Strumpet City: One City One Book Edition

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The video image for Strumpet City has been digitally remastered, and is presented in a widescreen, enhanced for 16:9 TVs, format. I could be wrong, but I doubt this film was originally shot in widescreen (considering its relatively small budget), so it appears that it's been matted to fit the new 16:9 dimensions. Many of the shots look extremely cramped, with the tops of characters' heads cut off by the framing -- further evidence to me that the original frame ratio has been altered. While I would have preferred the original aspect ratio, the video image is sharp and clear.

Strumpet City was a 1980 television miniseries produced by Irish broadcaster RTÉ, based on James Plunkett's 1969 novel Strumpet City. [1] [2] [3] I am wise enough to know now that these things were not 'of the past'; they are just as relevant today and if you look around you will find a Rashers Tierney existing not so far from where you live.Plunkett’s objective rather was to remind the reader how it felt; how the city’s most deprived suffered in an unequal struggle against its most privileged. His story captures the simple truth which no post-modernist abstraction should ever be allowed to obscure. Today when antiheroes dominate our fiction we may sometimes forget that there are historical events that are best judged in binary terms: good and bad, justice and injustice. Plunkett, in his old-fashioned way, was never in any doubt which side of this divide he was on. That’s what makes Strumpet City so authentic, and such a pleasure to read again.

The character of Rashers Tierney is very well done and reminds me of Dublin characters I knew as a child, in his wit and humour. The 3 priests are also very complex characters and well done, considering Plunkett himself was an anti-clericalist. the culmination of five years of increasingly bitter disputes between Dublin's unskilled workers, organised by Larkin's Irish Transport & General Workers' Union, on the one side and the city's employers, led by William Martin Murphy, on the other. The Risen People". Abbey Theatre. 2013. Archived from the original on 26 October 2014 . Retrieved 24 May 2015. Strumpet City’ is a best-selling novel by James Plunkett set in Dublin between 1907 and 1914, a period of major labour unrest. Adapted for RTÉ Television by Hugh Leonard, ‘Strumpet City’ was broadcast as seven episodes in 1980.

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Rashers Tierney, in lesser hands, could have been merely the embodiment of the horror of near absolute poverty. He is utterly destitute, despised and bullied by officialdom. He occupies the margins of life and of history, too poor even for the collective self-assertion of the workers. He is reduced almost to the level of his friend and equal Rusty, his beloved dog. He is King Lear’s “unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal”. The Risen People, a stage play, which premiered at the Abbey in 1958. By then he had joined RTÉ, initially working in radio and transferred to television in 1961, eventually becoming head of drama. Hugh Leonard's seven-part adaptation of is the impossible Irish novel. The great master of the short story, Frank O'Connor, writing in 1942, claimed that it was simply not possible to write a social novel in Ireland. In Russia, he said, an author such as Chehkov could "write as easily of a princess as of a peasant girl or a merchant's daughter" but in Ireland "the moment a writer raises his eyes from the slums and cabins, he finds nothing but a vicious and ignorant middle-class, and for aristocracy the remnants of an English garrison, alien in religion and education. From such material he finds it almost impossible to create a picture of life . . . a realistic literature is clearly impossible." In explaining the novel's success Plunkett himself said that it was that he didn't "lift my eye away from people at any stage, didn't lift my eye away from the parish. This is all one can know, for the whole of life is in that parish, where else can it be" (Writer in Profile interview with Niall Sheridan RTE, 1/1/1970). General Tom Barry’s Cork No. 3 (West Cork) Brigade wiped out an eighteen-man Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael, on the Macroom–Dunmanway road, Co. Cork.