A multi-media performance by Martina Evans
A multi-media scrapbook of poems, fiction and photos loosely based around the poetry collection Facing the Public. Through sequences of text and images Martina delves into Irish social and political history as refracted through the lives and accumulated experience of the generations of the Cotter family.
Left: photo © Barbara Piemonte, 2007. Right: the young Martina in her communion dress
She describes the production as "a detailed vision of Ireland that goes between the world of my parents and grandparents in the 1920’s and my own childhood in the 1970’s. Using lyricism and humour within stories and poems to create an original view that expresses our common humanity, whether seen from the other side of a bar or the wrong end of the barrel of a gun. ... Families, curious customers, mercenaries, horses, dogs, cats, gardens - concrete physical things that conjure up memory for the audience as much as the writer."
Top: Mammy with two nuns
Beneath: The Black & Tans in Ireland
The piece was first performed as a work-in-progress at Lewes Live Literature Festival, October 2007. Directed by Mark C. Hewitt