December
2009: Interview with Cherwell
 by Finola Austin | , Mon 28 December 2009
Sitting in Belfast's first (deserted) Argentine
café on a cold Friday morning just before Christmas, I wonder
what to expect of Lucy Caldwell - the playwright whose rather
impressive résumé I have been studying for a couple of weeks.
Caldwell has two full-length, three short and two radio plays
to her name, among them Leaves, which was awarded the 2006 George
Devine Award and short-listed for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
She also wrote a Dylan Thomas Prize and Waverton Good Read short-listed
novel as well as a novella, short stories and articles for The
Independent. This is no mean feat, especially for a person still
in their twenties. (read
more)
November 2009: "The Furthest Distance"
Lucy Caldwell's novella, The Furthest Distance,
was published on 27th November 2009 by Netherlea Press, the first
in a series of novellas written about journeys within
Ireland.
Publisher's Description
Summer 1978, and five-year-old Brooklyn is on her first trip
to Northern Ireland. Her daddy’s happy to be going home. Her
mommy’s not: she’s dreading going back to the place she’s tried
her whole life to leave behind. The one thing they agree on is
that the train journey from Belfast to Derry is the most beautiful
you’ll ever make. Just past Castlerock the train thunders between
cliff and rocky shore and waves break right up against the tracks.
The long journey is almost worth it for those moments alone,
they tell her. But for Brooklyn, destined to spend intermittent
summers travelling the same route with her mother’s frustrated
feminism and her father’s unfulfilled dreams for stardom, the
point of a journey is simply its destination. Until the day when
a brief encounter sends her own life in a new direction…
The Furthest Distance is a sad, funny, moving
meditation on the journeys we make and on how, finally, the furthest
distances we travel are those between people.
October 27: "Girl from Mars" wins the
2009 Richard Imison Award
 Lucy Caldwell's radio play Girl
from Mars last
night won the Imison Award which perpetuates the memory of Richard
Imison who devoted his entire career to radio drama
and to developing new talent. He discovered dramatists such as
Tom Stoppard, and encouraged Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Samuel
Beckett, and Alexander Gelman to write for the genre.
Award the 2009 prize to "Girl
from Mars", the
judges said:
"This is a gripping and powerful depiction of
the effect on a family when one sibling goes missing. The beautifully-told
story begins when a body is found and the remaining daughter
returns to be with her family while they await identification.
Girl From Mars is moving and emotionally taut. It veers away
from sentimentality and felt personal and believable. The structure
is complex - combining three different timescales - and uses
radio to its full potential, using many techniques including
voice-overs, dialogue, text messages, and voice mail. The story
has a shades-of-grey resolution about the way a person's life
can tragically stop short - and this is echoed in he subtle way
the writer ends her own play too."
To
listen to "Girl from Mars", Click Here
September
2009: "Guardians" at Irish Rep Theatre
On Friday, September 18, 2009, 3:00 pm there
will be a reading of Guardians by
Lucy Caldwell at The Irish Repertory Theatre, which as part of
its mission statement, “encourages
the development of new works focusing on the Irish and Irish
American experience, as well as a range of other cultures.”
The reading is directed by Kara Manning; the
part of Molly will be read by Susan Louise O'Connor and the part
of Conor will be read by Lucas Near-Verbrugghe.
The Irish Repertory Theatre is at
132 West 22nd
Street
(between 6th and 7th Avenues)
New York City
Admission to
the event is FREE. RSVP to (212) 727-2737
In Guardians,
bright twenty-somethings Molly and Connor have been married for
a year. Forced to relocate to Conor’s family home in Belfast,
their love and understanding of each other is brought irretrievably
into question. Caldwell explores what happens when our expectations
come up against reality, and how easily it is to miss our step. (more
info)
September
2009: "The Luthier" (Off Broadway)
Spinning the Times
When a Palestinian luthier, a London songwriter, a time traveler,
a troubled teen and a New Yorker dream of music, escape and home,
they are drawn together by the global media, even as their communities
and lives are shattered by the events it depicts.
The best of [the plays]
is “The Luthier” by Lucy Caldwell,
about a Palestinian youth who is learning to repair violins.
Ethan Hova gives a beautiful performance
New York Times
Fugue and The
Luthier tread ground that has been
covered before, but both are nonetheless rich in their humanity.
… Ethan Hova stars in The Luthier,
as a Palestinian man trying to carve out a peaceful life in a
world that refuses to yield to his nature. A luthier is an artisan
who repairs violins; Dawood dreams of practicing his craft in
the U.S. as he remembers pivotal, tragic moments from his past
here in Gaza. Both David and Dawood are refugees because of ancient
hatreds afflicting their homelands; from their circumstances
can we learn compassion for problems that, here in America, always
seem so far away?
NYTheatre.com
The Luthier, by
Lucy Caldwell, takes us to Palestine where Dawood (Ethan Hova)
fixes violins. "Except for fire,
there is no damage which cannot be repaired," he says. While
he may be able one day to save violins, Dawood cannot restore
the damage the persistent bombings have wreaked on his friends
and family. It is a portrait of senseless violence and innocence
destroyed, and Hova's understated performance is heartfelt and
sweet, even in the face of horrific destruction.
TheatreMania.com
The Luthier premiered as part of Spinning
the Times, a tapestry woven by five
acclaimed Irish playwrights who together from news stories
in the New York press. The production, by Origin
Theatre Company, is part of the New York 1st
Irish Festival .
August
2009: The Fairy's Curse (BBC Radio 3)
As
part of the BBC Radio 3 series Twenty
Minutes,
Lucy Caldwell
delved into the fantasy world of fairy tales in a progamme
titled The Fairy's Curse broadcast
on August 10, to coincide
with the performance of Igor Stravinsky's The
Fairy's Kiss at
the 2009 BBC Proms.
July
2009: The John Hewitt Summer School
 Lucy
Caldwell will be taking part in this year's
John Hewitt Summer School,
which runs from 27 July and Friday 31 July. Lucy will be giving
playwriting workshops and doing a reading from some new work
alongside acclaimed poet Leontia Flynn.
Now well into its third decade, the John Hewitt International
Summer School returns for the seventh year to the Market Place
Theatre & Arts Centre in
Armagh, the ‘City of Saints and Scholars’.
Between Monday 27 July and Friday 31 July, the School will address
the theme, ‘Unfettered thought: belief
in the future?’, an idea
inspired by these lines from Hewitt’s poem, The
Glens:
I fear their creed as we have always feared
the lifted hand against unfettered thought.
I know their savage history of wrong and would at moments lend
an eager voice,
if voice avail, to set that tally straight.
For more information on the Summer School, click
here.
"Girl from Mars" shortlisted for
2009n Richard Imson Award
"Girl from Mars",
Lucy Caldwell's award-winning play has been short-listed for
the 2009 Richard
Imison Award.
The award, now in its fifteenth year, perpetuates the memory
of Richard Imison to acknowledge the encouragement he gave to
writers working in the medium of radio, and in memory of the
support and friendship he invariably offered writers in general,
and radio writers in particular. It is administered and judged
by the Society of Authors.
The presentation of the awards, by Mike
Hodges,
will take place on the evening of 27th October at the British
Academy, London. Plays will be rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3, 4
and 7 and will be available from the BBC website 7 days on-demand.
To
listen to the play, Click Here
"Avenues of Eternal Peace" - June 2009
Lucy Caldwell's "Avenues
of Eternal Peace" - the Afternoon Play on BBC
Radio 4, on 4 June 2009 - focussed on the horrific events
in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Student
couple Kai-Liang and Chang Li join the Tiananmen Square protests,
where their passions and ideas are put to the ultimate test.
Avenues
of Eternal Peace was chosen as a 'Pick
of the Week' on Radio 4,
"Guardians" - May
2009
"Guardians" review
by Michael Billington ( Guardian, 5 May 2009)
4 stars
The
Cut, Halesworth
Now in its third year, the High Tide festival is based in the
small Suffolk town of Halesworth and exists primarily to promote
new writing. It has already notched up a big success with the
London transfer of Adam Brace's Stovepipe. Having seen two of
the three plays on show this year, I would confidently predict
an afterlife for Lucy Caldwell's Guardians: the second in a Belfast
trilogy that began with Leaves, seen at the Royal Court in 2007.
Caldwell's gift is for exploring the texture of domestic unhappiness.
In Leaves, she dealt with the impact on a middle-class family
of their daughter's aborted suicide. Here, she shows how young
love can go disastrously wrong. Molly is an American doing a
thesis on post-conflict societies, and Conor is a Belfast-born
law student. Having met and married hastily in Indiana, they
come to Northern Ireland to house-sit for a year in Conor's parental
home. Although they seem very much in love, rifts soon appear:
Molly feels an outsider in Belfast and finds her academic work
blocked, while Conor is unable to cope with Molly's idealised
vision of him as a talented musician. Within a few months they
part, apparently irrevocably.
What Caldwell understands very well, in a manner reminiscent
of Rattigan, is the inequality of passion: Molly simply has a
capacity for love more profound than that of her young husband.
While the theme may not be startlingly original, Caldwell invests
it with a wealth of enlivening detail. Denied a family wedding
herself, Sonya Cassidy's wonderfully touching Molly sits alone
desolately watching home movies of other people's nuptials. There
is something equally poignant about the admission of Andrew Simpson's
law-obsessed Conor that he is not as interesting as his wife
once thought.
Caldwell may be a miniaturist, but she writes with real power
about lost love and, although I found Natalie Abrahami's production
sombrely underlit, I was much moved.
Full
Guardian Review High
Tide Festival
French première of "Leaves" by the
Theâtre des Lucioles
"Feuilles",
Séverine Magois's translation of Lucy Caldwell's
award-winnning play "Leaves",
directed by Mélanie Leray for Theâtre
des Lucioles premièred at the Théâtre National de
Bretagne in Rennes on February 26, where it will run from 3-13
March 2009, starring
David Jeanne-Comello and Valérie Schwarcz. The translation, by
Séverine Magois (who won a Molière in 2005 for her translation
of The Browning
Version) has been published by Les
Editions théâtrales with the support of the Centre national
du livre
 Photographs
from "Feuilles"
Christian Berthelot's
photographs of the French production of Lucy Caldwell's "Leaves"
Click
here for more
Girl from Mars wins Irish Writer's Guild Award
Girl from Mars,
Lucy Calwell's radio play, (broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in
June 2008), has won the Irish
Writers' Guild Award (known as a "ZeBBie", named
in honour of O. Z. Whitehead, to acknowledge the best script(s)
written by Irish playwrights and screenwriters during the previous
year.) for Best Radio Script. For more details about the award
and the shortlist, click
here.
To
listen to the play, Click Here |
