Trespasses by Louise Kennedy Radio 4
This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan Radio 4
This was a longed-for adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s award-winning novel - not least because this listener hunted the airport bookshop in the extensive Irish section but drew a blank, then perused the shelves at a well-known bookshop only to be told it was sold out.
Instead, I found her short stories - The End of the World is a Cul de Sac – and found them heartbreakingly beautiful but painful in their honesty.
Trespasses has been serialised on Radio 4 as read by local actress Lisa Dwyer Hogg.
The first episode “Papish warpaint” begins with a reference to Ash Wednesday.
Fr Slattery had marked Cushla with a thick cross which had to be washed off as most of the clientele in the bar did not get “Papish warpaint”.
Cushla is a young primary school teacher who helps out in the family pub at night.
There she meets barrister Michael Agnew - much older, married, a Protestant.
And so it begins.
Kennedy – like Brian Moore or Bernard McLaverty – has a finger on the pulse of here.
She holds her gaze; paints our lived reality.
There is humour – her mother in her rollers and a pair of knickers rolled over the top; the whiff of Je Reviens, cigarettes, setting lotion and gin. Her mother’s cough: “a treacly hack”.
Billed as “tender and shocking” – Trespasses is that - but I’m not holding out for a happy ending.
This Is Not A Pity Memoir is screen writer Abi Morgan’s account of what began as an ordinary June day when her world tilted wildly on its axis.
It’s dark, she’s fed up and apparently she snores… so far so crotchety ordinary.
When her partner Jacob tells her he has a headache, she is tired, unsympathetic and asks him has he taken a paracetamol.
He tells her that she’s a bad nurse.
Hours later she returns home and finds him collapsed on the floor.
Jacob ends up in an induced coma and when he wakes up he has a delusion for a time that Abi is an imposter and not the woman who’s been his partner for 30 years and the mother of his children.
It was, she said “like a bad party game”.
It’s horrific but listen, for she will also make you laugh. Hers is an honest, courageous and very funny story.
