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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

My great-great-great-aunt, Sarah Purser, portraitist, landscape artist, and leading light (no pun) in the Irish stained glass industry revival, once made a well-known painting of these sisters.

According to John O’Grady’s monograph, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser, this double portrait was commissioned by ‘enlightened resident landlord [and] amateur Arctic explorer’ Sir Henry and his wife Lady Georgina Gore-Booth, of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, in about 1882, when the sisters were roughly 14 (Constance) and 12 (Eva). It is approximately life size, and in its style and setting (a beech grove, apparently) it is thought ‘boldly unconventional’ for the Ireland of the time – and it is credited, writes Elizabeth Coxhead in Daughters of Erin, with being ‘one of the two pictures which put [Purser] on the road to success’.

The original ‘Constance and Eva Gore-Booth’ is displayed at Lissadell House to this day, where it’s available to members of the public in the summer. I must admit I’m not in love with it; if anything, I’d say it’s most remarkable for the fact that it betrays – and fair enough – nothing at all of the hard-line, gun-toting political activist that Constance Gore-Booth/Markievicz was to become. That said, a few years later Constance went to study painting with a friend of Purser’s, and progressed, from there, to the French Académie Julian, where – fatefully? – she met Count Casimir…

No inconsiderable lady in her own right, Sarah Purser (1848-1943) was born into a financially-unstable offshoot of the Guinness-brewing Purser clan. Taking her future in her own hands, she set off to train in Paris (on ‘a pound a week’), and was exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts by the age of 23. Three years later the Royal Dublin Society awarded her a certificate for still lifes, and before long she was elected an Honorary Academician of the RHA, whose first female full member she eventually became in 1924.

She founded the An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) stained glass cooperative in 1903, which she then ran for almost 40 years. She helped establish Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and develop the National Gallery of Ireland, where various of her portraits (and much stained glass produced under her sponsorship) now, quite properly, reside.

Often referred to in the same breath as Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, and other notable women of the era (and indeed Eire), Purser moved in very much the same cultural circles – minus the Catholicism part; she being of Huguenot descent – and went on to paint all of the aforementioned (including Constance several times again), as well as luminaries like WB Yeats, Roger Casement, Douglas Hyde and Brendan Behan’s mother, Kathleen Kearney (‘The blue hat’. (It was Behan’s grandmother, NB, who famously took her bath ‘every year, whether she was dirty or not’)). Her continued friendship with the Gore-Booths was particularly helpful, work-wise. She once remarked that she “went through the British aristocracy like the measles.”

Now and then, the increasingly ‘indomitable’ Purser was herself sketched and painted, among others by John Butler Yeats, WB and Jack’s father. JB’s somewhat beaky portrait especially seems to reflect not some head-in-the-clouds romantic artiste but a professional arts-and-crafts intellectual whose income, for the most part, came through her quite astute investments – in particular, in Guinness. Her large home, Mespil House, on Dublin’s Grand Canal, became, in John O’Grady’s words, ‘a salon frequented by writers, politicians, visionaries and revolutionaries.’

One contemporary describes this scene as ‘full of bubbling gaiety’, and Coxhead claims that Purser’s later portraits were ‘not done for money, but for love of good talk and good company.’ This may be true; but the family remembers her as something of a fierce old stick (‘not notoriously a cuddly creature’ was, I think, my father’s summary), who once threw out a burglar just by talking at him, and who, aged 89, demanded to be taken up by Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) in his private plane, to inspect the house roof, then wrote complaining to her landlord – to be informed, rather politely, that her lease had actually expired a decade previous.

Artistically, though, she’d become most definitely someone to be reckoned with. She was wont to give her sitters ‘a few scoldings and home-truths’ along with their likenesses; she objected strongly to Catholic bishops having their official portraits done in Rome, not locally; she once gave Yeats an earful for suggesting one of her artists’ windows was derived from an old German print; and in the last week of her life she wrote in fury to the President of Ireland (a former sitter) to excoriate him for the ‘bad art’ on a recent postage stamp.

With her caustic wit and enthusiasm for ‘discussion’ to the fore, and her personal network of poets, painters, politicians, and the occasional heavyweight boxing champion all around her, on the second Tuesday of every month, regular, she hosted, presided over, held forth, and generally tried to bend all aspects of the Irish national culture to her will. For thirty years her soirées were widely considered to be unmissable – if only in the sense that half the guests came primarily out of fear of what might well be said about them in their absence. It was not for nothing these ‘at homes’ became known to Dublin wags as Sarah Purser’s ‘dies irae’.

Still fuming at the business of the ugly stamp, she died on August 7th, 1943. Her funeral, her friends were not too grieved to note, was on the second Tuesday of the month.

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 28 1906
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‘Facetious’ is the shortest word in the English language including all the vowels in alphabetical order.

The English theatre loves the joker.

Samuel Beckett notched up 35 runs in first-class cricket.

UK funeral directors are fuming because people found something out.

The Republic lives with its face uncovered.

Men working in the fields sing pentatonic tunes.

American biscuits are in fact scones.

A boatman has taken 99 mackerel in three hours by whiffling.

2.8 million viewers tuned in to find out who shot JR Ewing.

Torture in Uzbekistan is institutionalised, systematic and rampant.

Ross Brown is now active.

Californium 252 costs $30,000,000 a gram.

Storm’s a-coming.
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He published, among other works:

The Dramatic Censor, No. 1;
Sylla, a dramatic entertainment, from the French of Frederick II of Prussia;
A Voyage from the Moon, from the French of Cyrano de Bergerac;
Memoirs of the Count de Beauval, from the French of D’Argens;
The Third Satire of Juvenal, translated into English verse;
A View of the Stage;
The Battle of Lora, a poem, from Ossian;
Dryden’s Works, with a Life and Notes;
A Poetical Dictionary (4 vols.);
A Collection of Voyages (2 vols.);
Letters written from Leverpoole, Chester, Corke (2 vols.);
Derrick’s Jests – or, The Wit’s Chronicle;
and a novel narrated mostly by the ghost of William Shakespeare.

He is remembered for being the author of a directory of prostitutes.

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The Betty Nansen Teatret’s Mozart Undone features six singers and five instrumentalists in a two-hour ‘freewheeling musical deconstruction’ of 20 of Mozart’s most recognisable melodies – or what Nikolaj Cederholm would call ‘hits’. Formerly-recognisable, anyway. These ‘hits’ have been, according to the show’s garrulous and inimitable press release, ‘re-imagined and re-engineered into a wild synthesis of ancient and modern genres’ involving such (neo?-)classical touchstones as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mumford & Sons, and – deep breath – Dolly Parton.

The players come nominally dressed as characters from The Magic Flute – plus Don Giovanni (naturally) – but with only half a dozen of them, each playing numerous ‘roles’, there are never-ending on-stage costume-changes, and no shortage of off-stage antics (we will say nothing of the poor girl charged with inserting microphones into condoms…). The costumes themselves, however, seem influenced less by the fashions of Mozart’s own era than, say, the aesthetics of a Stanley Kubrick production, with a dash of Lady Gaga thrown in for good measure – the net result roughly approximating, perhaps, the opium-befuddled nightmares of an overwrought Mozart scholar. In many respects, it’s not a million miles away from Amadeus. Except that – ahem – there is no actual narrative to speak of. What there is, is a lot of water. Bloody gallons of the stuff.

This entire thing probably has to be seen to be believed – a kind of full-on (and slightly inevitable) ‘Cirque du Gubbay’. But doubters be warned: the company’s Beethoven show had Darwin, Turner, and Nelson Mandela in it. And that ran for months. In Norway.

So, what is a ‘theatre concert’? You have to run to keep up with Cederholm’s comically relentless enthusiasm for his work (think Adrian Edmondon’s Red Baron in Blackadder), but the rough explanation goes something like this:

‘Theatre and music are very old colleagues. But the musical, vaudeville, opera – these are not the ancestors of the theatre concert: they are its cousins. The theatre concert is a real hybrid: music and theatre as equals!

‘In Copenhagen, in the Nineties, we wanted to do musicals; but there was a dissatisfaction with the way that musicals were done – the music was always serving a secondary role. You know when the story calls for a song about someone finding a letter on a mantelpiece… and it’s always a bad song! And there’s always that certain style of singing. Rock concerts, also, had these Old Testament-style rituals: “Good evening, London!” And they had a very low dynamic. In the first quarter of an hour they had shown you everything they had to offer: lighting, playing, singing.

‘So our first show was Gasoline, about ‘The Rolling Stones of Denmark’, and we took an interpretation of their work – as when a theatre does Shakespeare or Chekhov. The only difference is we can hear how the Beatles were supposed to sound. We had the boldness to say, “It doesn’t matter: a song can mean a lot of things.” We interpret not only through the music but also through the rituals, the costumes, the dramas. It’s very rich. You cannot necessarily get everything from seeing it only once.’

Cederholm, it seems, is constitutionally incapable of resisting a challenge. Having subsequently pulled off theatre concerts on Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and the Beatles (twice), he thought ‘Why don’t we do a classical composer?’ Why not, indeed. But between the mischievous mentions of ‘electro-Irish, punk, and power ballad’ influences, and the programme credits for ‘Music Directors and Producers’ (Jens and Peter Hellemann) and ‘Songs written by’ (Neill Cardinal Furio), an obvious question arises: what really remains of Mozart once he’s done being undone?

Cederholm doesn’t falter: ‘The basic notes.’ But his aim is not to put on a note-for-note concert of Mozart’s music so much as to recreate the antic spirit of, say, Die Zauberflöte’s original Freihaus performances. ‘We just took the music that we could talk with,’ then ‘we tried to make the lyrics about important issues today that would fit…’

To wit, as played over (a piece formerly known as) a piano concerto: ‘Where is my target? / Where is my drone? / The cruel insurgency / I track on my phone.’

Your call. As I said, there’s no storyline. ‘This is not about Mozart, certainly. But if you want to make connections, you are free to do that for yourself.’

Traditionalists will argue that the end product is less Mozart being re-worked than Mozart being worked over. At best, it’s Mozart being sampled (remember the Lloyd Webbers vs Paganini, back in the day? That. Only more so). But Cederholm is unbothered. In fact, he’s far more concerned about people turning away from it because it’s ‘Mozart’.

‘Is it for Mozart-lovers? Maybe… if you are an open-minded Mozart-lover!’ But not liking Mozart is not a reason not to go, either. ‘The years gone since Mozart composed have added to the significance of his music,’ he says, with heavy ambivalence. ‘Same as with The Beatles, Mozart produced some of the greatest hits – part of our understanding of what Music should sound like. He’s a big hit-maker: in the cinema, in the supermarket… So the audience come with their luggage; but the most exciting thing is people don’t know what it is they are going to experience.’

The whole performance, not so incidentally, is in English. ‘Mozart was German but wrote in Italian, the language of opera. English is the language of pop music, and we want to reach out to an audience everywhere.’

And that audience is…? ‘It’s a lot of people who would rather go to the movies. But also traditional theatre-goers, who find the energy very satisfying. It’s a family form. It’s for everybody who loves a good show!’

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For Sinfini Music. Published/edited version here.

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For theartsdesk

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For theartsdesk

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For theartsdesk

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For theartsdesk