The Works Presents

In the first programme, John goes to London to talk to Irish playwright Enda Walsh, whose opera The Last Hotel, co-written with Donnacha Dennehy, is about to open at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Walsh talks about growing up in north Dublin in the 1970s and 80s, about being taught by Roddy Doyle, and about the highlights of his stage career from his first hit, Disco Pigs, in 1996, which gave a young Cillian Murphy his first major acting role, to the most recent, Ballyturk, which starred Murphy, Stephen Rea and Mikel Murfi. Walsh has also written for film – he penned the screenplay for Hunger (2008), in which Michael Fassbender played Bobby Sands – and he won a Tony for Best Book of a Musical for Once in 2012. Walsh is currently co-writing a musical with David Bowie, due to open in New York in November. Based on The Man Who Fell To Earth, Lazarus asks the question where would Thomas Jerome Newton – the character Bowie famously played in the 1976 film – be now?

John meets performance artist Amanda Coogan, whose new exhibition, I’ll sing you a song from around the town, is now on at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. Coogan talks about growing up in Tallaght, Dublin in the 1970s and 80s, as the oldest child of deaf parents, in a home that was at the heart of a wider vibrant deaf community.

Singer/songwriter Glen Hansard tells John Kelly about 25 years of The Frames, his new solo album and how it all began with a headmaster who told him to quit school early and pursue his love of music. Glen looks back on his teenage years busking on the streets of Dublin, meeting other musicians such as Kíla and Mic Christopher, as well as forming the Frames and the group’s early influences. ‘The Waterboys was the main reason why the Frames became a band.’ Glen opens up about life as a musician and, of course, playing a musician on-screen – first in 1991 in Alan Parker’s film The Commitments and in 2006 in John Carney’s musical Once – not to mention his Oscar win for the song Falling Slowly.

This week, John talks to New York composer Philip Glass, who published his acclaimed memoir Words Without Music earlier this year. Philip Glass grew up in a secular Jewish family in 1930s/40s Baltimore, Maryland where his father owned a record store and would bring home the records that didn’t sell and listen to them. In this way, Philip got an early education in classical greats such as Bartok and Stravinsky. In 1952, at the age of 15, he went to university in Chicago to study maths and philosophy and was exposed to a jazz and blues scene second to none at that time – Charlie Parker, for one, was a regular on the circuit. He went on to study at the world-famous Juilliard School of Music in New York and then with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar in Paris. Back in New York in the 1960s, early works by Philip Glass marked him out as an innovator (in the company of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and others), and changed the grammar of modern classical music. The opera Einstein on the Beach was his first major success in 1976 but he worked as a furniture removals guy and a New York taxi driver (Dali was one passenger) until he was 41 to fund his composing. Now 78, Glass is as prolific and as much in demand as ever. The breadth of his work is highlighted in the range of people he has worked with from Samuel Beckett to Woody Allen, and Paul Simon, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.

John goes to Barcelona to talk to the visual artist Sean Scully, who has celebrated his 70th birthday this year with some 15 exhibitions worldwide. Born in Inchicore, Dublin, in 1945, Scully grew up in Dublin and London. He now lives in New York and also spends time at his studios in Germany and Spain. One of Ireland’s leading painters, Scully is best known for his abstract paintings, his use of a signature grid of vertical and horizontal lines. This year alone, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale for the first time and he became the first Western artist to have a major retrospective in China. He has also been the subject of three shows in Ireland, at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, the Kerlin, Dublin and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Scully has also been working on one of the more unusual commissions of his long career, from the Benedictine monks at the famous monastery of Montserrat, near Barcelona, who asked him to create a permanent exhibition at their 10th century chapel, Church of Santa Cecilia. This is an honour accorded to few artists and sees Scully following in the footsteps such as Rothko and Matisse, with their chapels in Houston, Texas, and Vence, French Riviera respectively. The new work at the Church of Santa Cecilia opened in June 2015.

Author Kevin Barry has published three award-winning books since 2007, two short story collections, There Are Little Kingdoms, and Dark Lies the Island, and one novel, The City of Bohane. His exuberant fiction is full of twisted, shape-shifting trickster types, and runs the full range in tone from dark comedy to outright horror. At home in Sligo, he talks to John Kelly about his new novel Beatlebone – his first attempt at historical fiction, he says – in which a crisis-ridden John Lennon tries to get to his island off Clew Bay, in Mayo in 1978. He also tells John about his first-ever short story, written in the aftermath of another kind of trauma.

From his screen debut as Pat Barry in RTE’s The Riordans in 1978, actor Gabriel Byrne has gone on to conquer Hollywood and indie films in the US, win awards for his stage work on Broadway, and return to TV screens in recent times with hit series such as HBO’s In Treatment and, on Irish TV screens, to star in Vikings and as Quirke, John Banville’s pathologist detective in 1950s Dublin. He talks to John Kelly about why it’s harder than ever to make indie films now in the US, the pull of TV (it’s where the writers are) and stage fright. He also reminisces about the early fame of Irish TV dramas, The Riordans and Bracken – ‘Surreal is a word I would use’ – and working with legends like Robert Mitchum: ‘chain-smoking and incredibly well-read and talking to me about Máirtín Ó Direáin.’ Currently working in the UK on the film Lies We Tell, which also stars Harvey Keitel and Gina McKee, Gabriel Byrne also talks about the challenges and excitement of his next major Broadway role, as James Tyrone, Eugene O’Neill’s iconic patriarch, in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2016, playing opposite Jessica Lange as his morphine-addicted wife Mary.

This week, John Kelly goes to New York to talk to singer/songwriter Elvis Costello, aka Declan Patrick MacManus, about his new memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink. It’s almost 40 years since Elvis Costello released his first album My Aim Is True. Since those early punk and new wave roots, he has written a stream of unforgettable hits including Oliver’s Army and Watching the Detectives, and explored many other music genres, collaborating with Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney and the Brodsky Quartet along the way. The memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink looks back on a remarkable life in music, and a serious lineage in the music business, a heritage that comes from county Tyrone originally. His father Ross (who considered himself Irish even though he never lived here) was a jazz musician who sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra and played the same bill at the London Palladium as the Beatles in 1963, while his grandfather Pat was a World War 1 veteran and a trumpet player on the famous White Star Line ships in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jennifer Johnston published her award-winning first novel, The Captains and the Kings, in 1972. She was 42. Making up for what might have looked like a late start, she has written 17 novels since – including her most famous, How Many Miles To Babylon, in 1974 – as well as several plays and short stories. A new novel Naming the Stars is published on e-book this month and in print in 2016. Her fiction charts the crisscrossing of private lives and public events the length and breadth of 20th century Ireland, unearthing flawed characters and family secrets, often in the Big House, often against a backdrop of war. Jennifer Johnston tells John Kelly about growing up in a well-known Dublin family – her father was the playwright Denis Johnston and her mother the actor and producer Shelah Richards – and about living in Derry since the 1970s until recently, writing with bombs going off around her and at one time working with paramilitary prisoners on both sides.

In the final programme this series, John meets performance artist Marina Abramovic at her home in New York. Marina Abramovic was born in 1946 in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, the daughter of Communist partisans and national heroes, soldiers who were also prominent members of General Tito’s new post-war government. Abramovic would go on to forge her own uncompromising cause in performance art – first to great scandal in her still Communist hometown, then in a more liberal Amsterdam in the 1970s, and finally in New York where she is something of a superstar. Her work in the 1960s and 70s, in common with a lot of performance art of the time, saw her test her body and her audience to extremes. Famous early works include Rhythm O, in 1974, in which she offered the public 72 items – from a lipstick to a gun – to use on her body, an invitation of which they took full advantage for good and ill.