Episode 9 The Arts Show

FIDDLE MUSIC

Hello! The Arts Show is in Dublin,

a city steeped in Vikings and Guinness,

James Joyce and stag weekends.

Its rich history echoes through these streets, built on words

and supercharged by a culture clash of poetry, prose and politics.

A bit like The Arts Show.

Writer Lucy Caldwell on why Charlotte Bronte

may have kept on her brassiere, but burned the rule book

for generations of women writers.

Fermanagh actor Ciaran McMenamin

tells us about the art that first blew his mind.

From the River Foyle to the River Styx, we journey into the Underworld

with the brilliant Seamus Heaney as our guide

and the BBC weatherman, Barra Best, channels

his inner Swayze and gets creative behind a potter's wheel.

I'm on Twitter now at BBC Arts Show.

Dublin is, of course, firmly in the spotlight this year,

with the centenary of the Easter Rising just around the corner.

1916 saw politics and culture violently collide,

with the General Post Office, or GPO, at the centre of events,

as the headquarters of the Irish Volunteers during Easter week.

While the rising itself failed,

it did put in motion a series of events that would ultimately

see the formation of an independent Irish Republic.

But when the new government issued its first banknotes in 1928,

I wonder, did its citizens realise that the emblematic face

representing Ireland was that of a British society hostess?

When the Free State was established

they wanted, obviously, a new currency,

'they wanted to move away from the notes

'with the Royal figurehead.

'And they went, instead,'

to looking at somebody who would symbolise Ireland,

a personification of what was an Irish beauty,

what was an Irishwoman of the time.

'Of course, ironically, we know now that it was an American

'who never lived in Ireland who ended up on that currency.'

Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the emblematic face of the new Free State,

was painted in 1927,

but artist Sir John Lavery began painting Irish political figures

in 1916.

John always believed that he was commissioned to paint

the image of Eire for the new Irish Free State currency

because of their involvement in the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

He just took a painting that he had of his wife

and he repainted it, placed a black shawl around her

and had her with all the emblems,

the Killarney Lakes in the background,

leaning on the harp, but at the end of the day, for those who knew,

it was just a reworking of yet another portrait of his wife.

She would have entered London society

when her husband was already well established.

He was friends with Asquith,

who was the British Prime Minister at the time.

He was painting society ladies.

He'd already painted a very well-known portrait

of the visit of Queen Victoria to Glasgow

and he'd made his name painting the portraits of the Royal family,

people from established society, and he was very personable,

so he really was well accepted.

Hazel had a really lovely introduction.

He already had a studio in South Kensington,

located on Cromwell Place,

so they had a lot of really well-known neighbours,

and Hazel very quickly became the muse for a number of poets,

a number of artists, and, of course, that meant

she automatically had her picture constantly in The Tatler

and The Sketch and all these women's magazines,

so she became very, very well known, really, really quickly.

It was said that one of the groups of women, who were

so put out that their husbands always wanted to spend time

with Hazel Lavery, set up a husband-protection society.

At one stage, he actually painted her as The Madonna for a triptych

that he was doing for Belfast St Patrick's Church

and this was on display, when their visitors would come

and see it. Of course, a lot of the other society ladies used to gossip

and complain, because they would see she had seen herself as The Madonna.

John's interest in Ireland

was always at a remove in those early years.

His connection to Ireland happened

really around the time of the 1916 rising.

He was given the opportunity,

whilst into commission, he was given the opportunity

to paint the appeal of Sir Roger Casement, who had been convicted

of treason, for his involvement in the run-up to the rising.

He was very aware of the political situation that had developed.

Well, Hazel was interested in Ireland.

She became hugely interested in Irish politics

and she used the circle that she had developed,

the influences that she had with British parliamentarians,

talking to them and trying to bring together connections.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was being negotiated

and, of course, the famous Scarlet Pimpernel of that time,

Michael Collins, was the one that every society hostess wanted to get.

He'd been elusive, he'd been talked about, nobody knew who he was.

He had been leading this war of independence,

and, of course, Hazel had the absolute in.

She knew his sister, Hannie Collins.

Some people have considered them to have been, maybe, lovers,

but in whatever the exact nature of the relationship is,

there was a lot of correspondence between them.

He wrote her poetry, he spoke to her in a very loving way.

They exchanged books,

they used to attend mass together in the Brompton Oratory

and she is, in fact, the woman who managed to get him to go

and see Lloyd George at that critical moment.

Michael Collins, of course, was killed in the early stages

of the Civil War.

In fact, when he had signed the treaty,

he described it as having signed his own death warrant.

And that came to pass.

The Laverys were in Ireland when he was killed.

Hazel was distraught.

It turned out that he had letters from Hazel Lavery on his body.

They were returned to her by Collins' sister in later years.

In fact, you can see the bloodstain on that letter.

And she, obviously, treasured those scraps and those fragments.

John himself, actually, commemorates Collins' death

and he paints, the very famous now,

Love Of Ireland, where he paints him on his deathbed,

draped with the tricolour,

which has become a very symbolic and important image.

While Hazel attended the funeral, he's painting the funeral.

Hazel had always suffered from ill health.

She was so much younger than John. She suffered with nephritis.

Kidney disease, combined with a weakened heart

meant that she had a long and slow and painful death

and, in the last two years of life, she was mainly confined to bed.

It was very difficult for her, because she was now out of society,

so John set up a canvas, to keep her company,

and he painted away in her room

and the painting that he produced is so sad,

because it actually sees the, sort of, the demise of the woman

that he loves, the tiny figure in this massive bed.

And then, when she died, before her coffin was taken for her funeral,

he painted her coffin in her bedroom.

He had lost the love of his life,

who he had depicted from the moment he had met her through his art.

Thanks to her, we have a wonderful body of work from her husband,

Sir John Lavery.

What an incredible story.

Well, I'm in Collins Barracks, the National Museum of Ireland,

which is hosting a major exhibition to commemorate the events of 1916.

Among the exhibits,

some of which have never been on display before, is the actual

proclamation of the New Republic and the table it was signed upon,

the original signed orders and letters of surrender,

the flag which flew over the GPO during the rising,

Roger Casement's coat and even James Connolly's bullet-ridden hat.

Now, Fermanagh actor Ciaran McMenamin is currently appearing

in a new production of After Miss Julie.

The Arts Show caught up with him, to find out what arts

and culture shaped him.

The first piece of music

that, literally, blew my mind...

was when I accidentally found

my dad's old Thin Lizzy, Bad Reputation LP,

buried under my mum's Neil Diamond LPs.

And I didn't know what it was.

I would imagine I was about 11,

and I lifted this black album covered with these three...

sexy, scary-looking men in shades, staring out at me,

and I put it on and, er...

it actually did, literally, blew my mind.

I was playing air guitar on my back on the floor.

DRUMS AND GUITAR MUSIC

My sister Aine and I

sneaked into the Ardhowen Theatre, underaged,

to watch David Lynch's Wild At Heart.

I'd never seen anything like it, the music,

the sex, er...

the violence, the reality, erm...

the dark humour, this strange Wizard Of Oz theme.

That was a moment when I went, wow.

Erm, cinema can be something completely different

and completely exciting.

The piece of art that made a huge impression on me

was Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.

I had been aware of Turner's work. I had saw

photographs, documentaries about his work,

but when I first, actually,

in the flesh,

saw his use of light,

and stood in the National Gallery,

trying to get my mind to work out how someone had done that

with a brush and some paint

hundreds of years ago, before photography,

literally, did kind of cause my mind to fall apart.

For a piece of theatre that made a huge impression on me,

I'm going to choose something from later on.

I'd, kind of, fallen out of love with theatre a little bit,

cos I hadn't seen anything I'd liked.

I hadn't done it myself for a while,

and I went to The Lyric a couple of years ago to see

my fellow Fermanagh man, Adrian Dunbar,

in Brendan At The Chelsea,

and it genuinely, genuinely inspired me

to come back to the theatre,

for various reasons, but mainly because he managed to...

tell me something important about alcoholism

and completely entertain me, at the same time.

So, you, literally, had that, kind of, crying and laughing

in the same evening.

I also thought I'd mention it because,

for anybody that didn't see it, it's coming back.

It's a really amazing night at the theatre and it actually did,

in a weird way, save the theatre for me.

So, thanks, Adrian.

Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid is an incredible story,

full of as much drama and suspense as any TV box set

we might watch today.

It's a powerful poem, in which the young hero Aeneas battles the demons

and the undead, to travel deep into the underworld,

to meet the spirit of his father.

But in a strange way, Aeneas's most recent journey starts

right here in what was once St Columb's College,

where a young Seamus Heaney was first introduced to Virgil

in the 1950s by his Latin teacher, Father Michael McGlinchey.

"Next comes a grinding scrunch and screech of hinges

as the dread doors open and you see what waits inside,

the shape and threat of the guard who haunts the threshold.

Farther in and more ruthless, still, the Hydra lurks, monstrous

with her 50 gaping mouth-holes and black gullets

and beyond the sheer plunge of Tartarus down to the depths,

to darkness, a drop twice as far beneath the earth,

as Olympus appears to soar above it."

Book VI six of The Aeneid wasn't on the A-level curriculum in 1957.

It was Book IX instead,

but Heaney remembers his teacher pining for his favourite Virgil.

In the foreword to his new translation, Heaney says

that McGlincey was forever sighing,

"Oh, boys, I wish it were Book VI."

"But seeing Aeneas come wading through the grass towards him,

he reached his two hands out in eager joy,

his eyes filled up with tears and he gave a cry,

At last! Are you here at last?

I always trusted that your sense of right would prevail

and keep you going to the end.

And am I now allowed to see your face, my son,

and hear you talk, and talk to you myself?"

This is a poem that Heaney would return to

at key moments in his life, first translating passages from it

after his own father's death in the '80s

and on the birth of his first grandchild in 2007.

And he was finalising work on it right up to his own death in 2013.

Seamus Heaney has called Book VI a constant presence.

Now with its posthumous publication,

it marks the end of his own poetic journey.

"There are two gates of sleep,

one of which they say is made of horn

and offers easy passage to true visions.

The other has a luminous dense ivory sheen,

but through it to the sky above,

the spirits of the dead send up false dreams.

Anchises, still guiding and discoursing,

escorts his son and the Sibyl on their way

and lets them both out by the ivory gate.

Aeneas hurries to the ships and rejoins his comrades,

then sails, hugging the shore to the port of Caietae.

Anchors are cast from the prow, stern cushion on sand."

Last May, I picked this up for a radio documentary I was making.

It had been 25 years since I'd last played it. I dusted it off,

even rejoined my old orchestra, met friends that I hadn't seen

in decades and, best of all, my children now hear me play.

You know what? It has been the best thing that I have done in years.

So, if like me, you want to dust something off,

or like Barra Best here, you want to create something new,

BBC Get Creative is a one-stop shop for all your creative needs.

-Barra.

-We're giving it a go.

It's the first time I've ever done pottery.

Always wanted to have a go at it.

I'm not too sure I'm the best at it, but Helen's give me a few good tips

-to get me underway.

-Helen, how's it going so far?

Well, the clay's still on the weave, so it's a good start.

But so far, so good.

My clothes are still clean.

Of course I had to wear a white shirt today, as well.

It's a little bit easier than I thought it would be.

I thought I was going to be all over the place.

It's just good to do something different and be a bit creative.

I don't get a lot of opportunity to do

-that at the moment, I'm so busy.

-Is the weather not creative?

Well, it can be in this country, definitely!

It's all over the show, so that keeps me busy,

but I don't think I'll give up the weather for this just yet.

So, can you explain to me

where this pot is going at the moment, Barra.

-That's not going on!

-It's not happening! THEY LAUGH

-By the time you come back, that's going to be a masterpiece.

-A masterpiece, OK.

-OK, I believe you. I believe you.

-Yes.

-Well done, well done.

So, leave Barra and head across here to where other work has gone on,

and Rebecca, you are one of the creative champions,

what's going on here?

Well, Get Creative is a UK-wide initiative, it's run by the BBC

and by voluntary arts and it's all about celebrating creativity,

in all its shapes and sizes.

I've encouraged people to get involved, do something different,

or take up something they loved doing when they were children.

-So, how do you do it?

-We encourage people particularly to take up

crafts and have a go at that.

We have an online resource called a Craft Map and a craft directory

of makers and that's all on our website, which is craftni.org.

You can go and find your local arts venue

or local maker and find out what's happening near you.

Rebecca, thank you so much and thank you, everybody, for coming today.

Barra, how are you getting on?

-Here you go. Look at that for a masterpiece.

-That's not bad.

-I'm not even lying, it's one I prepared earlier.

-You really did.

-I absolutely did.

-In true Blue Peter style.

Yes, and I'm bringing it home. You're not having it.

Well done, fella. Don't give up the day job just yet.

OK, I'll stick with the weather.

And there is a Get Creative Day on April 2.

Barra Best, thank you so much.

The Abbey Theatre famously played a role in the Easter Rising,

with actors, playwrights and stagehands all taking part

in the very real-life drama that was unfolding in the streets outside.

The theatre is at the centre of another controversy. The lack

of female writers in its programming for 2016 has caused a huge storm.

The online #Wakingthefeminists kick-started a very public

conversation about why it was mainly all male writers' work on stage.

Charlotte Bronte lived well before Twitter,

but she was a trailblazer for women in literature.

We gave Belfast-born writer Lucy Caldwell a little more

than 140 characters to explore.

"I am no bird and no net ensnares me.

"I am a free human being with independent will."

These are the captivating words of an unlikely pioneer

who lived at a time when women were barely allowed to express

themselves. Their author blazed a way for women writing today.

200 years ago this April, a baby girl was born to a curate

and his wife.

It's here at this small parsonage in Yorkshire that she grew up

to become one of the world's greatest writers

in the English language.

Her name was Charlotte Bronte and she emerged at a time

when the world of letters was no place for a respectable woman.

She changed the course of literature.

I feel greatly indebted to her.

So where did this revolutionary voice come from?

The world-famous Bronte sisters,

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are actually half Irish.

Even in her teenage years, Charlotte was described by

a classmate as speaking with a strong Irish accent.

Their story begins in County Down.

Charlotte's father Patrick was born here in this two-room cottage.

From these humble roots, he earned himself a place at Cambridge,

with the help of local clergymen, who saw his potential.

He went on to instil in his own children the same

sense of the magic of books.

He finally settled in this Pennine village on the edge of Howarth Moor,

where he went on to raise one of the world's most literary families.

To celebrate Charlotte's bicentenary, the Parsonage Museum

is featuring an exhibition, Charlotte Great & Small.

I met the curator and award-winning writer Tracy Chevalier.

When I went up to the parsonage to look around they said,

"What would you like to see?"

I thought, "I'd like to see one of those miniature books that

"the Bronte children made when they were teenagers."

Then, I started looking at other things, like little watercolours

and little needlework and then, I discovered Charlotte was tiny,

-she was four foot ten, if that.

-That's tiny.

-Yeah.

Her hands were tiny, her feet were tiny - everything about her.

At the same time, I was rereading her novels and, in them,

she is expressing always this huge desire

and I thought I'd like to contrast those two things -

the small things in her life with the huge ambition.

There is a wonderful anecdote of Charlotte's father after

the publication of Jane Eyre

summoning his offspring into his study and saying, "Children,

-"it seems that Charlotte has written a book."

-Yes.

It's so... It's amazing, but it's a little painful, too,

because really very little was expected of women at that time.

It was not expected that they would ever have a career,

the way we can now. We take it for granted now,

but you couldn't take it for granted back then.

There's a lovely quotation from one of her letters, where she says

people of talent know full well the excellence that's in them.

She, from a very early age, knew that she wanted to do great things.

When she was 18, she wrote to Robert Southey,

who was Poet Laureate at the time saying, "Here are some of my poems,

"what do you think of them?" Remarkably he wrote back,

a very famous letter where he says women should not write.

Even that was not enough to deter Charlotte,

because she wrote back to him.

She wrote back and said, "If ever I have any of those crazy ideas

"to write I'll think of Southey and I will calm down."

It's just, the tone is very funny.

It's very subtle, because there's nothing you can point out to

say she was being rude to him, but actually, there is an undertone of

"I'm going to do just what I like."

You've also edited an anthology called Reader, I Married Him,

stories inspired by Jane Eyre.

Would all of these writers be writing

if it weren't for Charlotte Bronte?

You know that's why I've asked women to write rather than men in this

book because I think we owe her a debt of gratitude for being

such a trailblazer for women.

In a world where women had restricted liberties,

writing was an escape for Charlotte and her siblings.

This is a tiny little book made by Charlotte Bronte in 1829.

She would have been 13 when she wrote this.

You can see the date on the cover.

Oh, my goodness. The writing is...

It could have been done like needlepoint.

Yes. This would have been made with a quill pen

and the tiny writing became a secret code amongst

the siblings so that if their father came across any of these tiny books,

he wouldn't be able to read the contents.

So they've got stories, poems and reviews.

If we turn to the back, you will see that there are even advertisements.

"To be sold, 1,000 horses by Gerald."

One of the things I love about the Bronte sisters is,

I'm one of three sisters myself, and we grew up making magazines,

making manuscripts, writing secret codes and stories.

It's absolutely extraordinary to look at.

What is it, an inch and a half?

Yes. This looks like it's made from a scrap of an old sugar bag.

But they used wallpaper, whatever they could lay their hands on.

I love the idea of the sisters writing at this very table.

They would work feverishly

until the clock struck nine at which point they would get up

and start walking round the table, reading their work aloud

and discussing their latest plots.

It's amazing to think it was here that they wrote such

classics as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.

Charlotte went on to create some of the most unconventional

characters in literary history like Jane Eyre

and my personal favourite, Lucy Snowe.

Like her, they are small, plain and introverted, yet they lead

rich inner lives and rage against injustice.

Once, after an argument with her sisters, she said,

"I will prove to you that you are wrong.

"I shall write a heroine as plain and small as myself

"and she will be as interesting as any of yours."

Defiant in her life and revolutionary in her writing,

Charlotte Bronte will long be esteemed as a fearless

pioneer of women writers.

And this is where the Rising came to an end,

the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen's Green.

The rebels signed the letters of surrender here.

The building remains unchanged and bears the bullet marks to this day.

And that's it for tonight.

We're on BBC Radio Ulster, Tuesdays to Fridays at 6.30pm

and online and Twitter too.

You can't miss us. Until then, goodnight.