Film
SCREENING: KAMIKAZE GROUND STAFF REUNION DINNER.
Description:
Part of the Stewart Parker Retrospective.
On August the 15th, 1945, after the official surrender of the Empire of Japan, Admiral Matome Ugaki led the last Special Attack Force pilots across the Pacific, to crash into American ships. Thirty-five years later, the men who serviced the aeroplanes are still meeting up for their annual dinner. Now settled into civilian jobs - dentist, baker, taxi-driver, insurance salesman - and with children and grandchildren, they bemoan the decay of traditional Japanese values. Hard liquor is imbibed, toasts raised to the memory of the heroic dead, and old rivalries resurface. The survivors’ dissatisfaction with post-war life comes to a head when, in a moment of drunken inspiration, Tokkotai the airline pilot decides on a symbolic gesture to show that the kamikaze spirit lives on
Venue: QFT
Booking info: Free
SCREENING: CATCHPENNY TWIST
Description:
Dismissed from their teaching jobs, two young Belfast musicians pursue alternative careers in the music industry as songwriters, however, their catchpenny tunes which also involve ballads for fallen volunteers of both loyalist and republican paramilitaries leads to live bullets in the post and death threats, so they set off for Dublin and then London and eventually end up in the final Eurovision Song Contest! Success seems at hand and Belfast seems very far away... but for how long?
Venue: QFT 1
Booking info: Free
SCREENING: IRIS IN THE TRAFFIC, RUBY IN THE RAIN
Description:
Parker later referred to the play as ‘a condensed female variant on the Dedalus-Bloom odyssey’. Ruby the Bloom figure, played by Frances Tomelty, is a vigorous if flu- sodden social worker who journeys the city sneezing and assisting others. Iris the Stephen figure, played by Aingeal Grehan, is a rather passive, incurious character who is regularly and haphazardly caught up in others’ activities.
A certain restless agitation governs most of the play’s characters, and the aggressive strains of Stiff Little Fingers sets the tone for Ruby’s odyssey through Belfast. By the play’s conclusion, a trio of responses to the conditions of Belfast life has emerged: the loss of sanity; emigration; or staying on and surviving together. Strikingly, it is the female characters that seem most rooted in the city.
Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain is an unlikely combination of elements. Yet the discreet Joyce reference, the punk gig, and the soundtrack, lend unexpected nuances to the social problem play structure that was emblematic of Play for Today.
Stiff Little Fingers provide the soundtrack, and singer Jake Burns appears as Iris’s friend.
Venue: QFT 1
Booking info: Free
SCREENING: JOYCE IN JUNE
Description:
Parker frequently expressed his deep appreciation of James Joyce’s work and with this play he most explicitly pays tribute to his mentor. Joyce in June is a clever concoction of fact andfiction combining a double narrative, citations from Joyce’s biography and work, with a typically incisive comic perspective.
The framing storyline follows Joyce and his companions shortly after Joyce began walking out with Nora Barnacle. The embedded storyline is imagined by Joyce while he poses for fellow student, Constantine Curran, who is taking his photograph — an iconic image of the young Joyce.
Parker’s “television postscript to Ulysses” features Molly Bloom, Blazes Boylan and an assortment of Dublin singers on a concert tour that begins, fatefully, in Belfast. Northern piety clashes with Southern frivolity resulting in a dramatic breakdown of decorum and raucous laughter at the play’s finale. If the production of Joyce in June is rather low budget and studio-bound, the cast energetically draw out the wit, playfulness and theatricality of Parker’s script. Roles are artfully doubled—Bridget de Courcy plays Nora and Molly with seductive charm; Stephen Rea is both the abstemious Stanislaus Joyce and the inebriated Mick McIntosh; Gabriel Byrne performs the dapper Ted Keogh and the Don Juan figure, Blazes Boylan.
Joyce in June is a remarkable tribute to Joyce, though as Parker admits “there’s a tiny motive ofrevenge as well for those invariably unpleasant portraits of Northerners in the Joyce canon, the likes of Mr Alleyne in “Counterparts,” MacAlister of the oblong skull in A Portrait, the headmaster Deasy in Ulysses.”
Venue: QFT 1
Booking info: Free
PERFORMANCE: SPOKESONG
Description:
Directed by Frankie McCafferty
Stewart Parker’s extraorindary first play Spokesong is set in a Belfast bicycle shop, owned by Frank Stock, who dreams of reviving interest in cycling in his native city. The city fathers, however, are not convinced. Spokesong is told with the aid of flashbacks, trick cyclists and juggling.
Venue: Brian Friel Theatre
Booking info: Free
SCREENING: INTERVIEW WITH PROF. JAMES MACKAY
Description:
Images of the Two Traditions. A poignant and profound interview with Stewart Parker filmed several months before his death whilst he was enjoying the success of his last, and greatest play, Pentecost.
Venue: Brian Friel Theatre
Booking info: Free
SCREENING: PENTECOST
Description:
BBC Film Version
Set in East Belfast at the height of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Strike, Pentecost tells the story of four ‘refugees’, gathered together in a working-class parlour-house where, against the background of political strife, they work out their personal relationships with each other, the world outside, and their past. Only Marian is aware of a fifth presence - the ghost of Lily Matthews, who returns to haunt the house. This BBC television version of Stewart’s final play was adapted by his partner Lesley Bruce
Venue: Brian Friel Theatre
Booking info: Free
