OnTheTown: Directors, producers, actors and a London-based literary agent turned up to salute theatre director and playwright Declan Hughes on the launch of his first novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood.
These included Lynne Parker, artistic director of Rough Magic Theatre Company, which she co-founded with Hughes in 1984; Siobhán Bourke, freelance producer and former producer with Rough Magic; actor Darragh Kelly, who is currently in rehearsal for Hysteria, by Terry Johnson, which will be opening at Project Arts Centre in a couple of weeks; and Ian FitzGibbon, director of the television series, Paths to Freedom and Showbands.
Other friends at the Dublin launch this week were writer Anne Enright, her husband, playwright Martin Murphy, and crime writer John Connolly (whose eighth book, The Book of Lost Things, is due out later this year) with his partner, Jennie Ridyard.
Hughes's literary agent, John Saddler, gets approximately 30 manuscripts a week, he said. The quality of Hughes's work, he added, "immediately strikes you. He stands out because he's such a good writer".
"I think he will do for Dublin what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh," said Anya Serota, fiction publisher at John Murray publishers.
"From the first line, I just fell in love with this dark, laconic, utterly true voice," she added.
Also at the launch were two former comediennes with The Nualas, Susan Collins and Anne Gildea (whose first novel is due out later this year); interior designer Rebecca Rowe; and actor Cathy Belton, who is currently filming The Tiger's Tale in Dublin with a cast which includes Brendan Gleeson, Kim Cattrell (of Sex in the City fame) and Sean McGinley, under the direction of John Boorman.
The Wrong Kind of Blood, by Declan Hughes, is published by John Murray
Greetings from the inky garret
Poet Dennis O'Driscoll, who has just been awarded the 2006 O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, recalled his first encounter with Samuel Beckett. O'Driscoll was speaking in the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin this week, launching RTÉ Radio's CD box-set of Beckett's trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, which are read by actor Barry McGovern.
Only a handful of people turned up to a one-night-only performance of Waiting for Godot in Thurles in 1969, recalled O'Driscoll. "I was deeply shaken by what I saw on stage," he said. "I immediately dropped the struggling author a note, assuring him (in whatever garret he currently starved in) that he was unquestionably a man of great talent and urging him to go on . . . I felt sure I had discovered an unknown genius."
Some weeks later, he received through the post a Grove Press edition of All That Fall, in which the author had "inkily inscribed his greetings and thanks". It was later that year, when O'Driscoll heard on the radio that Beckett had been awarded that year's Nobel Prize for Literature, that he realised "I had been scooped by a committee of Swedes".
Among those who enjoyed O'Driscoll's story were Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie Heaney; Edward Beckett, the writer's nephew; Rachel Milotte, of Irish Academic Press, the British ambassador, Stewart Eldon; RTÉ director general Cathal Goan; Philip Furlong, secretary general of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and chair of the Beckett Centenary Council; and Robert Nicholson, curator of the Joyce Museum.
"Barry McGovern has brought the world of Beckett alive," said Adrian Moynes, director of RTÉ Radio, introducing the actor. Patrick Lannen, of the Lannen Foundation, which has supported the box-set with RTÉ, was also at the launch.
"If I were a professional philosopher, I would include the three novels as a module on my course," said Tim Lehane, producer of the 19-hour long recording (with Mark Duff as sound engineer). "Beckett is really down at the very basement of human experience. He is concerned with identity, self-narrative, silence, sound, language. The option is either silence or language," said Lehane. "It's grittily true."
Asperger geniuses of Irish history
Nine major figures in Irish history, including Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera, had Asperger's Syndrome, according to a new book which was launched in Trinity College Dublin this week.
Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger's Syndrome was launched by Kathy Sinnott MEP, the campaigner for disability rights and services.
Those with Asperger's Syndrome "tend to be loners with poor social relationships, poor eye contact, problems sharing, very controlling. They lack empathy, they tend to live in their heads, have an odd tone of voice and very narrow interests, and because of those narrow interests they focus on them to the exclusion of everything else," said Michael Fitzgerald, Henry Marsh Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, who has written the new book with the editor and writer, Antoinette Walker.
"We are looking at the personalities behind the 1916 Rising. Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera both had Asperger's Syndrome," Fitzgerald explained. He classes both men as Asperger geniuses.
"They were both loners and they were both eccentric and single-minded and tremendously energetic," he said. "Odd, persistent, and they had a great certainty about their view and a kind of autistic charisma. And because of that, men followed them."
Some of the other key figures in the book who are identified as having Asperger's Syndrome are Robert Emmet, writers WB Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, scientist Robert Boyle, ethnographer Daisy Bates and the mathematical genius, William Rowan Hamilton.
The book shows "that the reality of Asperger's Syndrome is not just the day-to-day struggle, accommodating the requirements of the disability, but the moment-to-moment call of Asperger's to create, to explore, to break new ground", according to Sinnott.
Among those at the launch were television producer Stephen Ramsey, who was making a documentary for Australian television about Fitzgerald's thesis; novelist Keith Ridgway; health and social services consultant Augusta McCabe and her niece, Carol Brennan; fencing coach Tony Quinn, businesswoman Aoife Lennon; and UCD philosophy lecturer Dr Jack Ritchie.
Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger's Syndrome, by Antoinette Walker, and Michael Fitzgerald, is published by Liberties Press
Hastening to hear Molloy
The words of Samuel Beckett echoed through the restored Victorian warehouse called CHQ, in the IFSC on Dublin's northside this week, at a performance which was part of the Beckett Centenary Festival.
"The room was dark and full of people hastening to and fro: malefactors, policemen, lawyers, priests and journalists, I suppose," says Molloy, Beckett's eponymous creation in the first book of his trilogy.
Perhaps there were no policemen or priests in evidence but there was a lot of hastening to and fro before Conor Lovett, of the Gare St Lazare Players, dressed in black, took centre-stage to weave a spell with Beckett's words.
"Beckett uses elements of his own autobiography, but they are deployed in a fictional form," explained Beckett scholar Gerry Dukes, of Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, before the performance. "Some of the descriptions of his characters are portraits of himself."
The theatrical troupe (which had previously also performed Access All Beckett at the Irish Museum of Modern Art) was thanked "for your creativity and talent and for bringing this unique opportunity to us" by Paul Maloney, chief executive of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA), which hosted the evening.
"It's a philosophy for life," said Judy Hegarty Lovett, one of the directors of Access All Beckett. This philosophy, she explained, is that "despite all of what we live through, we manage to continue and suffer on".
Among those at the opening of this series of readings and recitals at CHQ, which continued until last night, were Beckett's nephew and niece, Edward Beckett and Caroline Murphy; dancer Colin Dunne; former Cork 2005 director John Kennedy; Clodagh Kenny, director of Dublin's Fire Station Arts Studio; Michael John Gorman, of the Government's national Discover Science and Engineering programme; and Cork woman Mary McCarthy, the newly appointed arts manager of the DDDA.