Shining City

Today's countdown to Halloween reading suggestion, or rather watching suggestion, as it is a play: Shining City by Conor McPherson. I saw it thirteen years ago on stage in the Lake District and loved it so much that I bought the play that very night. It's a sober but very efficient ghost story set in contemporary Dublin (the shining city of the title). In it, therapist Ian, former Jesuit with a few inner demons of his own, is treating a new patient. It's John, an ordinary man if there ever was one, claims to have seen what seems to be the ghost of his recently deceased wife. As he tells his story and as we follow in parallels the troubled life of Ian, the existence of ghosts, whatever their true nature may be, seems less and less implausible. In a world where normality is often oppressive and corrosive, guilt becomes a presence, a force that can break you. It's for you if you like psychological horror (like me) and it is all the more fitting for the season that Halloween comes from Ireland originally.

Fancy a modern ghost story?

I am a big fan of Conor McPherson since I saw his Shining City back in the Lake District. It is the only play I read of him, but I want to read more. I admire a lot of things about it: how believeable, natural the characters were, how dead genuine the dialogue was and how on top of this he managed on top of this to make a believable ghost story set in modern day Ireland. McPherson has a way of twisting expectations of the genre that is pretty much pure genius. It is a cliché to say that someone goes beyond the genre. In his case, he puts the genre back in modern drama. As Halloween, the most Irish holiday with Saint-Patrick, I am on the look for ghost stories and horror movies. I was happily surprised,  looking for info about McPherson, to discover that he wrote and directed a horror movie, The Eclipse, in 2009. To top it up, the main character is played by... Ciaran Hinds, an actor I greatly admire. More about the movie here. There are some clips of the movie around Youtube too.

I don't know if I can see it before Halloween, but I hope so. If like me you prefer sobriety to gore and shock, this movie, if it is anything like McPherson's stage work, might give you a genuine chill. Here is the trailer.

Actor in search of a text

I am eagerly waiting for some news from the acting school I will attend. All I know is that it starts in November, where it is and at what time. I have no idea on what the teacher is expecting of us in the first lesson. I used to take lessons in Montreal, where I had to prepare a little monologue, nothing classic, something simple. It might not be the way my new acting teacher will kick start the course, but I might have to find something, some text in a play. And I have only two plays in English here: Shininc City and The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi. If I can choose one play to pick up a text from, I think it will be from either one of those, because I love them, because they are contemporary and because I would not miss an opportunity to work on texts I love and to look at them in a different light, and from an insider's perspective, so to speak. And there are these lines from The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi which I always found brilliant and I would love to play them for an audience, even if it was a small one. But I wonder if my readers have any suggestions.

The last blast of summer?

Well, who would have thought about it? After a few gloomy days, it was hot and sunny today. I read outside and it was lovely. It looks like summer giving one last blast before autumn. But when evening came, the temperature dropped down. You can see that autumn is at the door.

Today, I officially and fittingly finished my summer reads (mainly crime fiction) and I will start my "autumn read" tonight (mainly scary stories), first by reading Shining City by Conor McPherson, which has been haunting me since I saw it. Usually, I have books on my summer read well into September. Now the new reading season will start in late August. In that aspect, summer is already a bit over for me. But during daytime it will last a bit longer, going away with a fiery blast.

Theatre by the Lake

I want to come back to our trip to the Lake District and Keswick. We went to Theatre by the Lake twice (my wife's brilliant idea). Lovely place, idyllic one even, literally surrounded by nature. A few steps away from the theatre we could see flocks of sheep in the field and within eyesight we could see the lake, with the ducks . The walk there and back (a slow walk back) were worth the price of admission. Whether there was clouds or clear skies, the sunsets were strikingly beautiful. The picture at the right does not give it justice.

We saw first Shining City by Conor McPherson, then Northanger Abbey, adapted from a Jane Austen novel. I never cared much about Jane Austen (my mother-in-law must think I am a blasphemer right now, maybe my own mothet too come to think of it), but I actually enjoyed that one. It was partially because it was gently mocking gothic fiction, a genre I enjoy. There is always a good deal of affection in good parody, and that was good one. I don't know how the original novel is, but I thought the adaptation was a smart adaptation. I enjoyed it mainly because I love the art of acting, no matter if the play is a great one or a minor one.

Shining City, I loved completely, so much so that I bought the text the very next day. My wife and talked about it all night afterwards and we still come back to it. It was that smart. Obviously it is a haunting story, literally as it is about a ghost, but this ghost, if it has a human appearance, is guilt. I will try to blog about it more deeply. Let me just say now that I loved it. Oh, and the production was a perfect example of small is more: the play was presented in a small studio, the audience was surrounding the stage, we were like unwilling voyeurs witnessing the drama.

Seeing those two plays reminded me how much I love acting and how much I miss the stage, how powerful it is as a medium. My interest for it has been rekindled recently, through reading of plays (well, one play so far) and through these two nights at the theatre. We should have more of them, even though it makes me envious of the people on stage. I know from experience that they have the best seats in the house.