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      Searching for Brian Friel, and His Mythical Ballybeg

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      Irish Repertory Theater’s season-long survey of the playwright’s work prompted our reporter to seek out the Irish town that inspired the imaginary site of so many of his plays.Up a steep and grassy windblown hill, in the top row of what’s known as the new graveyard, the playwright Brian Friel lies buried under a dark, glossy slab etched with an image of a St. Brigid’s cross, a traditional Irish symbol woven from rushes.This little cemetery in a remote northwest corner of Ireland has a sweeping view of valley, hills and tiny town: Glenties, County Donegal, which in a way is a curious choice for Friel’s final resting place. It isn’t where he was born, in 1929; that was Omagh, across the nearby border with Northern Ireland. It isn’t where he died, in 2015; that was Greencastle, quite a bit farther north in County Donegal, on the sea.But it is, arguably, a place he spent a lot of time in his head. Glenties (population 927 in 2022) is his mother’s hometown, where he would go during childhood summers. Not a son of the town but a grandson, he became, as the New York Times critic Mel Gussow asserted in a 1991 profile, “a writer on a level with Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge,” two of the most esteemed Irish playwrights in the canon.What claim to fame Glenties has, and what brush with Hollywood, is because of Friel. In his writing, he transformed it into a place called Ballybeg: the site of many of his plays, including the most famous, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), which is inspired by his mother and aunts, and dedicated “In memory of those five brave Glenties women.”At St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history around the corner from Main Street, material about Friel includes news clippings of his funeral and old show posters.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe grave of the Irish playwright Brian Friel overlooks the western Irish town of Glenties.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOff Broadway this season, Irish Repertory Theater’s Friel Project will revive three of his Ballybeg plays, starting with “Translations” (1980), about a 19th-century British colonialist project to Anglicize Ireland, directed by the Tony Award winner Doug Hughes and running through Dec. 3. It will be followed in January by “Aristocrats” (1979), set amid a once-grand Catholic family in Chekhovian decline, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director; and in March by “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964), in which a young man prepares to leave Ballybeg for the United States, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director.After Friel died, the critic Michael Billington called him “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation,” citing a body of work that examined “exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland [and] the subjective nature of memory.” All of it, he pronounced, was “bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theater and his breadth of understanding.”In a phone interview, O’Reilly said that “if there was such a thing as a poet laureate of the Irish Rep, it would be Brian Friel”: an intellectually curious, deeply empathetic playwright who probed the makeup of Irish identity. As profoundly as Friel fathomed small-town Irish life, he also recognized the urge to escape it — or in O’Reilly’s words: “Let me get the hell out.”“In so many of his plays, it’s about the departure from it and the need to break beyond it,” said O’Reilly, who was 19 when he left his hometown, even tinier than Glenties, in County Cavan.A current view of Main Street, which is pocked with vacant storefronts.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA photograph on display at St. Connell’s Museum shows Main Street in 1912.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOf course, the true Ballybeg — whose name in Irish, Baile Beag, means “small town” — exists only in Friel’s plays. Still, you can hear echoes of Glenties in those plays, and echoes of those plays in Glenties.And if you go there looking for him, as I did in late September, you will find him — even if the post office where his mother is said to have worked is long gone, succeeded by a branch tucked efficiently inside the Costcutter supermarket, on an unbusy Main Street pocked with vacant storefronts.I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast at one end of the road, near the electric vehicle charging point that communicates loud and clear that Glenties is a 21st-century town. At the other is a hotel whose website commemorates the occasion, 25 years ago, when Meryl Streep, star of the film adaptation of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” slept there “on the night of the local premiere.” In between, a creative arts center and a gift shop both have Lughnasa — “the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh,” as the narrator of Friel’s play explains, and a harvest festival — in their names.With a dozen Broadway productions in his lifetime, most of them Ballybeg plays (including “Faith Healer,” from 1979, in which a pivotal, sinister event occurs on the outskirts of town), Friel was not given to sentimentalizing rusticity.A peat bog in the hills and mountains surrounding the town.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesBut outsiders have a tendency in that direction, as a Ballybeg woman says in Friel’s comedy “The Communication Cord” (1982): “You know the way strangers get queer notions about a place like this; and foreigners is the worst.”Yet when a visitor remarks, in “Give Me Your Answer, Do!” (1997), “The view up that valley is breathtaking,” he could easily be talking about Glenties, whose name in Irish, Na Gleannta, means “the glens.”The town has stunning vistas of the Blue Stack Mountains that hem it in — and make driving there from Dublin, as I did, an adventure, fraught with the risk of toppling off some narrow, winding road into a patch of gorgeous scenery.Phillip Rodgers, owner of Roddy’s Bar, shares a drink with his patrons.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA 2008 photo of the “The Laurels,” the old family home where Friel’s grandparents, mother and aunts once lived. Mary Ita BoyleA local resident sells bread at a weekly street market.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesFOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, starting in the 1890s, a railway stopped in Glenties. I learned that at St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history just around the corner from Main Street. Its collection of Friel material tends toward news clippings (more Meryl) and old show posters (like the one that informs you that both Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea were in the original cast of “Translations,” in Derry).There is also the text of a cheeky piece that Friel wrote for The Irish Times in 1959, ribbing Glenties for its second consecutive win of the national Tidy Towns contest. “My mother’s people were MacLoones,” he notes, wryly claiming “direct descent” from that “mecca of tidiness.”An early-20th-century photograph at St. Connell’s Museum shows a train traveling in western Ireland.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe family home was not far from where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather was the station master.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe cottage where the family lived, the home of the impecunious sisters who inspired “Dancing at Lughnasa,” is in Glenties — close to where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather had been the station master. The Brian Friel Trust, which reportedly has plans for a cultural center elsewhere in town, owns the house.From the road, the path to the old family home passes under a low canopy of branches. Then, in a clearing, there it is, looking grimy and forlorn, with moss-carpeted stairs and a gold-lettered plaque beside the door. “‘The Laurels,’” it says, which is the house’s name. “Unveiled by Brian Friel, Meryl Streep and Sophie Thompson. 24th September 1998.”Sheep are free to graze the rolling hills.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAnd this is where the soft glow of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a memory play set in imaginary Ballybeg in 1936, collides hard with a reality that is too earthbound, too bleak, too untouched by poetry. But also — maybe because of the plaque, and the gloom — more like an exhibit than a remnant of history.“Translations” (in which, somewhat mind-bendingly, a character from Ballybeg mentions Glenties in conversation) takes place a century earlier, in 1833, as the British are mapping all of Ireland and rewriting every Irish place name into English. It’s more than a decade before the Great Famine, but jobs are scarce — a theme that runs through Friel’s plays — and a fear of blighted crops is making some locals nervous.“Sweet God,” another scoffs in response, “did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never!”If you go simply by the sign on Main Street in Glenties, with its arrow pointing vaguely north, you will never find the town’s famine graveyard. If you consult Google Maps, it will tell you that the place is “temporarily closed.” Not so.The famine graveyard has a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMichael, who now lives in Australia, was visiting family in Glenties. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesWhen I pulled up behind the group of houses where my GPS said it was, a man in a purple sweater instantly emerged to find out why I was there. Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. Down the hill, sheep were grazing.The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. Sickness spread among the desperate poor at the Glenties workhouse. Inmates who perished were interred out back.So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.I got back in the car and headed to the Atlantic Ocean, about eight miles away, where the island of Inishkeel and its medieval monastic ruins lie not far across the water from Narin/Portnoo Beach. At low tide, you can walk to it on an exposed sandbar, but you will need to keep careful watch of the time if you don’t want to get trapped there, and heed a sign, fixed to a gate on the island, that warns, surreally: “Beware of the bull.” (I saw no bull.)The island of Inisheel in the distance. A sandbar that is exposed during low tide connects Narin/Portnoo Beach and Inishkeel.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThere is a wildness and a timelessness to Inishkeel. A rugged desolation, too, even though all you have to do is face the far shore to see the houses on the mainland, and wind turbines spinning in the hills beyond: a side-by-side coexistence of the eerie ancient and the unsettled now that is very Friel.Glenties doesn’t have a coastline, but Ballybeg does, with at least one island off it: in “The Gentle Island” (1971), called Inishkeen; in “Wonderful Tennessee” (1993), called Oilean Draiochta, which is translated in the play as Island of Mystery. Neither island is tidal like Inishkeel — you need a boat to get to them — but each shares a bit of the real island’s past.In those plays, Friel taps into the primal, the mythic, the spiritual. And maybe it was just the gray and chill the day I was there, and the tiny needles of rain that stung my face. But on that marvelous, rock-strewn island, all of those forces seemed entirely conjurable — somewhere off beautiful Ballybeg, County Donegal. More

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      Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

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      Michael Keegan-Dolan has collaborated with his partner Rachel Poirier on “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse.“For some reason I wanted to be a dancer,” Michael Keegan-Dolan said of his younger self. “And then I realized I was really bad at it.” Keegan-Dolan, a choreographer and director, was talking on a video call from his home in Dingle, a remote spot on the southwest coast of Ireland where he lives with the dancer Rachel Poirier, and where his dance company Teac Damsa is based. “I was this kind of tragic character.”Sitting next to him, Poirier chuckled. “I didn’t see him dance then,” she said, “so thank God I don’t need to comment.”Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater work “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Saturday, springs from the tension between this thing he loved beyond all others — dance — and the realities of his body.In a mix of stories and dance, he and Poirier trace the dogged efforts of a young Irishman, based on Keegan-Dolan, now 54, coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, struggling to find his place in the world of dance. It plays out against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about masculinity, I.R.A. violence and his feelings of being an unwelcome outsider in England, where he went to advance his training.“I was a kind of tragic character,” Keegan-Dolan said of wanting to dance but not being much good at it. Poirier didn’t see him perform back then, she said, “so thank God I don’t have to comment.” With the couple is their dog Chamalo.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesIn ballet school Keegan-Dolan was told that his pigeon-toed feet were hopelessly untrainable. In the show he recalls being asked by a teacher, with as much kindness as she can muster, “Is there anything else you might like to do with your life?” He can’t think of anything.His salvation, it turned out, would be choreography, and through it, theater. After his last appearance onstage as a dancer in 1994, he turned to making dances and eventually rose to acclaim as a choreographer, first in opera and later in ensemble works of his own.In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theater in the Irish Midlands, which, after its relocation to Dingle, became Teac Damsa. (The name means “house of dance” in Gaelic.) With those companies Keegan-Dolan has explored themes from Irish history and myth in well-received works that combine live music, theater and dance, like “The Bull,” “Rian,” a reimagined “Swan Lake,” and “Mám,” recently presented at Sadler’s Wells.In “How to Be a Dancer” he turns his lens inward. There are just two characters, the Dance Man and the Dancer, played by Keegan-Dolan and Poirier.The work’s intimate scale is partly a product of circumstance. “How to Be a Dancer” was created during the pandemic and rehearsed at a theater down the road from Keegan-Dolan and Poirier’s house. (It premiered in 2022 at the Gate Theater in Dublin.)For Susan Feldman, the artistic director at St. Ann’s, the small scale offered an opportunity. “I’ve been aware of Michael for many years,” she said in an interview, “and I’ve seen many of his works, but our space isn’t really conducive to presenting large dance pieces.”Feldman was struck by the honesty and humor of the show. “I was really interested that it would be him dancing,” Feldman said of Keegan-Dolan, who hasn’t performed in decades and appears in a series of wigs. “At first I didn’t even realize it was him.”Keegan-Dolan turns his lens inward in “How to Be a Dancer,” which he developed in Dingle during the pandemic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe material that makes up “How to be a Dancer” began to emerge before the pandemic, Keegan-Dolan said, but the period of forced inactivity gave him time to look back on memories that had dogged him for years. The number in the title comes from yoga practices that hold that 72,000 channels, known as nadis, circulate energy through the body.The stories in the show draw upon the kinds of memories — small revelations, as well as shameful or painful experiences — that help shape our inner lives. Keegan-Dolan describes sitting in his home in Dublin, the youngest in a large family, watching Gene Kelly on television as his mother ironed. And how he felt when he took his first dance class, at 18, towering over the barre in rugby sweats in a room full of “9-year-old girls in pink leotards,” he says. He should feel ridiculous, he adds, “but instead I feel like I am in exactly the right place.”After moving to London in the ’80s, a period of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army, he remembers being called a terrorist and worse. Often he reframes such painful experiences as absurdist comedy. But the sting is still there.Onstage, the stories roll out of him like well-worn yarns. And like all such tales, they contain some fabrication. “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story,” Keegan-Dolan said. He is a natural storyteller, lively and funny, “un peu cabot” (a bit of a show-off), as Poirier put it in her native French.The storytelling is layered with snippets of movement and dance, as when Poirier and Keegan-Dolan re-enact a happy-awkward dance at an Irish disco in the ’80s, while bullies hurl insults from the sidelines. “I wait for him to go,” Keegan-Dolan says of one of them, “and when he’s gone I start dancing again.” Nothing can deter his joy in movement — not even the fear of being punched in the face.Keegan-Dolan, a natural storyteller, said, “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story.”Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe more technical dancing in the show is left to Poirier, who has danced with the Rambert dance company and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group among other troupes. She is the dancer he would have liked to have been, Keegan-Dolan said — along with Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire and Jacques d’Amboise.The climax of the piece is a 15-minute solo performed by Poirier that the pair choreographed together to Ravel’s “Boléro.” Here, the memories that rise to the surface are hers.“There are bits of steps hanging there, dance memories,” Poirier said, “and the feeling of what it’s like to be a dancer, all the struggles and the lack of money, and the greatness and the poetry that comes with doing the job we do.”And even as she pushes through exhaustion, the freedom and force of her movements, sustained by Ravel’s music, suggest something about the power of dance, the thing that has kept Keegan-Dolan in its thrall all these years.“It connects you to a part of yourself that is otherwise totally inaccessible,” he said. “And you don’t even have to be good at it.” More

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      CMAT Makes Country Music Sad, Smart and Strange

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      In April 2020, a new force in Irish music announced herself with a song about love, loss and fried chicken.The video for “Another Day (KFC),” CMAT’s debut single, opens with the singer dancing cheerfully in front of a blue screen. “Baby give me something else to do,” she sings, in a style pitched between country twang and ‘60s pop, “I cried in KFC again over you.” Then, suddenly, the camera swerves to a dark room where the man this song is addressed to sits gagged and tied to a chair. CMAT, still grinning, dances over and slaps him in the face, then eats a bucket of chicken while sitting on his lap.Since the video came out, CMAT — an acronym for the 27-year-old artist’s name, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson — has become a huge star in Ireland and won fans further afield with country-pop songs that are irreverent, vulnerable, sad, smart — and decidedly strange.Her 2022 debut album, “If My Wife New I’d Be Dead,” went straight to No. 1 in Ireland, and was awarded the RTE Choice Music Prize, Ireland’s equivalent to the Grammys. A follow-up, with another grammatically wayward name, “Crazymad, For Me,” arrives Friday, and she has tour dates scheduled in Ireland, Britain and the United States.The connection between Ireland and country music is longstanding: The “singing cowboy” Gene Autry toured the country in the ’30s, and the genre was further popularized in the ’60s by groups known as showbands that played in rural dance halls. In the ’90s, Garth Brooks’s stadium gigs in Dublin triggered a nationwide craze for line dancing. CMAT brings this tradition up-to-date, combining the enduring country themes of heartbreak and self-destruction with camp humor and a distinctly Irish sense of the absurd.“I think the structure of everything I do is probably always going to come from country music,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “I’m always going to sing like a country singer.”CMAT’s country-pop songs are irreverent, vulnerable, sad, smart — and militantly strange.Ellius Grace for The New York Times“Crazymad, For Me,” however, also branches into psychedelia, anthemic pop and rock ‘n’ roll. For this album, Thompson said, she “wanted to make something that sounded very theatrical,” like Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.”The Meatloaf influence is clear in the slow-burning, claustrophobic ballad “Rent” which builds to a rock ‘n’ roll chorus with a spiraling piano line and howling vocals — but there is also “Have Fun,” a pop anthem showcasing an Irish fiddle.Mattias Tellez, the album’s producer, said Thompson’s voice was “timeless, and powerful, and so distinct,” displaying “qualities I hear in the likes of Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald — that power, and control, and spontaneous humor.”The new album draws on Thompson’s life, looking back on a tumultuous relationship the singer began with an older man when she was in her late teens. It follows her from her lowest and messiest point, before she reckons with the past and decides to move on.Along the way, she weaves in references to St. Anthony (the finder of lost things — a favorite of Irish mothers), Miranda from “Sex and the City” and the “Wagatha Christie” trial that recently gripped Britain’s tabloids.The single “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” sees CMAT collaborate with the singer-songwriter John Grant. The two appeared onstage together in September, at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, where Grant was performing a concert of Patsy Cline covers. CMAT was the guest star, singing “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “She’s Got You.”In an email, Grant said working with Thompson was “a blast.”“They absolutely love her in Ireland, and with good reason,” Grant said. “Looks like the rest of the world is catching on.”CMAT began her career describing herself online, ironically, as “a global pop star” who “lives in Dublin with her grandparents.” Prepandemic, she was working in a cafe: She had no money, and was recovering from a period of depression and disillusionment, after the band she’d formed at 18, Bad Sea, failed to gain traction and split.She reinvented herself as a solo act, self-releasing singles including “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” and “Nashville,” a dreamy (and surprisingly exhilarating) song about suicidal ideation. She rapidly gained fans, in particular among young Irish L.G.B.T.Q. people. (Thompson, who is bisexual, once told an interviewer that she’s “making music for the girls and the gays, and that’s it.”)“I think the structure of everything I do is probably always going to come from country music,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “I’m always going to sing like a country singer.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesHer career took off just in time for Covid-19 to rule out the chance of touring. “Everyone was stuck at home, and had nothing to do, and didn’t know how to exist on the internet,” she said. “But I did, because I’d been there. I’d spent a lot of time in a room by myself.”As a teenager, Thompson was an avid Tumblr user, and wrote fan fiction about Bombay Bicycle Club, an English indie band. She focused on building her own online following, with live streamed events including “CMAT’s Very Nice Christmas,” and the “CMAT Confessional Line,” during which fans called in with life dilemmas for her to solve.Thompson has since swapped Dublin for Brighton, England, and has reached a point of success where the “pop star” line is no longer a joke. She has even won the recognition of her idols: On the track “So Lonely” she asked “Who needs God, when I have Robbie Williams?,” attracting the online attention of the man himself. Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Williams called the duet with Grant “majestic.”“Now I am actually kind of living like a pop star,” Thompson said. “And now, trying to keep up the pop star thing, and having a fake life, and a fake personality to go with it, just feels wrong.” Instead, she is steadily cultivating a unique brand of anti-glamour, appearing in videos in clown costumes, elaborate wigs and male drag, or with facial prosthetics, bleached eyebrows and gems stuck to her teeth.The intimacy she has forged with fans has only intensified: Recently, Thompson promised on X that if “Crazymad” reaches the Top 10 in Britain, she would send her wisdom teeth, freshly removed, to a lucky follower.In the same spirit of authenticity, the album shows its creator’s flaws, as well as her triumphs. “When I was making this record, two things happened,” Thompson said. “I got angrier about some things, but then I also realized that I had done some things wrong in my life.” Across its 12 tracks, the album shifts from blaming her ex to forgiving herself for her own mistakes.“I feel like no one is trying to make themselves look bad anymore in their music,” she added, “but we’ve all done things wrong in our lives. I’m an embarrassing person who’s done some very embarrassing things.”The album’s ecstatic final tracks, “Have Fun” and “Stay For Something,” complete this journey from resentment to regret, through self-acceptance to, ultimately, optimism.“There’s no point in suffering,” Thompson said. “You could just have been having a good time. Because life is very short.” More

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      Ireland Says Goodbye to Sinéad O’Connor at Funeral Procession

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      In the coastal town of Bray, south of Dublin, the site of Ms. O’Connor’s last Irish home, mourners gathered to pay their respects to the singer.At the close of a life poised between tradition and rebellion, Ireland gave Sinéad O’Connor a send-off on Tuesday that embraced both.In keeping with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, in Bray, County Wicklow.But many of those who gathered, or who left her tributes, brought a spirit more in keeping with her life as a rebel who took on the establishment — most notably the Roman Catholic Church — and who spoke up for the oppressed. Among the signs left in front of her family home was one that read “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “GAY PRIDE” and “REFUGEES WELCOME.”At noon, the cortege reached Ms O’Connor’s former home on Bray’s seaside promenade. The crowd broke into prolonged applause, with some raising fists in salute. Many were in tears. Earlier, as thousands of people waited for her cortege to pass alongside the small town’s seaside promenade, a classic Volkswagen van draped in rainbow and Rastafarian flags had played a selection of her music from speakers. The playlist mixed her rock and pop hits with her renditions of Irish traditional ballads, including “The Foggy Dew.”Ms. O’Connor, who was found dead in her London apartment last month, converted to Islam in 2018, and her family will give her a Muslim burial on Tuesday. While the family wished to keep the funeral private, they invited the public to come to Bray for a last farewell.Some of those lining the streets — suddenly sunny after days of gray skies — were avid music fans. Others were activists, and there were also abuse survivors who had drawn strength from Ms. O’Connor’s openness about her own experience of childhood trauma. Dave Sharp, who said he had spent years in care homes and been the victim of abuse, traveled to Bray from Glasgow on Monday.“We didn’t have much notice but I’d promised myself that I’d be there for her,” he said. “Sinéad O’Connor is one of the bravest women I’ve ever known of. She not only put her life and career on the line, but she was ahead of her time.”The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, will attend the funeral with his wife, Sabrina.“The outpouring of grief and appreciation of the life and work of Sinéad O’Connor demonstrates the profound impact which she had on the Irish people,” he said in a statement. Speaking of her “immense heroism” and the pain it caused her, he added: “That is why all those who are seeking to make a fist of their life, combining its different dimensions in their own way, can feel so free to express their grief at her loss.”In accordance with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, on the seaside promenade in Bray.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersIn recent days, among a rolling wave of tributes, a creative agency temporarily augmented a World War II territorial marker on nearby Bray Head to celebrate the singer. Where once it said “Eire” — Irish for Ireland — to warn belligerent aircraft that they were approaching neutral Irish territory, the giant sign now says “Eire 🤍 Sinéad.”Passionate and often controversial, Ms. O’Connor had slowly become, in the eyes of many, a national treasure, a woman who spoke up for the weak and oppressed, and who took an early stand against the abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere.Her public struggles with mental health inspired protective feelings in fans and supporters, and added to the grief at news of her untimely death at age 56. Although an autopsy has been completed in London, no cause of death has yet been given.Ms. O’Connor, performing in Avenches, Switzerland, in 2008, had become a national treasure in the eyes of many.Ennio Leanza/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the weekend, performers and crowds came together at summer music festivals around the island to sing some of the musician’s most beloved songs, such as “Mandinka,” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.”The week before, the crowd fell silent, then applauded, at Ireland’s biggest sporting occasion, the inter-county Gaelic football final in Dublin’s 80,000-capacity Croke Park, as the big screens played the famous video of her version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”Even the church, famously the target of her anger, has paid respects. Speaking last week, before the annual ancient pilgrimage to climb Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland, the Catholic primate of Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, said he had heard many stories about her kindness.“Clearly her own trauma and her own personal experiences made her a very compassionate person who reached out to the marginalized — she had real empathy,” he said. “God rest her troubled soul.”Flowers, messages and gifts were piled in front of Ms. O’Connor’s former home, many paying tribute to her empathy and the causes she supported.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters More

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      Sinead O’Connor Was Ireland’s Alternative Moral Compass

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      In any society, she would have been radical for a pop star. But in Ireland, she was revolutionary.On March 9, Sinead O’Connor stood onstage at the Vicar Street concert venue in Dublin. Her presence was greeted by a prolonged standing ovation. O’Connor was at the RTE Choice Music Prize, an evening celebrating the best Irish albums of the past year. A new award had been invented for the occasion: classic Irish album, and O’Connor was there to accept it for her 1990 record, “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.”It was the day after my 40th birthday. Untethered by this life landmark, I felt strangely grounded by her presence: Sinéad is here, all is well in the world. Soaking in the noise of the audience cheering her on, she smiled, almost bashful, before dedicating the award to refugees in Ireland.O’Connor had a tendency to show up at necessary moments. This time, her reappearance was a relief, because everyone in the crowd was worried about her. Her son, Shane, took his own life in 2022. He was 17. She was no stranger to articulating her personal struggles: the abuse she suffered as a child, the impact of a news media that sometimes hounded her, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and PTSD.And now, here she was, onstage in Dublin, a strange sort of lighthouse, beaming again. “How is she?” I asked one of the stage crew. “Flying form,” came the answer.O’Connor receiving the Classic Irish Album award at the RTE Choice Music Prize, in Dublin, in March.Kieran Frost/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAt the time, there was something of an O’Connor renaissance occurring. Her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” was critically lauded, and she posted the positive reviews excitedly on social media. The 2022 documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, correctly positioned her as an alternative moral compass in Ireland, driven by integrity and authenticity, not shame.When I was a child, Ireland felt like a phony place, yet I had no way to conceptualize its inauthenticity. I was raised Catholic, and made to navigate the weirdness of First Holy Communion, novenas and trips to the shrine at Knock. The idea of defying this was incomprehensible. The dominance of the church was simply a given.I was 9 when television news bulletins framed O’Connor destroying a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” as blasphemous, missing the serious statement behind the act. As far as Irish society was concerned, he was a living saint. The incident rattled the country, and it also rattled me. You could do that?There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.O’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990.DMI/The Life Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAnd Ireland was in her songs. “Dublin in a rainstorm” was the setting for one of her finest, “Troy.” Her voice was pure and strong, and Anita Baker described it as “cavernous.” She traversed alt-rock and pop, reggae and traditional Irish music. She covered Prince, Nirvana and John Grant. On “8 Good Reasons” (a title that referred to the eyes of her four children, she explained), she sang, “You know I love to make music, but my head got wrecked by the business.”When I first interviewed O’Connor, in 2007, backstage at the Oxegen music festival, in Kildare, she seemed a little shaky, but utterly cool, friendly and fun. In 2014, I sat listening to her talk about her latest album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” as she chain-smoked in a Dublin recording studio, her face tattoos faded by laser removal treatment.Although I only knew her from afar, the sense of connection she created, both through the music and what she stood for, was profound. Her loss has instigated a deep collective grief across Ireland. She was a symbol of hope as much as defiance, an artist and thinker who always stood on the horizon, urging others to catch up.When I heard the news, I felt the gut-punch of loss. It was as though something elemental had departed the world, and some essential tributary had run dry within me.My wife stood up from the couch, walked to the fireplace, and lit a candle, the traditional gesture of Irish grief and remembrance. The national broadcaster’s main radio station played song after song. We remembered that night in March, when the roar and applause of the audience in Dublin seemed to say: thank you, we love you, you were right. More

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      Sinead O’Connor, Evocative and Outspoken Singer, Is Dead at 56

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      She broke out with the single “Nothing Compares 2 U,” then caused an uproar a few years later by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on “S.N.L.”Sinead O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter known for her powerful, evocative voice, as showcased on her biggest hit, a breathtaking rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and for her political provocations onstage and off, has died. She was 56.Her longtime friend Bob Geldof, the Irish musician and activist, confirmed her death, as did her family in a statement, according to the BBC and the Irish public broadcaster RTE.“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” No other details were provided.Recognizable by her shaved head and by wide eyes that could appear pained or full of rage, Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, beginning with the alternative hit “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1987. She went on to sell millions of albums worldwide, breaking out with “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1990.That album, featuring “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a No. 1 hit around the world and an MTV staple, won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance — although Ms. O’Connor boycotted the ceremony over what she called the show’s excessive commercialism.Ms. O’Connor rarely shrank from controversy, though it often came with consequences for her career.In 1990, she threatened to cancel a performance in New Jersey if “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the concert hall ahead of her appearance, drawing the ire of no less than Frank Sinatra. That same year, she backed out of an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in protest of the misogyny she perceived in the comedy of Andrew Dice Clay, who was scheduled to host.But all of that paled in comparison to the uproar caused when Ms. O’Connor, appearing on “S.N.L.” in 1992 — shortly after the release of her third album, “Am I Not Your Girl?” — ended an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” by ripping a photo of Pope John Paul II into pieces as a stance against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said.That incident immediately made her a target of criticism and scorn, from social conservatives and beyond. Two weeks after her “S.N.L.” appearance, she was loudly booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. (She had planned to perform Mr. Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” but she sang “War” again, rushing off the stage before she had finished.)For a time, the vitriol directed at Ms. O’Connor was so pervasive that it became a kind of pop culture meme in itself. On “S.N.L.” in early 1993, Madonna mocked the controversy by tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island auto mechanic who was a tabloid fixture at the time because of his affair with a 17-year-old girl.Once a rising star, Ms. O’Connor then stumbled. “Am I Not Your Girl?,” an album of jazz and pop standards like “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” was stalled on the charts at No. 27. Her next album, “Universal Mother” (1994), went no higher than No. 36.Kris Kristofferson spoke to Ms. O’Connor after she was booed off the stage during a concert in tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992, shortly after her “Saturday Night Live” appearance.Ron Frehm/Associated PressThe British musician Tim Burgess, of the band Charlatans (known in the United States as the Charlatans UK), wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “Sinead was the true embodiment of a punk spirit. She did not compromise and that made her life more of a struggle.”Ms. O’Connor never had another major hit in the United States after “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” from “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” although for a time she remained a staple on the British charts.But in her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” Ms. O’Connor portrayed ripping up the photo of the pope as a righteous act of protest — and therefore a success.“I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she wrote, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”She elaborated in an interview with The New York Times that same year, calling the incident an act of defiance against the constraints of pop stardom.“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” Ms. O’Connor said. “But it was very traumatizing,” she added. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Glenageary, a suburb of Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. Her father, John, was an engineer, and her mother, Johanna, was a dressmaker.In interviews, and in her memoir, Ms. O’Connor spoke openly of having a traumatic childhood. She said that her mother physically abused her and that she had been deeply affected by her parents’ separation, which happened when she was 8. In her teens, she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to reform schools.Ms. O’Connor at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWhen she was 15, Ms. O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — the love theme from “A Star Is Born,” made famous by Barbra Streisand — at a wedding, and was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer who had an affiliation with the Irish band U2. She left boarding school at 16 and began her career, supporting herself by waitressing and performing “kiss-o-grams” in a kinky French maid costume.“The Lion and the Cobra” — the title is an allusion to Psalm 91 — marked her as a rising talent with a spiritual heart, an ear for offbeat melody and a fierce and combative style. Her music drew from 1980s-vintage alternative rock, hip-hop and flashes of Celtic folk that came through when her voice raised to high registers.She drew headlines for defending the Irish Republican Army and publicly jeered U2 — whose members had supported her — as “bombastic.” She also said she had rejected attempts by her record company, Ensign, to adopt a more conventional image.The leaders of the label “wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,” Ms. O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. “And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.”“Nothing Compares 2 U” — originally released by the Family, a Prince side project, in 1985 — became a phenomenon when Ms. O’Connor released it five years later. The video for the song, trained closely on her emotive face, was hypnotic, and Ms. O’Connor’s voice, as it raised from delicate, breathy notes to powerful cries, stopped listeners in their tracks. Singers like Alanis Morissette cited Ms. O’Connor’s work from this period as a key influence.Ms. O’Connor in 2021, the year she published a memoir, “Rememberings,” in which she spoke openly of a traumatic childhood. Ellius Grace for The New York TimesNot long after “Nothing Compares” became a hit, Ms. O’Connor accused Prince of physically threatening her. She elaborated on the story in her memoir, saying that Prince, at his Hollywood mansion, chastised her for swearing in interviews and suggested a pillow fight, only to hit her with something hard that was in his pillowcase. She escaped on foot in the middle of the night, she said, but Prince chased her around the highway.The effects of childhood trauma, and finding ways to fight and heal, became a central part of her work and her personal philosophy. “The cause of all the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin magazine in 1991.Her mother, whom Ms. O’Connor described as an alcoholic, died when she was 18. In her memoir, Ms. O’Connor said that on the day her mother died she took a picture of the pope from her mother’s wall; it was that photo that she destroyed on television.On later albums, she made warmly expansive pop-rock (“Faith and Courage,” 2000), played traditional Irish songs (“Sean-Nós Nua,” 2002) and revisited classic reggae songs (“Throw Down Your Arms,” 2005). Her last album was “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” released in 2014.As her music career slowed, Ms. O’Connor, who had been open in the past about her mental health struggles, became an increasingly erratic public figure, often sharing unfiltered opinions and personal details on social media.In 2007, she revealed on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that she had tried to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. Her son Shane died by suicide in 2022, at 17.Ms. O’Connor said in 2012 that she had been misdiagnosed and that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a history of child abuse. “Recovery from child abuse is a life’s work,” she told People magazine.Several years ago she converted to Islam and started using the name Shuhada Sadaqat, though she continued to answer to O’Connor as well.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Ms. O’Connor had two brothers, Joe and John, and one sister, Eimear, as well as three stepsisters and a stepbrother. She wrote in her memoir that she was married four times and that she had four children: three sons, Jake, Shane and Yeshua, and a daughter, Roisin.In discussing her memoir with The Times in 2021, Ms. O’Connor focused on her decision to tear up the photo of John Paul II as a signal moment in a life of protest and defiance.“The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,” she said. “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.”Alex Traub More

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      What’s Driving a Fresh Wave of Irish Music? Tradition.

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      As Ireland reimagines itself, musicians including the singer Lisa O’Neill and the band Lankum are reimagining the island’s music with an ever-growing sense of pride.DUBLIN — The 40-year-old Irish singer Lisa O’Neill’s north Dublin flat is filled with books, records, instruments and talismanic chachkas. A Sinead O’Connor photo flanks a Johnny Cash portrait on a shelf next to a ceramic teapot; a Patrick Kavanagh poetry collection tops a pile of paperbacks; a Margaret Barry LP jacket gets pride of place on her upright piano’s rack.Barry was a street singer “discovered” by the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1950s; she busked with a banjo and a beautiful bray of a voice, brazenly Irish, singing songs of the day alongside traditional ballads. Her work has become a touchstone for O’Neill. “I kind of really learned to sing from these recordings,” she said in an interview in her high-ceilinged kitchen last month. “She was like the Edith Piaf of Ireland.”O’Neill is a cultural hero in her own right. She has released five albums since 2009, building a reputation as a modern artist tapped into the ancient. In song, her voice becomes a wild thing, cutting the air like the cry of Dublin’s omnipresent sea gulls; it can silence a noisy pub crowd when it lays into a ballad, swooping boldly into high notes or creaking fiercely. She spent Ireland’s strict lockdown largely by herself here in one of the city’s weathered Georgian townhouses, writing the incantatory songs that inform her recent album, “All of This Is Chance,” which was released in February.“Folk” might not be the best word to describe O’Neill’s striking mix of originals and interpretations, which echo singer-songwriter, alt-country and indie-rock traditions. In this, she is not alone. Over the past decade she has found community and common cause with a Dublin tribe leaning into Ireland’s older traditions.There’s the sublimely harmonizing brother duo Ye Vagabonds, who opened shows for Phoebe Bridgers last summer; the mighty bass-baritone singer-songwriter John Francis Flynn; Eoghan O Ceannabhain, a master of Irish-language song in the sean nos tradition; and Lankum, a gang of drone-loving experimentalists who have become a lodestar for the scene, and released their fourth album on March 24.This creative bounty has been echoed in other Irish arts resonating abroad despite — and arguably because of — their rich, resolute Irishness: the TV series “Derry Girls” and “Bad Sisters,” the films “The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” both part of the so-called Green Wave at this year’s Oscars.All this has coincided with significant sociopolitical change in Ireland. The legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage — alongside the exposure of the horrors inside the religious institutions known as “mother and baby homes” that proliferated until the 1990s — have marked the diminished power of the Roman Catholic Church alongside the greater empowerment of women. Brexit, while further complicating Ireland’s ever-fraught relationship with England, has perhaps sharpened the Irish sense of self.Lankum’s singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat, 36, sees this cultural churn accompanying a resurgence of interest in Irish folklore and language “with absolutely zero sense of embarrassment,” describing an atmosphere where artists are “confident about their identities as Irish people, and not trying to recreate things they’ve seen done somewhere else.” She credits the abortion and marriage referendums, driven by decisive popular vote, as giving people “a sense of pride.”Her bandmate Ian Lynch, 42, a singer who plays contributes both uilleann pipes and tape loops, added a clarification. “Not a jingoistic, blinkered sense of pride,” he said. “Not like some right-wing, ‘oh, we’re the best,’ but actually a sense of pride for good reasons.”The Lankum crew, who often finish each other’s sentences, mulled this notion on a blustery February afternoon at Guerrilla Sound, the workshop of the group’s producer/low-key fifth band member John Murphy, 39, who’s known as Spud. The catacomb studio is stocked with esoteric electronic instruments, some of which shaped the band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album, “False Lankum.”The band’s “folk song” approach, which can equally suggest the vast dronescapes of the composer Sarah Davachi and the experimental metal band Sunn O))), appears in microcosm on their nearly nine-minute single “Go Dig My Grave.” Peat’s piercing delivery of the centuries-old “forsaken girl” ballad, which has many variants (“The Butcher Boy,” “Died for Love”), charts a bottomless grief as the track layers instruments alongside other sounds: minor-key hurdy-gurdy notes, steely fiddle harmonics, witch-coven murmurs, potato-chip crunching and the subliminal flicker of Murphy digging holes for tomato plants in his garden.Spider Stacy, 64, the English musician and actor who exploded the possibilities of Irish traditional music with the Pogues in 1980s and has performed with Lankum, admired the group’s “profound understanding of the possibilities of sound” and “intimate knowledge of their art” in an email exchange. “For me anyway, they surpass pretty much anyone,” he added. “They’re the best band in the world.”“Go Dig My Grave” is a song Peat had plumbed for years at casual pub sessions, social hubs that remain central to Irish music tradition. The tradition got a boost in the late ’00s, when the financial crisis left young people with more time on their hands than cash. Lankum’s members met at a Dublin session. Diarmuid and Brian Mac Gloinn, of Ye Vagabonds, found a home in them, as did O’Neill. For a time, she and the Mac Gloinns anchored separate nights at Walsh’s, in the north side Stoneybatter neighborhood.O’Neill sat in on a recent session there, a lively assembly that ran until 1 a.m. and nearly veered into a brawl when a bystander picked up a concertina without asking. A labor-themed sequence included O’Neill’s “Rock the Machine,” about a Dublin dockworker losing his job to automation. Kilian O’Flanagan, a rising talent, sang Ewan MacColl’s “Tunnel Tigers,” about the digging of the London Underground, and Paddy Cummins, taking a night off from his band Skipper’s Alley, delivered “McAlpine’s Fusiliers,” another rueful worker’s tale popularized by 1960s folk revivalists the Dubliners.The mother ship of Dublin session pubs, however, remains the Cobblestone in nearby Smithfield. In a scenario echoing the 1970s New York punk crucible CBGBs, a dive bar in a rough neighborhood was transformed by a music lover — here, in the late 1980s by Tom Mulligan, who now runs the Cobblestone with his children. Roughly 10 years ago, the bar began hosting “The Night Larry Got Stretched,” a monthly session in the back room aimed at involving younger people in traditional singing. It’s been going strong ever since.But Dublin has changed. Smithfield became a desirable district, and the Cobblestone was the locus of a civic controversy in 2021, as developers planned to build a hotel on top of it, eliminating the pub’s back room and courtyard. Community protest was swift; petitions circulated, and a media savvy march included musician pallbearers parading a coffin inscribed “RIP Dublin.” The hotel project stalled, and developers withdrew an appeal last year.The Cobblestone’s cause, like that of the Dublin scene writ large, has been furthered by a dedicated network of culture workers. Filmmakers have been key. Luke McManus is a local who shot a moving clip for Lankum’s 2016 breakthrough single, “Cold Old Fire,” gratis; his new documentary, “North Circular Road,” is a musical love letter to hardscrabble North Dublin. “Song of Granite,” Pat Collins’ haunted 2017 biopic of the sean nos legend Joe Heaney, featured vivid performances by O’Neill and Damien Dempsey, the north side singer-songwriter who just completed a run of his “Springsteen on Broadway”-style “Tales From Holywell” at the venerable Abbey Theater. The filmmaker and musician Myles O’Reilly, possibly the hardest-working man in Irish trad, maintains a YouTube Channel that’s a master course in how to present, preserve and promote a nascent music scene.From left: Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch of Lankum. The band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album is titled “False Lankum.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesImaginative boutique festivals (Quiet Lights in Cork, Roise Rua on the island of Arranmore) have helped, too, as well as the Irish Arts Council’s traditional arts arm, who have lent support in spite of grumbling from some folk music old-schoolers skeptical of the current scene.Perhaps the biggest boost to international outreach has been the attention of Rough Trade Records, founded by Geoff Travis; the label was known for signing post-punk acts like the Smiths and the Raincoats in the 1980s. The label’s co-owner Jeannette Lee sharpened her appreciation of traditional music touring with Public Image Limited, whose frontman, John Lydon, liked blasting Irish folk alongside dub reggae in its van. She started the folk-adjacent River Lea label with Geoff Travis as, in his words, “a labor of love, to a degree,” but also as a proving ground for young artists. Flynn, Ye Vagabonds and O’Neill debuted on River Lea; with a growing audience, her latest album was issued on Rough Trade proper.While the tide of interest is lifting many boats, no one’s getting especially rich. Ian Lynch felt so priced out of Dublin’s ballooning housing market, he moved back in with his parents. (“I get to see them, which is good,” he said. “But, I mean, I’m 42.”) Side hustles help. Along with lecturing on Irish folklore, Lynch produces “Fire Draw Near,” a fascinating and often very funny Patreon-funded podcast devoted to modern and historic Irish traditional music. O’Reilly supports his video work in part via Patreon, too, with enough success that he can often film emerging musicians without charge, helping grow the scene.O’Neill, one of the first musicians O’Reilly ever filmed, back in 2010, is an object lesson in how the collective work bears fruit. She quit her barista job at Bewley’s, the famous Grafton Street tearoom, and after years of shares, was finally able to get a flat of her own. Her February album release concert at the town hall in Cavan — her hometown, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin — felt like the homecoming it was. On a stage made homey with vintage table lamps, guest artists came and went as old songs flanked new, and the show ended on a spectacular, dissonance-spiked version of “All the Tired Horses,” her remarkable Bob Dylan cover that recently capped the popular period crime drama “Peaky Blinders.”Afterward, naturally, a session bubbled up, in the lobby of a small hotel down the road. O’Neill’s father ferried in rounds of Guinness from the pub next door. A young man spoke of health struggles, and beautifully sang “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Corkonian legend John Spillane, a national treasure who is something of Ireland’s John Prine, reprised an earlier onstage duet with O’Neill on his aching “Passage West,” then laid into the raucous WWI lament “Salonika,” with hearty accompaniment from the novelist Patrick McCabe, a friend and fan of O’Neill’s who came in for the show.And on it went until sometime after 3 a.m., when the holdouts finally called it a night. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Quiet Girl,’ an Oscar Contender, Explores Irish Loneliness

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      The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, directed by Colm Bairéad, tells a gentle story of cultural reticence.This article contains spoilers for the film “The Quiet Girl.”For the first 55 minutes of “The Quiet Girl,” the film’s audience does not know why the titular child has been sent to live with strangers in the Irish countryside. Cáit (Catherine Clinch), 9, does not know either. Her parents do not talk to her, and they barely speak to each other.Cáit eventually learns the truth from a nosy neighbor: While her parents prepare for the birth of yet another baby, she has been shuttled from her chaotic family home to spend the summer with some middle-aged relatives, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett), who have their own silent sorrow.This uneasy, unanswered isolation is at the heart of “The Quiet Girl,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday, and is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar. A “hushed work about kith and kindness,” as Lisa Kennedy wrote in her review for The New York Times, the film tells a quintessentially Irish story, yet one that is rarely seen by international audiences on the big screen.Irish cinema often features a cast of gregarious men and pious, conservative women, like in Ken Loach’s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”; “Brooklyn,” starring Saoirse Ronan; and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated “Belfast.”“Irish people are always known for the gift of the gab,” said Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl.” “It becomes almost a caricature.” But in Chrualaoí’s film, Cáit and her new guardians cautiously try to connect through their loneliness and pain.When Cáit (Clinch), left, and Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) first meet, Cáit is slow to warm to her elder relative.Super, via Associated PressThe depiction of such struggles to communicate has resonated deeply with Irish audiences. The feature — called “An Cailín Ciúin” in Ireland — was named the best film of 2022 by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle, and screenings in the country have regularly left viewers in tears.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.For Colm Bairéad, the film’s director, miscommunication is at the heart of both “The Quiet Girl” and its source material, Claire Keegan’s novella “Foster.”“So much of it is under the surface,” he said in a recent video interview, noting that Keegan’s prose was able to capture an Irish inability to open up. “There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” he added.Irish people “don’t talk about our feelings in the way other cultures do,” said Siobhan O’Neill, a professor at the University of Ulster, whose work focuses on intergenerational trauma. “People who are traumatized,” she added, “don’t want to talk about it.”In both Cáit’s fictional childhood — set in the ’80s, in the countryside — and my own, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the two subsequent decades, the effects of the historically religious and conservative society hung in the air. Like Cáit, as a child I attended wakes and was aware of the way gossip moves in small communities.This social history had wider implications: I was 4 when the last “Magdalene laundry” — abject institutions usually run by the Catholic Church where thousands of women worked without pay — closed. Like many children of the “cease-fire baby” generation, born just before the end of the Troubles, I struggled to communicate with my parents through an atmosphere of generalized anxiety.The same intergenerational malaise permeates “The Quiet Girl.” While most of the film’s dialogue is in Irish, Cáit’s cold father (Michael Patric) is the only character who speaks exclusively in English, reflecting the distance between him and Cáit.The film’s preference for Irish dialogue has been widely praised in Ireland, as a wider so-called Celtic revival across music, politics and fashion has recently been celebrating the language. Less than 2 percent of the Irish population speaks the country’s native language on a daily basis, but recent Irish-language interviews from Paul Mescal and Brendan Gleeson on the red carpet at the British Academy Film Awards attracted much attention online, including Mescal’s praise for “The Quiet Girl.”When Bairéad, who has raised his children with Ní Chrualaoí speaking Irish at home, read “Foster,” in 2018, he said he knew he wanted to make it an Irish-language film. The book could “be an authentic Irish-language story,” he said. “We weren’t forcing the language into a scenario.”“There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” said Colm Bairéad of his film “The Quiet Girl.” Nacho Gallego/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the time, he and Ní Chrualaoí were expecting their second child, and both felt drawn to Cáit’s aching loneliness, Bairéad said. In the film, the absence of Cáit’s world unfolds in slow, dreamy glimpses rather than via dialogue: a glove box filled with cigarettes, a child sitting alone in the bath. The pair were also aware, Bairéad said, of how rarely figures like Cáit were the protagonists in Irish stories.“There’s been a tendency in our cinema to pander to something that’s expected of us,” Bairéad said. But a recent wave of Irish films feel “very sure of themselves in terms of their identity,” he added. “They’re coming from the inside out, rather than the outside in.”These films include the fellow Oscar contender “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in which Colm’s (Brendan Gleeson) ennui becomes a self-destructive determination to create a musical legacy. In the 2022 film “The Wonder,” the protagonist’s inability to speak about girlhood sexual abuse is transformed into a belief that God is speaking through her body.In “The Quiet Girl,” we see Cáit grow from a lonely little girl to a more confident and open child. The film tackles the effect of societal traumas, O’Neill said, by addressing what goes “deeper than words,” and how comfort, sometimes, has to come from somewhere other than talking.With words still scarce, Cáit finds comfort in the softness of Eibhlín’s touch, and her discovery — thanks to Seán — of the joy of movement. Although verbal expressions of emotion might continue to be culturally difficult for Cáit and for those around her, in the film’s powerful final moments, we see the child running, silently, toward love. More