The Casement Sonata is a long poetic work in musical form examining the life, imprisonment and death of Roger Casement (above) by Gavin Friday and Dublin poet James McCabe, at Dublin City Gallery at Hugh Lane, .Charelmont House, Parnell Square N, Dublin 1. To wit:
The Casement Sonata is a long-form ambient poem exploring the life and death of
Sir Roger Casement, one-time knight of the British Empire and the establishment’s most threatening rebel spirit. By transforming the age-old argument between Celt and Saxon into a global conversation about human rights,Roger Casement upended nationalist rhetoric just as much as imperial reasoning, and set the scene for his own isolation and execution. Like Parnell and Wilde before him, Casement was a sophisticated Irishman who threatened the fabric of British hegemony and was deliberately targeted for his sexual behaviour as a reactionary countermove.
FIGHT!
The Casement Sonata will be played twice daily in the Hugh Lane Gallery at 12pm and 3pm from July 21- August 21.
The Casement Sonata (Gavin Friday)
Thanks Noel at Dublin City Council
There’s a decent enough novel of his life called The Dream of the Celt written by any Peruvian Nobel prize winner of all people.
Recommended to me by a Costa Rican. Good read and an interesting fella if anyone wants to know more about him.
Mario Vargas Llosa, who also wrote Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter, made into a film with Barbara Hershey, Keanu Reeves and Peter Falk and which is really good – the book and the film. I’ve been meaning to get his Casement book, must see if they have it in the library.
You know and lot more about him than me so, hopefully you enjoy it!
Thanks for reminding me, though!
“Barbara Hershey, Keanu Reeves and Peter Falk”
That is a hell of a cast. For many reasons.
Nightmare.
sounds like a particularly tortuous experience.