Something For The Weekend: Ultan Pringle's cultural picks

Ultan Pringle is a writer and director from Co Donegal. He is deeply intrigued by and invested in stories which investigate human relationships and the extraordinary in the everyday.

For his company LemonSoap Productions, he has written a number of acclaimed works for audio and theatre, including Marmalade Row, It Is Good We Are Dreaming, Piglet, Fruit and Pistachio, starring three-time Oscar nominee Piper Laurie.

His new play Boyfriends premieres this June: it follows a three-month affair between two anonymous men, played by Ultan and Emmanuel Okoye, charting the ups and downs and roundabouts of a modern 'situation-ship'.

Emmanuel Okoye and Ultan Pringle in Boyfriends

We asked Ultan for his choice cultural picks...

BOOK

As I write, I've just finished an astonishing little novel by Clare O’Dea called Voting Day. In truth my head Is still stuck in 1959 Switzerland but I’ll try and tell you why you just have to grab a copy. This nugget of humane brilliance was recommended to me by the ever wonderful staff at The Gutter Bookstore in Temple Bar, and have they ever put a foot wrong with regards to a recommendation? The book follows the lives of four women in Switzerland on the day of a national referendum in 1959 to decide whether or not women should be given the vote. The observation of the novel is what bowled me over, the making of breakfast, or waiting on a train platform, or traipsing around town, all the while wondering at and pondering and trying to fathom what life may be like very soon. It’s short and sweet and full of transcendence. A novel for me is exemplary when I feel as if the roof has lifted a little, like you could touch at something magic in the air, and putting down Voting Day I had that feeling, like I’d sucked at a lemon, but the lemon is full of wonder and the bittersweet taste will linger.

THEATRE

I devour every single Annie Baker playscript I can get my hands on and I always think: how the hell has nobody done one of these here yet?! Well, halleluiah, cause The Gate Theatre is producing her magnificent Circle Mirror Transformation this May and June, and I cannot wait to sit and be so very jealous at how miraculous Annie Baker is, how she can write about a drama class and the lives of the people attending it and turn out a work of art which’ll make you think: I’m alive! Isn’t that both shocking and amazing? And if any big theatre head honcho is reading this: do John next! And after that The Flick! And maybe The Aliens or or, or….

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FILM

My Granny and I of recent years have been enjoying going to the cinema together. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was a big hit, the dancing the dancing she kept whispering in awe, and of Jamie Dornan in Belfast she leaned over and said: has anyone ever looked more beautiful? And with That They May Face The Rising Sun she said afterward: it’d all of life in it and I’ll be lying in bed dreaming of it tonight now. She’s right, it does has all of life in it, and it’s a beautiful evocation of the rural. I can’t wait to see it again and let such tranquillity wash over me.

What Irish writer right now is as epically adept as Nancy Harris? Between her operatic rom-com in the Abbey last year, Somewhere Out There You, and the new season of The Dry, she’s single handedly keeping us fed with works of art riddled with joy and a deep melancholic moving rumination on the meaning of being here. The Dry is the kind of show where every five minutes one of your favourite Irish actors pops up to be brilliant and I for one think we need more and more shows like it. Plus, what other piece of art of the moment has so interrogated, with humour and pathos, our rather obscene drink culture?

MUSIC

This is how bad I am at music. I’ve only recently discovered, at the ancient age of twenty-six, the epic joys of Madonna and the brilliance of Tom Waits and have you ever heard of a little known artist I’ve just discovered, called Bronski Beat? What I am saying is: maybe I’m not best placed to recommend music but I do have two sweet treats I think’d enrich any weekend. George Houston is a brilliant new Donegal singer songwriter, and his song In Aeternum Vive never fails to thrill - and the fact it’s inspired by the Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn classic Death Becomes Her? Cherry on top.

And if you haven’t heard Sheila Atim singing Tight Connection To My Heart from Conor McPherson’s epic Bob Dylan musical Girl From The North Country, well strap those AirPods in and get ready to ponder where you’ve come from and where’ll you soon be. In the most gorgeous way possible.

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GIG

I suppose you can guess from the above music answer I don’t go to many gigs. But I do have my ticket booked for the next Egg, a delightfully mad and wonderful queer DIY cabaret run by one of Donegal’s best exports Aoife Sweeney O’Connor. They’ll play Beyond The Pale this year for anyone lucky enough to be attending and are running nights at BelloBar throughout the year. A ticket you say? Don’t mind if I do.

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RADIO

Forgive me RTÉ Culture readers, this may not be the spiciest recommendation, but I do love a bit of RTÉ Radio One. From Late Date to Liveline, to Claire Byrne, to Drivetime, it just makes me feel so alive to be listening to the radio! Like I’m a part of the world and it’s a big stupid rotten place but being clued into it with Sarah and Cormac from 4.30 pm weekdays is a privilege, I think.

Team Drivetime: Sarah McInerney and Cormac Ó hEadhra

ART

Katie Hassett, a dynamite emerging Donegal artist, for the month of June exhibits her work at An Grianán Theatre in Letterkenny. Running as a part of the Lasta Festival, a nationwide festival run by and for younger audiences, Katie’s work is a fascinating and provoking interrogation of patriarchal theocratic Ireland and what it’s done to the women of this country. It’s beautiful and it’s difficult and enraging and I think she is an artist we’ll be seeing much more from in the future.

TECH

I’m currently enraged with technology and how with all the brilliance we have the world is still looking like it’s gonna hop off a cliff. But I did watch Mad Max: Fury Road again recently, and found it as moving as can be as a ferocious example of a wasteland which could await us, and I did find myself thinking: God bless whatever filmmaking techniques made this insanity possible. So that’s the tech I’d like to venerate: whatever myriad technological innovations allowed George Miller make Mad Max: Fury Road? God bless you.

THE NEXT BIG THING...

I’m gonna be desperately uncouth here and say for the past few months I’ve had the immense pleasure of working with a team of spectacular artists on my new play Boyfriends. With such collaborators every conversation, design meeting and rehearsal is a dream. Already I feel emboldened and challenged and invigorated and I think they all, each and every one of them, are going to take the theatre world by storm. Hell, they already have.

Boyfriends is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin from 26th June – 6th July during Pride week 2024, and at An Grianán, Letterkenny, Co Donegal from 11th - 13th July - find out more here.

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