You know you’re getting old when even the annual commemorations of dead musicians you remember seeing play start to turn 40.
So it was with the latest “Vibe for Philo” (officially known this year as “The Dedication”), which marked that milestone anniversary of the death of Phil Lynott.
And yet, among the grizzled gathering at Dublin’s 3Arena on Sunday night, there was a strangely youthful air. This was in part due to the presence, mysterious at first, of a high number of women aged 38.5.
Then the realisation dawned that these were the mothers of the National Children’s Choir (NCC), which was to be part of the latest celebrations, alongside the more usual line-up of musicians who had played with Thin Lizzy, or at least knew them, at their peak.
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When the NCC’s massed ranks – all drawn from primary schools – took to the stage, it caused a precipitous decline in the average age there, and an equally dramatic rise in vocal tones.
Some Lizzy veterans must have worried they’d slipped into the next world unknowingly as, accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, this choir of angels launched into The Boys Are Back in Town.
I wondered briefly if somebody had rewritten the song for the occasion, to be more in keeping with Department of Education guidelines.
But no: Lynott’s lyrics were untouched. Thus, in tones more usually heard on Walking in the Air, the angelic voices started intoning about “crazy” cats and “steaming” chicks and the time Johhny got his face slapped, etc, all the way up to: “Friday night, they’ll be dressed to kill/Down at Dino’s Bar and Grill/The drink will flow and blood will spill/But if the boys wanna fight, you better let em.”
Elsewhere over new year, I also attended the Vibe for Michael Furey, or James Joyce’s The Dead, as it’s better known. This was the interactive theatre version at the Museum of Literature Ireland, now running until February 1st and already sold out.
The immersive experience began at a door on Stephen’s Green, opened to me by a young woman in maid’s costume. “You must be Lily,” I said, slipping effortlessly into character, although I stopped short of slipping her a coin, as Gabriel Conroy did in the original story.
Thereafter, we were led through a succession of rooms and hallways, watching the party unfold and occasionally joining in, via dances and conversation, or even in the case of a few audience members, sitting at the dinner table.
It was all great fun, spoiled for me only by the liberties taken with Joyce’s famous closing passage, about the snow faintly falling through the universe.
This included changing the tense of what – to us print journalists anyway – is the greatest sentence in world literature: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.”
Here it was rendered in the present tense, which may have seemed more dramatic, but sacrificed solemnity. And that was only part of a more general decision to paraphrase rather than quote the story.
In this, as I’ve since been reminded, they were following the lead of John Huston’s 1987 film version. So maybe the original does present a challenge for dramatic stagings.
But still, I believe Joyce’s mesmeric last paragraph should be sacrosanct: delivered verbatim if at all, preferably by an unseen narrator, and with at least as much respect for a holy text as the National Children’s Choir paid to The Boys are Back in Town.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, I also went to see Avatar 3 over the weekend: a friend’s idea, which we both soon regretted. In our defence, we had been tempted by the technological promise of what was billed as a “4DX” presentation.
This was a bit like MoLI’s staging of The Dead, except that instead of interacting with the cast, we were given 3D glasses and sat in seats that reverberated in time with events on screen.
That was about as much fun as a bad case of flight turbulence. But if it had happened on a plane, the pilot would have quickly changed altitude to reduce passenger discomfort, whereas when the novelty of the 4DX seats wore off (after about five minutes), we were stuck with it for another three hours.
The cinema was also cold, although whether that was part of the immersive experience, I’m not sure. I think they just hadn’t turned the heating up enough to cope with the suddenly freezing temperatures outside.
[ Joyce on Trial - Frank McNally on a landmark libel case of 1954Opens in new window ]
Anyway, for all the fortunes spent on making the film (not enough to include a decent storyline, obviously), even the 3D didn’t seem much of an advance on previous versions.
As for the shaking seats as an attempt to make us feel part of the action, the film also has endless scenes of aerial pyrotechnics and underwater violence, including attacks by killer squid. So maybe, thanks to the technology’s current limitations, we got off lightly.
