The Cripple of Inishmaan

Today in the Irish Times, Patrick Lonergan reviews the Druid production of Martin McDonogh's The Cripple of Inishmaan, which we will be seeing with Transition Year in the Dublin Theatre Festival on October 9th :-

This, then, is an intelligent and compassionate production of an important Irish play. The Cripple of Inishmaan remains a well-observed satire on Ireland's obsession with how it's seen by the outside world. But what is much clearer now is this: Martin McDonagh is not just a brilliant storyteller, but a brilliant analyst of the importance of storytelling.

Full review here.

[added 10.10.08 : Lyn Gardner gives the production four stars in her review in today's Guardian]

Blackberry Eating

Our second Poem of the Week this term is Galway Kinnell's 'Blackberry Eating'. The full text, and a reading by the poet, is on the Poetry Archive site here. Below, a half-hour reading and interview with Kinnell from the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego series 'Artists on the Cutting Edge'.

An Ideal Husband

Tonight all our Transition Year go to their first theatre visit of this year's TY course, the successful Abbey Theatre production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. We'll post a pupil review later. The next visit will be to the Druid production of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Olympia Theatre in the Dublin Theatre Festival, on October 9th. For the full text of the play, go here.

My Fair Lady

Casting has just been completed for our November production of My Fair Lady, and chorus practices start this evening in the Cadogan. The cast is :

Eliza Doolittle : Poppy Vernon
Henry Higgins : Ollie Smith
Colonel Pickering : Michael McBurney
Mrs. Pearce : Gina Mirow
Alfred Doolittle : Fred Mann
Mrs. Higgins : Anna Traill
Freddie Eynsford Hill : Shane Lavin
Mrs. Eynsford Hill : Olivia Plunket
Lady Boxington : Celeste Guinness
Jamie : Robbie Hollis
Queen of Transylvania : Daphne Wright
Zoltan Karpathy : Sebastian Stephenson
Maids/Racegoers : Lauren Meyler, Jane Quigley, Rosemary Wentges, Sope Anthony-Ojolola, Emma Moore, Hannah Wentges.

Junior Certificate results

Congratulations to the many pupils who yesterday received excellent Junior Cert results. In English, 91% sat the papers at Higher Level (the national figure is 67%), and 18% of all who entered received A grades (nationally, 7% of the entire cohort get Higher As).

What is Poetry?

Our first Poem of the Week this year is 'What is Poetry?' by Adrian Mitchell. Mitchell's own website is here. Poems of the Week are displayed around the school, and read and discussed in English classes.

Below, Mitchell reads (or performs) the poem at the Medellin Poetry Festival (thus the Spanish translation), and below that he reads perhaps his best-known poem, 'To whom it may concern - tell me lies about Vietnam'. Both poems feature in Neil Astley's new Bloodaxe DVD anthology, In Person - 30 Poets, which is now in the Library (in this, Mitchell updates his Vietnam poem to refer to Iraq too).

Poetry Archive has more audio recordings by Mitchell here.

Competitions

There are lots of competitions around at the start of the school year, and pupils may like to get involved in one or more of these, such as :-

• the annual Poetry Aloud competition organised by Poetry Ireland and the National Library. Over the next week, we'll be asking pupils to take part in our preliminary round, and then entering the winners for the competition itself.
• the new Spooky Story competition organised by Children's Books Ireland based on Tomm Moore's artwork (above).
• the new Young Emerging Writer's and Artists' Forum, which is publishing an arts journal later this year.

(click on the links for further details: your English teachers will be encouraging you in class ...)

TY Extended Essays

Today, our new Transition Year starts off on its journey towards the Extended Essay, the major project which we have been running for many years as part of our English TY course. By mid-November, every pupil in the form completes a major comparative essay on a topic and books of their own choice. Previous posts and online essays are under this label, and advice on making choices is available here.

Start of Term

Today, pupils returned ready for the start of our Michaelmas Term. As usual, there's a lot of action ahead of us: the TY House Speeches and Extended Essays, the Senior Play (or rather musical, My Fair Lady), House Debates, the English Prizes, various theatre expeditions, and much more, and later in term we'll start posting lots of pupils' work, as we've done since 2006. See the right-hand sidebar for our book, Going Places, which gathers much of this work.

So, lots of exciting events and work ahead of us ...

Sylvia Plath reads 'Daddy'

Yesterday's Observer Review had a feature on 'The 50 Greatest Arts Videos on YouTube', including literature clips - Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, and, below, Sylvia Plath reading 'Daddy', on which Ajesh Patalay comments : "what a rendition. Plath's mesmerising voice - refined, meticulous, scathing - gets stuck into 'Daddy' with considerable bite".

In the same edition of the newspaper, there is an interview with Judy Carver, William Golding's daughter, on Lord of the Flies and its stage version.

'Dream' at the Peacock

The National Youth Theatre are putting on A Midsummer Night's Dream this week at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, directed by Gyorgy Vidovszky. Read here an Irish Times article by Sara Keating on the work of the NYT. The production is a lively and enjoyable one, which gathers strength and pace through the evening.

Read Peter Crawley's review in the Irish Times here.

Leaving Cert results 2008

Congratulations to our candidates in this year's Leaving Certificate English exams, who again have performed very strongly. All figures below, for obvious reasons, are for Higher Level results :-

• 97% took English at Higher Level (nationally, 64% do).
• 17% got an A (nationally, 6%).
• 25% got a B (nationally, 18%).
• 48% got a C (nationally, 25%).
• most outstandingly, 90% of all our candidates across both levels got an A, B or C at Higher Level (49% nationally).

Full details of general results on the College site here.

George Orwell the blogger

One of the best examples of blogging, from one of the great writers of the last century : the Orwell Prize will, from Saturday 9th August, start putting on a new blog (here) the diary entries of George Orwell, each one 70 years to the day after he wrote them.

Great Hamlets

In today's Guardian, Michael Billington lists the ten best performances as Hamlet in his 50 years of theatre- and cinema-going. In chronological order, his choices are Michael Redgrave (1958), Innokenty Smoktunovsky (film 1964), David Warner (1965), Derek Jacobi (1979), Michael Pennington (1980), Jonathan Pryce (1980), Stephen Dillane (1994), Kenneth Branagh (film, 1996, pictured), Angela Winkler (2000) and Simon Russell Beale (2000). Full article here.

Sharon Olds interview

Today in the Guardian there is a rare interview (by Marianne Macdonald) with the fine American poet Sharon Olds. Occasionally her poems have been on the Ordinary Level Leaving Certificate course (such as 'The Present Moment'), though a selection would surely go down well at Higher Level.

Big Love

The new production by the talented Selina Cartmell, whose Macbeth at The Empty Space we reviewed here, is Big Love at the Peacock, and has recently been positively reviewed by Emer O'Kelly in the Sunday Independent, Helen Meany at the Guardian, and Sarah Keating in the Irish Times.

Big Love, by the American playwright Charles Mee, can be read in full on his site here. It's an adaptation of The Danaids (The Suppliants) by Aeschylus (full translation here). Mee's introduction states that 'the setting for the piece should not be real, or naturalistic. It should not be a set for the piece to play within but rather something against which the piece can resonate: something on the order of a bathtub, 100 olive trees, and 300 wine glasses half-full of red wine', and Cartmell's production certainly gets into this spirit, being inventive, energetic and visually arresting - a tonic in another rainy Irish summer.

Eleven Houses

Old Columban Christopher Fitz-Simon's memoir Eleven Houses has been a great critical success, and is now out in paperback. The week after next, the author will be reading extracts on RTE Radio 1 in the late night slot at 11.45pm (from Monday 28th July). There's an extract in the Irish Times here.

Hugh Lane Exhibition

In today's Irish Times, Aidan Dunne reports on the new exhibition at the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, which revisits the famous 1908 exhibition. The Hugh Lane bequest prompted Yeats's poem 'September 1913', known to generations of English pupils in Ireland through its appearance in the book Soundings, and still being studied (in rotation) on the new Leaving Certificate course.

In the words of the Gallery's website:

The gallery is hugely significant in the history of the State not only because of its renowned and international collection of art, but also in its association with twentieth century literature in particular the Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats.

W.B.Yeats recalls the controversy, disappointments and eventual joy in the permanent location of the collection in Charlemont House, in a number of poems including the wonderfully titled 'To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures', 'September 1913' and the poignant 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited.'