Professor Frank McGuinness"Bloomsday Centenary Public Lecture Series" . UCD. Retrieved on 3 June 2004. (born 1953) is an Irish writer. As well as his own plays, which include The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and Dolly West's Kitchen, he is recognised for a "strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Garcia Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim". He has also published six collections of poetry, and two novels. McGuinness was Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD) from 2007 to 2018.
Biography McGuinness was born in Buncrana, a town located on the Inishowen Peninsula of County Donegal, Ireland. He was educated locally and at University College Dublin, where he studied Pure English and medieval studies to postgraduate level.
He first came to prominence with his play The Factory Girls, but established his reputation with his play about World War I, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which was staged in Dublin's Abbey Theatre and internationally. The play made a name for him when it was performed at Hampstead Theatre, drawing comments about McGuinness's Irish Catholic background.Maxwell, Dominic. "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at Hampstead Theatre, NW3" . The Times. Retrieved on 25 June 2009. It won numerous awards including the London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright for McGuinness and the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. He has also written new versions of classic dramas, including works by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Euripides, adapting the literal translations of others.Higgins, Charlotte. "Frank McGuinness: 'I'm not entirely respectable. I couldn't be'" . The Guardian. Retrieved on 18 October 2008. In addition, he wrote the screenplay for the film Dancing at Lughnasa, adapting the stage play by fellow Ulsterman Brian Friel.
McGuinness's first poetry anthology, Booterstown, was published in 1994. Several of his poems have been recorded by Marianne Faithfull, including Electra, After the Ceasefire and The Wedding.
McGuinness previously lectured in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Ulster, Medieval Studies at University College, Dublin and English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Then he was a writer-in-residence lecturing at University College Dublin before being appointed Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film there."McGuinness named Professor of Creative Writing at UCD" . UCD. Retrieved 22 June 2007.
Original plays Frank McGuinness has explained, "My earliest writing was … song lyrics. I would have loved to have been … Paul McCartney … Joni Mitchell". Desiring to write something "substantial", however, he "tossed a coin" between a play and a novel, and decided to write a play. The Glass God, a one-act play written by McGuinness for the company Platform Group Theatre, was premiered at the Lourdes Hall Theatre in Dublin in 1982. It was one of three one-act plays presented under the collective title of Shrapnel.
McGuinness' first full-length play, The Factory Girls, also premiered in 1982, and dealt with a group of female workers facing redundancy from a small town in Donegal. McGuinness explained that he was inspired by "the women in my family"."Playwrights in Profile: Frank McGuinness" (RTĒ Radio, 2013) A critic has highlighted its "Wednesday to Sunday time frame", in a link to Catholic imagery which, surprisingly given its theme, indicates that this is in fact "a passion play". "When I wrote 'The Factory Girls'," McGuiness has explained, "I desperately wanted to bring across the audience a sense that I came from a sophisticated background, [because] I come from a background where language is very dangerous, where language is very layered."
McGuinness' second play, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, was first staged in 1985. The play, about a group of Protestant soldiers in the First World War, was not primarily political in intent, but, according to the playwright, was originally inspired by "a great story". Observe the Sons of Ulster has been described as "a theater of ghosts", a play where "a community is figured as spectral".Tom Herron, Dead Men Talking: Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme Éire-Ireland. Vol 39: 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2004): 136-62.
The play which followed, Innocence, dealt with the painter Caravaggio. It took its name from one of his paintings, The Sacrifice of Isaak, about the Biblical story of the father whose faith is tested by God's request that he kill his son. In the painting, a sheep watches the sacrifice about to take place and looks appalled at human cruelty, its innocence shattered. McGuinness was inspired by "this innocent sheep" who, at the end of the story, will be sacrificed instead of the child. "Only Caravaggio would remember the sheep" in the story, McGuinness says.
His next play, Carthaginians, premiered in 1989, was concerned with the Bloody Sunday events in Northern Ireland. In 1972, in Derry, British soldiers shot unarmed civilians who were taking part in a march against internment and killed 14 people. McGuinness has described Carthaginians as "My play on the Catholic imagination …", stating that "the keyword in [the play] is the word 'perhaps'". It has been claimed that Carthaginians should be placed primarily "within a body of translations and adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy in the Irish theatre of the 1980s and 1990s"."Review of Carthaginians" [at Millenium Forum, Derry, 2012, Directed by Adrian Dunbar] Liza Fitzhpatrick. 23 February 2015. A number of critics have suggested that Ibsen is the main influence in the plays of McGuinness, something corroborated by the writer himself, who has also explained that "... there is of course another influence, that of Shakespeare...". It was this influence that triggered the composition of Carthaginians and "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme". In the author's own words: "I decided, right, let's grab the unicorn by the horn, and see what happens". McGuinness has declared that he had "wanted to construct a five-act Shakespearean play", and to use "narrative in a way that I hope no one had done before". He has described the play as "a big brute", adding that, among his works to date, "I suspect 'this play will last'".
Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, first staged in 1992, is a play about the 1986 Lebanon hostage crisis. It is in effect a tragi-comedy which explores the relationship between three hostages, one American, one Irish and one English. Despite their contrasting backgrounds and beliefs the play soon erodes away their differences and brings to the fore the shared humanity that they rely on in order to cope with the horrors and uncertainties of their incarceration. In his introduction to Frank McGuinness: Plays 2 (a collection of plays which included Mary and Lizzie, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, Dolly West's Kitchen and The Bird Sanctuary) McGuinness explains, "At their hearts' core these plays centre around rituals and the need to disrupt ritual. […] In their tee-total captivity, Edward, Michael and Adam throw a wild party, somehow knowing that it's a wake. After these engagements, nothing will be the same. Comedy thrives on change. I suppose these plays are about change. Are they comedies? When they want to be."
The play Dolly West's Kitchen, premiered in 1999, is set during the Second World War in Buncrana. This time was euphemistically referred to in the Republic of Ireland as "The Emergency". McGuinness has explained that the arrival of US troops into the town of Buncrana was not only an invasion in terms of the military presence, but also an "invasion of sexuality", as the soldiers made quite an impression in the town. But the main theme in the play "… was to do with a gigantic sorrow in my life, which is that my mother died". This was the heart of the story, because, McGuinness explained, when the mother dies, "the children have to grow up".
The play Gates of Gold, premiered in 2002, was commissioned by The Gate Theatre in Dublin to celebrate its anniversary. The theatre was founded by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, who were lifelong partners in life and work, and the play is about them. McGuinness, who is himself gay and whose plays often contain gay relationships or explore more traditional family drama from an outsider's perspective, has explained that he "wanted to write a play that was a great celebration of homosexual marriage, love, partnership". The playwright has a drawing of MacLiammoir, by Norah McGuinness, in his sitting room, a work "which I bought with the royalties of the Factory Girls", so the actor is literally a constant presence in McGuinness' life. Gates of Gold looks at the dying days of MacLiammoir, because McGuinness wanted to write "something darker and stranger", and less predictable, about these two pioneers of theatre.
Premiered in 2007, There Came a Gipsy Riding asks the question of "how do you survive the greatest loss, the loss of a child...", to conclude that "you don't recover, but you do learn to live with it". A critic summarised this "impressive drama" as "a concentrated piece that intricately dissects a middle-class family at war with itself following the suicide of one of their three children".
The play The Hanging Gardens, premiered in 2007, is concerned with Alzheimer's disease, and the devastating effect it has on its sufferers and the people around them. McGuinness explained that: "I hope the audience laughs. And that they're shocked. I try to give them something more than they expect." One reviewer declared that the play "holds us, moves us, alarms us."
Adaptation McGuinness is as well known for his play adaptations as for his original plays. He has adapted classics by Sophocles, Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, Molière, Valle-Inclan, Federico García Lorca, as well as short works by Strindberg and Pirandello, a short story by James Joyce, and novels by Stoker and Du Maurier. His ability to distil the raw force from classic Greek drama, in particular, has been noted by critics. He sometimes takes noticeable liberties in his adaptations, in order to strengthen characterisation—for example by making the alienated protagonist of Rebecca into an Anglo-Irish woman from a once privileged family—or to underline the theme of the play—for example in Rebecca "I've invented a scene in which Mrs Danvers confronts Max and says, 'You loved her, but she didn't love you'", or in Barbaric Comedies, a play about a world of amoral grotesquerie, he added a sexual assault scene. Some of these liberties have been controversial. By and large, McGuinness' adaptations have been hailed as reworkings that "breath[e] life" into the originals.
Poetry