For the past 12 years my endlessly patient wife, Sally has generally played second fiddle on her birthday to the 4 Corners Festival. Well, in 2020 I did skip a day of the festival to take her to Dublin – to watch Ireland trounce Scotland in the Six Nations... and, incase, you don’t know fair reader, Sally is Scottish. Why she puts up with me I will never know.
This year she was at least able to watch Scotland beat Italy
(on the TV), but that evening, instead of a birthday dinner (which we had the
previous evening after the launch of the Festival at 2 Royal Avenue) she
accompanied me to Stranmillis University College Drama Theatre, where I was
scheduled to introduce Nuala McKeever’s one woman show “Truth, Love Or Promise.”
Actually this was the second time we had seen it together. Last August we went
to the Lyric Theatre to see it, finding that my fellow 4 Corners compadre Steve
Stockman and his wife Janice were also there. You can read his take on that night’s performance on his blog....
After the show we sat in the bar together and discussed how the
show would have been perfect for last year’s festival with its theme of “Our Stories
– Towards a Culture of Hope”, given that it was literally about 3 women, Maureen,
Brenda and Joanna, at a creative writing class looking at how to tell their
stories and the stories of those around them. But the way it ended (no spoilers
for those who haven’t yet seen it) meant that it might be a perfect bridge into
this year’s theme of “Home?” So when Nuala came over to join us after a while
we were bold enough to ask whether she would be willing to perform it as part
of the 2025 festival, and she said “Yes” – subject to availability and venue…
And as it turned out, the 1st February was the only possible date… Hence
Sally’s birthday celebrations had to be moved a day forward…
But she didn’t mind, even given this post-show photo, because it was a superb evening, with a full house, bar a few seats where people had booked tickets and not turned up – Boo! – a sad side-effect of a free festival… We do all that we can to encourage people to return tickets so that those on the waiting list (of which there were many for this event) can attend, but you will always find a small number of people who just can’t be bothered… But all those who were there were treated to a laugh out loud funny, poignant and perceptive piece, touching on many issues, not least prejudice in its many guises, sexuality, grief in different forms, and the ever present shadow of The Troubles. It is informed by Nuala’s own experiences and founded on the fact that we live, as Sally often says, in a city where it is not so much 6 degrees of separation, but one and a half at best. As such it illustrates how our stories, in this city we call home, often intertwine, and if we choose to share them they may help us move beyond our past and our preconceptions of each other, to a place of suffused with hope.
If you are one of
those who haven’t yet seen the show there are a few more opportunities in the
near future. Last weekend it was broadcast as a radio play on RTE, and you can read about it here and listen back. I'm not sure whether, like many BBC recordings, it will disappear after a period of time, so you'd better check it out soon. However, there is definitely something to be gained from seeing a production like this in the flesh... Any good performer gains a level of energy from a live audience, and performances will change from night to night, audience to audience and venue to venue. Indeed, although said afterwards that she was more cautious about her language in the $ Corners performance because a fair number of the audience would have been coming from a church background, I actually think that her performance was sharper... perhaps because it was a full theatre. So if you would like to see it live you can fork out money to see it either at the Burnavon Theatre in Cookstown, on the 8th March, or at a special performance at The Old Courthouse in Antrim on Thursday 8th May, 2025. This event is
in collaboration with Compassionate Communities NI and NHSCT. Doors open 7pm
with Tea & Coffee on arrival and the performance will be followed by Q+A panel discussion
with staff from NHSCT and Cruse Bereavement Support.
And in between those two performances you can also see Nuala in another one woman show she wrote before "Truth, Love or Promise" called "In The Window" a dark comedy, running from Wednesday 19th to Sunday 30th March at the Lyric, directed by another person who featured in 4 Corners this year, Andrea Montgomery... I hope to get round to commenting about that evening with her and Anthony Toner before going to see the show!
I am biased given my own history in theatre, but this evening at Stranmillis Drama Theatre wet an early high bar for the 2025 Festival... and illustrated again how well told stories can serve to bring us all closer together...
Selah
ps. The photos on this post (and an a number of other pieces about this year's festival are by Neil Craigan, who will feature in my reflections on the closing night... if I ever get that far...)
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