UCD Scholarcast - Series 1: The Art of Popular Culture: From "The Meeting of the Waters" to Riverdance PJ Mathews

Frank McGuinness speaks of his experience of adapting Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa for the screen, with Meryl Streep in the leading role. Friel has appeared to shy away from film for most of his distinguished career but was deeply influenced by the wider revolutions in acting, writing and directing across all media during the 1960s when modern sensibility took shape. Friel’s writing may have been influenced by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller but it also owes a debt to powerful films such as Kurosawa’s Rashomon. By reducing the role of the narrator and repositioning the climactic dance sequence, McGuinness attempted to translate what he regarded as a ‘male’ play into ‘a woman’s movie’.

Over the last three decades Bill Whelan has been at the heart of many exciting moments of extraordinary innovation in Irish music across the genres from traditional to rock. Here he documents and considers his varied career to date, from jobbing session musician in the early 1970s to Grammy Award winner in 1997. Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine are recalled as seminal influences on his music during the Planxty years while the founding of Windmill Lane Studios in the 1980s is seen as a landmark moment in the evolution of Irish music across the spectrum. Whelan reflects on Riverdance from inception to global reception. At a time of rapid cultural change he welcomes the creative possibilities brought on by recent immigration to Ireland and argues for the importance of a robust Irish musical tradition.

This lecture examines how contemporary Irish playwrights depict and how they engage the cinematic and narrative patterns we’ve come to associate with American movies. Donal O’Kelly’s Catalpa (1995), Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1999), and Geraldine Hughes’s Belfast Blues (2003) grapple with the effects of Hollywood on their characters and on Irish society. Despite frequently depicting individuals thwarted in their pursuit of big screen success, these plays maintain a surprising optimism about Hollywood. This suggests the American film industry provides a productive tool for exploring Irish identity and history in a moment of rapidly changing, globalized popular culture.

This lecture explores forms of popular culture that developed in Ireland during the Second World War. Comparisons are drawn with Britain, where radio and cinema assume tremendous importance in the war years. In Ireland the major developments are in amateur drama, reading groups, beginnings of film and journalism. Particular attention is focused on the very specific relationship between high and popular culture which develops in both Britain and Ireland at this time due to the fact that many 'high cultural' writers are taking on mediated jobs in radio broadcasting. Consideration is also given to the role of The Bell and other cultural movements in strengthening the consensus on behalf of neutrality in Ireland.

James Joyce’s works abound in references to popular culture. They depict such works as part of the very fabric of modern consciousness. Frequently, Joyce deploys allusions to popular entertainment as a means of underlining the debasement and vulgarity of contemporary existence. But also crucially, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, he depicts popular culture as a site of resistance and the very basis by which his characters may contest the enervating effects of capitalism and of political imperialisms.

This lecture examines W.B. Yeats’s not inconsiderable body of writing for the newspapers which ranges from literary journalism to letters to the editor. Attention will focus on the tensions between his clear commitment to journalistic practice and his own avowed hostility to ‘the Ireland of the newspapers’. As well as providing Yeats with the means of publicising his literary endeavours and pleading Ireland’s cause, journalism was also crucial to Yeats’s development as a poet.