Culture highlights 2024: Gaynor Funnell and Carole Burns

Gaynor Funnell

This year has been another smorgasbord of cultural delights, written, spoken, musical and visual. One of the most moving was Nye, written by Tim Price, and starring Michael Sheen as Aneurin, ‘Nye’ Bevan, the Welsh ‘architect’ of the NHS. We see Nye in his hospital bed, wearing slippers and red striped pyjamas. Through morphine-induced flashbacks as he awaits treatment, we meet amongst others, Churchill, Atlee, a bullying teacher, and, movingly, his dying father. We live through his wish for health care to be free at the point of use, of his aim to ‘Tredegarise’ the nation.

‘Look what we built’ and ‘Did I look after everyone?’ Two phrases that sum up everything about Nye and the NHS for me. I wasn’t the only one who had tears in their eyes.

Magical

A masterclass in storytelling and a journey through music, was Johnny Flynn’s magical River Calls, held in the Tramshed, Cardiff. In collaboration with the writer Robert MacFarlane, music from the albums The Moon Also Rises and Lost In The Cedar Wood, were interspersed with poetic words from Macfarlane, weaving themes of darkness and light, death and rebirth. It was a show unlike anything I’ve seen, a mythological pilgrimage of a unique kind, showing the natural world in all of her faces.

 Continuing with the themes of nature, the writer and poet Rae Howells wrote her poetry collection This Common Uncommon, as a response to the threat of a housing estate being built on a piece of common land near to where she lives, in West Cross, Swansea. We discover the creatures which make the common their home as well as the people that walk there and delight in the life they find. Life that may soon be covered by concrete. To me, the book is an example of how words can be a powerful tool of communicating these ever-present issues, how words can be used as an act of resistance.

Carole Burns

Three stories, an orchestra, stunning scenery, gorgeous singing – it is no wonder that the Welsh National Opera’s performance of Puccini’s Il Trittico remains with me still. It’s rare to stage all three of these one-act operas together, and what beautiful performances they were – held, it so happens, on the same night at the Taylor Swift concert in Cardiff. Call me square.

The first opera, Il Tabarro (The Cloak) is full of love, passion and revenge; the third, Gianni Schicchi, borders on farce as it traces a family squabbling over a will, reminding me of the film Knives Out.  Yet it was the second, quietest opera, Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) which moved me most, as a young woman learns, years after being sent to a convent for having an illegimate child, the fate of her son. Over rich harmonies, the simplicity of the lyrics and melody as she ponders his death (I wasn’t there to kiss your lips when they turned pale and cold) made her story heart-breaking; grief changes to hope as she thinks he’d now be in heaven – then horror when she realizes, as she takes her own life to join him, that she is committing a mortal sin,. Reader, I cried.

Tragedy

Outside the Wales Millennium Centre that night, WNO chorus members were passing out leaflets about their upcoming strike. The actions were postponed in November after progress in negotiations, but it’s a circumstance that, after being so moved by their work, seemed like its own, real world tragedy.

A month later, I was at the Salzburg Festival. The journey began as a homage to my father, who as a 19-year-old U.S. Army private had attended the first Salzburg Festival after World War II. Six months after he died, I followed in his footsteps. In my three days, I attended three concerts – including a 40-part vocal piece by Thomas Tallis, which the choir sang in various formations in church. Singers to my right and left, behind me and in front of me, I was immersed in the sound of their voices, all forty parts in an exquisite balance of harmonies that has existed for more than 450 years.  Entitled “Spem in alium,” the piece title means, “Hope in no other.”

I was thinking of my father, and the world.

Independent bookstores

Wherever I am, I’m reading. But with too many great reads in 2024 (every year!) to choose only a couple, instead I’m going to highlight a part of literature we writers could not do without: independent bookstores, specifically, the two newest in the Cardiff area: Book Space Cardiff and Bardic Books in Llanwit Major, the two newest in the Cardiff area.

I was introduced to Bardic Books after owner Kath Gilbin invited me to join two other writers – Özgür Uyanik and Sophie Buchaillard – to discuss our novels less than a week before the American presidential election with the topics: “Polls Apart: What Is the Role of Fiction in Politics?” – and don’t the election results make this topic ever more critical. What a community owner Kath has created since opening her store two years ago! Nearly 70 people braved a stormy Saturday night to sit under the stained-glass light of St. Illtud’s Church and talk about contemporary literature.

A few weeks later, the night was brighter, the audience smaller but perfect for the more intimate Book Space Cardiff, where Jasmine Donahaye, shortlisted in non-fiction for the 2023 Wales Book of the Year Award, answered questions from Parthian editor Richard Davies about her memoir, Birdsplaining: A Natural History.  Lily Baron opened Book Space just this summer, and has already established a dynamic series of events at her shop in Roath.

The stores are great additions to my other favorite indies – Shelf Life Books and Zines in Canton, and Griffin Books in Penarth (and there’s Bookish in Crickhowell! I could go on and on). Each shop has its own flavor and slightly different stock. You’ll have different conversations in each store, and receive different recommendations from their owners. Go in and have a chat – that’s also what books, and the arts, are about.