How was it for you? Irish Examiner arts writer Colette Sheridan selects her highlights of 2020
Colette Sheridan's highlights of the year include Lisa O'Neill, Normal People, Ger and Emelie FitzGibbon's Four Faced Liar, and Olivia O'Leary's radio show.
Live streamed from the National Concert Hall, the enchanting folk singer/songwriter Lisa O'Neill sat on a couch, with a blanket to keep her cosy and a pianist accompanying her for some of her quirky songs. The song that stood out for me was her Covid-19 song, The Strangeness of All This. Here's a taste of it: 'I've taken to washing the messages/I wash/and I wish/and I watch/The Strangeness of all this/The news was very sad at six.'
Actress by Anne Enright is both an amusing and desperately sad novel about a troubled family, rich terrain for this former Booker Prize winner. It centres around a daughter, Norah, a writer, who is prompted to investigate her actress mother's life. The mother, Katherine O'Dell, is something of a construct, born in England but reinvented as a colourful Irish woman who had early success in Hollywood. She has mixed fortunes on the stages of London's West End and Dublin. The evocation of shabby Dublin in the 1970s is brilliant, a perfect backdrop for the fading glamour of Katherine O'Dell.
I also enjoyed Feminism Backwards by Rosita Sweetman, part memoir combined with a lively account of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement of which the author was a founding member. Sweetman is an honest chronicler of recent history - and of her own sometimes difficult life as a single parent that included periods of dire poverty.
Normal People, based on Sally Rooney's novel of the same name, made for great viewing. The drama series was sexually explicit which ensured plenty of outrage aired by disgusted members of the public on Joe Duffy's Liveline. But it was all done very tastefully. That said, the objectification of Paul Mescal as Connell would have caused war had he been female.
The Poetry Programme, presented by Olivia O'Leary, included a revealing interview with Doireann NĂ GhrĂofa, whose prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat, recently won the An Post Irish Book of the Year. The writer spoke of her obsession with the 18th century poet, EibhlĂn Dubh NĂ Chonaill and her famous poem, Caoineadh Art UĂ Laoghaire. It inspired NĂ GhrĂofa's prose work, a new departure for this poet. The prose is suffused with domestic detail and description of being pregnant, some of it being "embarrassing." NĂ GhrĂofa spoke of wanting to be generous with the reader.
How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is dependent on the quality of the journalist and author's guests who celebrate the things that haven't gone right in their lives and career. It allows interviewees to be vulnerable. I particularly liked the interview with American feminist, Gloria Steinem who famously said: 'Brave is not being unafraid but feeling the fear and doing it anyway.'Â
I tuned into the Cork International Film Festival for the streaming of the feature film, The Edge of Chaos, starring the excellent Aobhinn McGinnity. Playing Carrie, an alcoholic from a well respected family, she is out of control. Her father, a politician and businessman, stages an intervention. He is being blackmailed by Carrie who threatens to publish damaging information about him. This is a tense, dark drama that deals astutely with the corrosive effects of addiction on the family.
Complete with live vermin on the shoulders of the members of Bob Geldof's band, The Boomtown Rats, the entertaining documentary, Citizens of Boomtown, took us back to the 1970ss when Ireland was disgracing herself yet again, trying to block the Rats from playing in their home town of Dublin.
Written by Ger FitzGibbon and directed by his wife, Emelie, The Four Faced Liar, presented online as a rehearsed reading from the Everyman, is a charming and evocative piece of writing whose conceit is that Shandon's four faces can see into the hearts, minds and dreams of Cork city's inhabitants. This nocturnal odyssey through Cork reminded me of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas.
The absence of sociable post mortems over a drink after gigs, shows, films and art exhibitions because of the new solitary way of experiencing art.
I'm excited about the forthcoming publication of novels by Danielle McLaughlin, Billy O'Callaghan, Claire Keegan as well as a short story collection by Madeleine D'Arcy. I'm hoping these books will have actual launches rather than virtual ones...
