Hideous violence and alluring ideology are predictable lovers. It’s a pairing that’s bound to stir up romance. But soon it’s disturbed. For it turns each into cannibals, half-eaten in their death dance. I’m reminded of the neurotic, doomed revolutionaries in Dostoyevsky’s Demons and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The youngest and the...
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The best writers aren’t always the best talkers. There is a kind of writer who, if you were to ask them about their work, would sit perpetually uncomfortable and give you a couple blunt, opaque words. This bluntness, finding the right words for the right time, is the language of...
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Some stories come back when you need them most. They can offer a wonderful clarity; new ways to understand a muddled present. The myth of Faust comes to mind, observing the done-in-a-day independence movement of the village of Piddington, Oxfordshire. Goethe’s story of a man who renounces love in exchange...
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After seeing a genocide erupt before his eyes, a boy looks down to a dirty puddle, sees a portrait floating in the water, and aims his gun. The final scene of Elem Klimov’s harrowing World War Two Epic Come and See, though working in harmony with its story, is not...
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Old houses ashed to no man’s land. Priam advances, but his arm’s stopped listening. He’s near forgotten his dead sons and the sacking. Another man’s son ghosts over him. Black eyes and blood stepped, the Prince is up for mincemeat. Barefoot and red faced, Hecuba cannot believe her family wiped...
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The morning following my interview with New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, taken place in a calm meeting room in Derry’s Seamus Heaney Homeplace, something terrible occurred. I, alongside the rest of Northern Ireland woke to a horrific video. A man had reportedly been attacked on North Belfast’s Kinnard...
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The author Roddy Doyle has a quote about funerals that I think always rings true: “Did you ever laugh at a funeral? Of course I laughed at a funeral. Did you ever not laugh at a wedding? Yeah, it’s so fucking boring. I’d much rather be at a funeral. Much...
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He’s come to spread the good word. two men the old KING and the young HUME meet and mirror in ‘68. a great and ghastly year, where fiery passion came to burn out their nations. a baptist preacher a papist college teacher with language to make...
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Nationalism proved the constant takeaway from 7 May’s local elections. Nationalist parties won in Scotland, Wales and, most perceptively, in England. The clinging gains made by the SNP and the groundbreaking upsurge of Plaid Cymru shot nationalist First Ministers to power, mirroring a similar upsurge from the nationalist Sinn Fein majority in Stormont. One can look at the political makeup of the UK now and...
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Scowling. Squinting. Decaying jowls. A reptilian, piano key smile. A dirty jacket and hat. In the prologue to the RSC’s production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mark Gatiss creeps into the titular role. His entrance, introduced in the middle of the prologue, comes as stark. Moments earlier, we...
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I walk here, on a early Warwickshire morning, with frost tipping the tress around me, in my grandfather’s shoes. They are large shoes. Owned by two men I never knew. Many stories I’ve been told, Have kept them around, milling about, in my head. They’re the shoes of a whole...
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In Willy Russell’s two-hander play Educating Rita, there is a monologue where the main heroine talks of her desire for more. She speaks of being in the pub with her family and friends, all singing some song from the jukebox, turning round and seeing her mother crying. “I said ‘Why...
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“When the sun stands at its zenith, he is at one with our shadow; then, in the hour of incandescence, history begins.” – Heiner Müller The old, short man takes a few steps. History is moving. Beaten into a pulp, he gets up again. A man with no legs, keeps...
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