SOUL SURMISE

TRUTH, LOVE OR PROMISE - MY SURMISE

Truth, Love Or Promise - mesmeric in tale, clever in script, convincing in acting, poignant in subject matter and laugh out loud throughout. I want all my friends to see it. 

Nuala McKeever is so much more a funny woman. This one woman show (With the help of Director Dan Gordon) is as if she has taken a stand up comedy routine and given it the format of a play because this is a drama more than a comedy. All McKeever's talents in one place.

Reviews have seen critics drop names like Dickens, Shakespeare and O’Casey. Of these the latter rings truest for me. A northern Irish Sean O’Casey, making the personal and societal issues of his place and time onto a theatre stage.

McKeever has conjured a story around a Creative Writing Class where three women from different backgrounds are thrown together, sometimes against their very will. As the class goes on through winter into spring Maureen, Brenda and Joanna become friends and we are totally gripped as their stories open up.

Our favourite comedian shows her acting chops as she herself plays all three of the women. Her side step back and forward between chairs to shift accents is almost a circus piece in itself as with humour and pathos and at times great speed she interweaves their conversations. 

Very quickly McKeever’s voice had me distinguish each character. It was as if there were actually three actors up there but I think the play would have lost something if there had been. Quite the skill Ms McKeever.

So around, below and on top of this plot, humour and very quick voice changes (how did she do that!) McKeever opens up the issues. Prejudice, sexuality, The Troubles and grief. There’s a lot of grief. The death of a husband, miscarriage and a death bed. That grief takes in the personal loss of all three women but also the united trauma of our post Troubles society. 

We are watching, laughing and struck to poignant silence by a grief that McKeever describes like she knows it; heavy and deep. Yet, there is a message of a hope that bursts through like the flowers that finally grow out of a lump of mud that Maureen watches change over the seasons as she sits in a park before the class. 

Under everything, something is going on. After searing loss the great big universe keeps moving. In the midst of those dying around us, life defies. 

Truth, Love Or Promise ultimately tells us that stories can help us find that. The truth about how we feel. Our empty page of denial covered with catharsis. The play also tells us that we have a choice about the story that we tell about our circumstances and where we take our stories from now.

It is not lost on me that we are watching this a few days before we commemorate 30 years since the IRA Ceasefire. Oh have we stories to tell and continue to write. 

Tonight one woman with the gifts of the gab, hilarity, literary invention and acting stopped me in my tracks more than once. At the end I just sat trying to take it all in and as we left for home I thought that it does always rain here BUT we can change the story by putting our hoods up. 

MY SERMON PODCAST - FINDING JESUS IN MUSIC

On this week's Sermon Podcast I am finding Jesus in rock music.

I reveal which songs literally changed my own life and then name moments where I sensed God revelations in the wider culture. Two of these are on the Glastonbury Main Stage - Stormzy and Coldplay.

All finished with a little challenge as to who is Lord of our Playlists.

Listen on your favourite platform:

FIND IT HERE

 

JOHN LENNON - 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Mind Games as a song has taken 50 years to grow on me. 50 years! When as an 11 year old I started listening to the radio John & Yoko’ Happy Xmas was all over it. I loved it. 

Mind Games was John Lennon’s next single and it was too weird. The sound. Then these lyrics about Mind Guerrillas and Druid dudes. Far out man but not my favourite Lennon song even when as a 15 year old I became obsessed by him and his old band.

The album Mind Games was the first Lennon album that I bought and it was fine… after that title track. What most intrigued a teenager starting to make sense of the world was his silent track Nutopian National Anthem. 

As an 18 year old I was secretary of the Ballymena Academy Debating Society and in a Balloon Debate I tried to save my place in that metaphorical balloon by arguing the power of said Nutopia. My argument sadly was as empty as a few seconds of silence on record and I was well and truly chucked out of that balloon.

All of this has come back to me as the Lennon Estate drop the 50th Anniversary Edition of Mind Games. 6 CDs and 2 Blu-Rays of out takes and fascinating remixes. 

As a friend said, “bottom line the songs aren’t strong. Not sure any amount of polish will shift that”. It was hard to disagree. But then I listened.

The Raw Studio mixes and the out takes gave the songs a new perspective. The Ultimate mixes, or the new mixes of the original, reminded me that apart from Mind Games I loved the original album back in my teens. Out of The Blue and One Day At A Time are beautiful love songs. Most of this record is.

We shouldn’t be surprised at that. Yoko was Lennon’s muse since 1968. Plastic Ono Band and Imagine had their own love to Yoko songs and 7 years later Lennon’s last work would be love songs. It wasn’t just his mate Paul who sand about Silly Love Songs.

Elsewhere Lennon seems to have out his trust in humanity. Bring On The Lucie (Freeda Peeple) and Only People are more generalised protest than the naive and often times mistaken characters he was singing about on Sometimes In New York City.

Back around to that title track. Sinead O’Connor’s version had already opened up its possibilities but now with a more mature ear and the Sean Lennon mix from the Gimme Some Truth compilation I have come to quite love it. I’d even dare to say that it sits up there with Imagine in it’s peace on earth, faith in the future and love is the answer.

So, no Mind Games is not the album that Imagine is but neither should it be dismissed. Sean Lennon is giving his dad's work real refreshment. I think 6 CDs might be too many. I went for the double CD. Whatever these mixes are giving us all reason to reassess.

THE SAWDOCTORS LIVE IN CUSTOM HOUSE SQUARE, BELFAST - 24.8.24

There is nothing like an aul singalong in Custom House Square to end the summer. Tow years ago it was Ryan McMullan and when I saw The Sawdoctors were playing I was on it. We used to play all those songs on car journeys across Ireland.

Janice and I hadn’t to a Sawdoctors’ gig since New Year’s Eve 1992 when they filled The Point with The Frames and Sharon Shannon. Our boys from Tuam were at their commercial peak teased us with a “We’ve got the 1 the 9 and the 9 where are you 2”. We were convinced Bono would appear any moment but settled for a big polystyrene 2 in the end.

I had first hears them supporting The Waterboys around 1988 and then I Useta Lover became Ireland’s biggest selling single of all time and they were very clearly out of Mike Scott’s slipstream.

Back to 2024 and Custom House Square and singalong was what we got, Tommy K and I Useta Love Her hating us early on. And off the boys went on a night that lit up the Belfast night with their unique version of Showband/Ceili/Rock N Roll. 

On the surface The Sawdoctors are just a fun band. Led by Leo Moran’s comedic front they are irreverent, rude and a whole lot humorous but don’t fooled.

There is so much more happening in these west of Ireland song of pop poetry. What Van Morrison and Christy Moore for do other parts of the island The Sawdoctors do for the west. In these humorous singalongs they catalogue the social (Joyce Country Ceili Band, N17, Hay Wrap), geographical (Clare Island, Red & Green of Mayo) and indeed religious landscape (Howya Julia) of Connaught and the islands.

Standing there in Custom House Square I began to see these boys as the Irish Proclaimers. See Clare Island as Sunshine on Leith, N17 as Letter From America or 500 Miles, where there’s references to soccer and Hibernian there’s GAA, Galway and Mayo. 

Both The Proclaimers and The Sawdoctors need more respect for their musical ability. I mean the virtuoso Anto Thistlethwaite, on saxophone and mandolin tonight, doesn’t play with amateurs.

Back again to Custom House Square and those singalongs. On Clare Island where they sing - 

 

Where the ocean kisses Ireland

And the waves carress its shore

Oh the feelin' it came over me

To stay forever more

Forever more

 

My grá for the island was nearly at religious levels.

As for N17, What a song. Like a humorous caricature of rural life - stone walls and the grass is green it turns into a song of immigrant longing for home. I was guldering! 

So much fun. So much of our Irishness. So much provocative thought. Best of all, so many singalongs. The Sawdoctors are a live band. They put on a show. We’ll remember this one for many a long year. 

 

 

NUALA MCKEEVER - THE SOUL SURMISE INTERVIEW

Nuala McKeever is a talent. Known first as a comedian she has more recently become a playwright of renown. She brings Truth, Love Or Promise back to the Lyric Theatre next week, this time on the main stage. I took a chance to throw a few question passed Nuala. Maybe we'll get a full podcast this autumn time.

 

The Lyric have named you a “Comedy Sensation”. When did you know you were funny?

When I was a student, in a house with lots of other girls, talking one night – making them laugh and one of them said, “You should be on the stage!”

And then think you could do it as a career?

When the Hole In The Wall Gang got the tv series series Give My Head Peace.

After that… when did you start writing?

My first writing commission was The Wilsons – a two-hander on Radio Ulster, with Olivia Nash. I got a whole £40 per script for that! I had done my own writing for some of our Hole in the Wall Gang live shows at that time too.  I gave up my BBC job and my then husband supported me for a while before the tv took off!

So Truth, Love or Promise? Where did the first spark of that come from?

One of the stories in the play was an image that came into my head one night. I thought, “Nah… nobody would believe that”. But it stuck and the play came to life around it, the characters spoke to each other in my head, I recorded the conversations on my phone and then typed them up!

How many creative writing classes did you go to?

I taught a couple of seasons of creative writing for people living with loss. One course was with Cruse Bereavement. I went to one writing day as a student, led by Damian Gorman.

Brenda, Maureen and Joanna… Are they based on real people and have any of the real people noticed?

There is one person in the play who’s based on someone I know a bit, but I can’t say who, cos it’s not flattering!!!  The three main characters all have some of my traits, but they’re not anyone in particular. They are themselves!

Comedy is so popular these days. I remember when we only had one TV show The Comedians. Now every other channel at 10 pm is a comedian. How important is comedy in communicating truth?

Like the old style Court Jester, the comedian can say things that are direct and close to the bone. Comedy can be a great way to get people to think, without preaching at them.

At the core of the play is the importance of stories. What are you hoping the audience will take away?

Reaction to the play has been phenomenal. Some people have come back a second time, bringing loads of others with them. Some have seen it 3 times!  I’ve had lovely responses from people saying it has touched them deeply. One woman opened up to her family about something that happened to her as a child, a secret she’d kept for years, after seeing the play.  I hope audiences go away feeling  entertained, surprised and hopeful.

Back by popular demand and now on the Main Stage. You must be encouraged? 

Yes, it’s been fantastic! Dan Gordon the director told me from the start that the writing was great.  It has felt like a story or play that has been waiting to be written. It’s extremely gratifying to me to connect at the deepest core with other people. The part of us that is underneath our individual identities. That’s the power of theatre – when we see ourselves.

And so... what is next?

I’ve been commissioned to write for TV so I’m hoping that’ll happen next year. Theatre-wise – I might bring back my previous play, In The Window, for all the people who loved Truth, Love or Promise!

 

BOOK TICKETS FOR TRUTH, LOVE OR PROMISE HERE

STOCKI SERMON PODCAST - FINDING JESUS IN 21st CENTURY - in the NOVEL

Finding Jesus in the culture, where at times you least expect him. 

I am on a little self indulgent series at the end of this summer (it was summer - honest!) where I am looking at where Jesus appears in the novel, the song and the film.

This is part 1 where I look at the novel, Douglas Coupled and Claire Keegan heavily mentioned. I also look at how we should be dealing with such things. 

There are many great quotes from novels and also from John Stott. Just one of his is wise and challenging:

 

“We refuse to become either so absorbed in the word, that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world, that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgement of the word.” 

 

We look at how God can decide where to speak and who to speak through and that the truth is not dependent on who writes or speaks it.

 

LISTEN TO THE SERMON PODCAST HERE

NOAH KAHAN LIVE IN BOUCHER PARK, BELFAST - 17.8.24

Noah Kahan a mile from our front door. His biggest gig ever. An absolute slay, as my daughter might say. 

And my daughter is who I need to thank. Yes, my mate Iain Archer co-wrote Still (credited or not and if you catch his small gig in Zurich soon then he’ll be singing this one with his daughter) so I had an early nudge but it wasn’t until my daughter took Kahan to her head and heart like I once did with The Beatles that I took notice. Dublin gig sold out. Another announced and again sold out. Who is this dude?

Amazingly, Jazzi is not with us in Boucher, preferring to see him in London! It might be the gig in 45 years of gig going that I knew so few of the artist’s songs before hand. The boy was under the spotlight. My daughter’s taste on the line.

First thing we noticed, as we thoroughly enjoyed support act Maisie Peters all short skirt, blonde hair, Noah sweatshirt with bags of charisma and tight songs, was that we were old! We noticed peers leaving off their children and in church the next morning “oh that must have been the gig our Eva was at last night.”

The crowd was huge and full of late teens and early twenties and predominately female which usually means boy or girl band. This could go very wrong. 

The opposite. Forgive me young people for my judgement on your 21st century music tastes. This boy is an incredible writer and he and his excellent band can fill a few football fields.

Indeed, the young girls were a distinct advantage and added to the experience. Yes, a drink or two down and there was the usual high shrieks of drunken gibberish but when they sang it was like being enveloped in a huge heavenly choir.

Now, let me say, that these are not easy songs to sing. Kahan wraps his clever rhyming couplets in his own interpretation of verse and chorus. Yet, this crowd sang… and kept singing… every single word.

What I suddenly started to realise, helped by the clarity of the sound and Kahan’s voice was that we were in a night of catharsis. Kahan is all about mental health. Struggling with it himself he writes right into a young audience sadly struggling too. 

 

Don't let this darkness fool you

All lights turned off can be turned on

I'll drive, I'll drive all night

I'll call your mom

 

Indeed when he left the stage I said to the girls in front, “well there is still one about Sticks for him to do,” and one of them said, “And I want The View Between Villages”. If I’d known the depth of loss in that song my pastoral vocation might have asked her if she want to talk about it!

Kahan is not just about the music. There is something profoundly helpful about these songs. I find his battles about where home is fascinating too. There are a lot of roads and driving on these songs, the grass greener somewhere else but then even greener back home in Vermont and there might be an interesting conclusion:

 

Drive slowly, I know every route in this county

And maybe that ain't such a bad thing

 

So, an absolute triumph for my daughter who predicted and for Kahan himself. He has Ed Sheeran’s boy next door demeanour in audience connection, funny and engaging. He works each end of that stage and his band fill the spaces. Shout out to his new fiddle player. 

The songs? Well this morning I am marvelling at their authenticity, honesty, vulnerability as well as just how good they are. If that choir that enveloped me listen and listen good then there is cathartic help here in abundance to navigate the roads that my generation have built for them. On tonight’s acoustic outing, Growing Sideways, no mean feat in a crowd of 40,000:

 

I'm still angry at my parents 

For what their parents did to them

 

Noah Kahan might go a long way to help them to forgive and get over us! As they say Stateside "colour me a fan!"

FANTASY LEAGUE - THE STRESS STARTS NOW!

It is a big and stressful day for millions of us. Teams need picked for the opening match of a new season of Fantasy League, tonight.

Today millions will be working out who they can buy for their £100 million budget. 

How many big players can we afford. 

What are the cheap players that are going to come through? 

Should I skimp on my defence for big goal scorers? 

Will new signings fit into their teams quickly? 

What about players from promoted teams? 

And managers, don't substitute a player before he has played his 60 minutes and don't bring a player on with a minute to go!  

Of course it is a marathon not a sprint and for most Fantasy League managers their teams will bear little resemblance even in October to the team they choose tonight. However, there will still be some panic. 

A good start is better than a bad one though it is amazing how quickly the team at the top of your particular league on Sunday night might drop away within a few weeks.

With one free substitution per week and then every additional transfer per week costing 4 valuable points it is best to have a good steady team at the outset.

Of course, there is some luck in this game. One of the biggest factors is choosing the right captain every week as their points double. It might be luck that my player scores a hat trick and yours doesn’t score at all. That might happen week after week!

BUT let me say that as I have followed this game for some 15 years and been involved in a Fitzroy League for 15 that this will have little to do with luck.

As I look at our league I know that John McMullen will be the one to beat. Isaac Orr, who I baptised less than fifteen years ago will be setting his sights on the top 3. My daughter Jasmine will be trying to build on an astonished good first season. BUT like cream the same names always come to the top season after season.

As always I recommend a solid start. I am going as always with a well tested spine. Big names who have proven themselves at the core. Maybe risk a new cheaper player early on. 

Then the wheeling and dealing can begin. There will be a careful watching to see what surprise player might come through for £5m. The sooner you get him the better. Some thought they had him with Oscar Bobb and then he breaks his leg! That’s Fantasy League. Or the nightmare of it.

So the best of luck and providence. I am not convinced about team yet. Two more hours to tinker.

STOCKI SERMON PODCAST - WHERE TO FIND JESUS IN 21st CENTURY Pt 1

I started a short new series on Sunday. It will be just 4 parts for now. A colleague Ken McBride suggested on social media somewhere that I should write a book about where to find Jesus in the 21st Century. My good mate Dave Thompson suggested it again last week. I am not sure my insights are wide enough for such an endeavour but this mini series will help me surmise if there is something there. 

This mini series will be very heavily based on the arts where I find Jesus in some of the least likely places and have to surmise if God is bypassing the Church in speaking into a modern culture who have dismissed the Church as irrelevant. So I will be looking at literature, music and TV/Film.

However I started with finding Jesus in our recent Racist riots.

I once had a fascinating experience of being on a Cape Town township at lunch time and a nice middle class church after dinner. In the latter we began with those words, "where two or three are gathered, I am in the midst". I surmised though that God might have preferred meeting me among "the least of these" on the township.

I use this and show from Matthew 25 how God wants us to respond to immigration - "I was a stranger and you invited me in". Holding back my anger I call us as individuals and a community to do the God thing. It is where we might find Jesus in the 21st century.

LISTEN NOW HERE

THE OLYMPICS IN OUR UNIQUE VENN DIAGRAM

There is nothing like The Olympic Games. Everybody is still buzzing, talking about a great performance here, an act of kindness there and medals everywhere. We even put on our duvet cover last night as if we were synchronised swimmers. Janice finished with a flourish of a pirouette. Oh that was gymnastics!

It was quite the Games for us on the island of Ireland. The Irish team scored NO gold medals at the Athens Games twenty years ago but this year scored no less than 4 golds in a tally of 7. If only Ciara Mageean hadn’t have gotten injured there was a medal for her in that 1500m.

Even more incredible was the wee North. Not having won any gold medals since 1988 and individual ones since 1972 we won three gold in sixteen hours - Daniel Wiffen in the 800 metres freestyle, a couple of hours later Jack McMillan has one in the 4x200m freestyle relay and early the next morning Hannah Scott in the Women’s Quadruple Skulls.

The benefit of the Venn diagram for me is usually adding the medals together. In 2012 Katie Taylor’s gold meant I celebrated 30 gold medals, instead of just the Great Britain & Northern Ireland 29. This year though, Northern Ireland actually won as many medals as the Republic. Seven. Of course some of those were the same medals. 

And so we have Jack McMillan and Hannah Scott going gold in British vests and Daniel Wiffen and Rhys McClenaghan in Irish vests. A silver for Rebecca Shorten and bronzes for Philip Doyle and Daniel Wiffen again. Wow! 

The benefits of that Venn Diagram. Let me explain. We lie snugly in between Great Britain and the Republic Of Ireland, sharing political government with the former and an island with the latter. We are tiny and it is easy to get knocked around by two more powerful entities pushing and shoving, often over us and a very bloody history where no one is innocent.

These two national entities are like the big circles in a Venn diagram. I like to sit in the middle bit that overlaps. 

It is not about flags. Or borders. Or who the Prime Minister or Taoiseach is? Those are pretty much set in stone. For me, it means more to my identity how I feel about the two states. Parts of my very self are touched by both countries. 

 

Walking across Ballycastle beach

Or an afternoon on Grafton Street

Hearing the Uilleann pipes. 

Remembering my Granny’s Ulster Scott words. 

Watching an All Ireland Hurling Final. 

Receiving my MBE from Princess Anne.

 

I do love the benefits of the Venn diagram. The Great Britain & Northern Ireland team didn’t do so well, when it came to gold medals this year. However Keely Hodgkinson’s gold and Alex Yee’s, Tommy Fleetwood silver, Georgia Bell’s bronze and of course Katarina Johnson-Thompson’s mammoth silver in the Heptathlon. Then Tom Daley and Helen Glover just adding more and more to their tally.

For Ireland those rowers, Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy are always a highlight. Asked about adding to previous silver and gold, with another gold, O’Donovan suggested it must be “a fluke”. The man's humour and modesty. Ready to take a bus to Cork from Dublin airport they finally took a lift from someone on the same flight. Special. Kellie Harrington retiring after another gold in the boxing is a tidy ending too. I was so sorry for Rhasidat Adeleke to not get on a podium in the 400 or 4x400m but there is always LA!

All in all though it is the very best ever Olympics for our wee country fighting above our weight. The island's best Olympics ever for sure! Well done to our particularly unique Magnificent Six!