The might-have-been of a human life is much more real to us than its routine dailiness. In a Brooklyn brownstone room, an elderly Irishman, more emigrant than ex-pat, dwells on a freeze-frame moment from half-a-hundred years before. The Americans are shooting Moby Dick on the harbour-front in Waterford in the Marian year, and a teenage thirty-bob film extra is about to fall for another. It's not as vast a venture as Captain Ahab's Odyssey. Even so, the boy from the borstal and a girl called Clara dream of the big-time, if not the big screen, and a new life in the New World. But there's only a hairline fracture on the lens between Once Upon a Time and Then One Day.
Brendan Conroy is Bernie Rivers in Jim Nolan's poignant one-person flashback
Moby Dick by Jim Nolan
I'm still listening to these monodramas, which, I guess, is any first person narrative read aloud, what difference is there between the two? They have the virtue of being pretty good and quite fresh. Again, I've posted to the RTÉ podcast site where you can access a long list of their radio dramas, from this series and others.
No comments:
Post a Comment