Martin Market – Frank McNally on the joys and pains of Martinmas

The new Martin Scorsese film and Colin Murphy’s play about the Ulysses trial, both of which I saw this week, have something in common. To greater or lesser extent, they each use the medium of 1930s Orson Welles-style radio drama.

That format frames all of The United States vs Ulysses, Murphy’s comic romp about the 1933 court case in which James Joyce’s masterpiece was found to be dirty, perhaps, but not obscene. Played by a brilliant cast, judges and lawyers meld into radio performers, with cameo appearances by Molly Bloom and others, as they build towards a rollicking climax (pun intended) in which the American legal system finally says yes to the book.

The conceit is more limited, and more jarring, in Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. A three-and-a-half hour epic, this tells a tragic true story from 1920s Oklahoma when Native Americans made rich by oil on their land were cheated, intimidated, and murdered out of their inheritance.

Most of it is filmed in the conventional way, to harrowing effect. Only at the end – Post-Plot Spoiler Alert – does the action cut to a radio studio, where foley artists and actors (including the standard cameo from Scorsese himself) summarise the story as a sort-of crime caper. This is rather at odds with everything that has gone before. Or is it? Maybe the director, by reminding us how much we have been entertained, wants to further trouble our consciences.

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Martin Scorsese will be 81 next week. Other birthday boys around now include Martin Luther, who would have turned 540 this weekend. Their Christian names are no coincidence, probably, because November 11th is the feast-day of St Martin, aka Martinmas.

The eponymous Martin of Tours was a fourth-century Roman soldier, who converted to Christianity. And Martinmas built on an older bacchanalian festival. Hence, perhaps, the continued association of the date with eating and drinking.

The excuse for roasting a goose around now is that when the church wanted to make the former soldier a bishop, reluctant to be promoted, he hid among a flock of geese, one of which turned informer and honked on him.

Most influential in France, the saint gave his name to many towns and villages along the Roman roads by which the new religion spread. From this base, “Martin” also became the most common French surname, outflanking such rivals as Bernard and Thomas.

Martin is the patron saint of wine too. And his feast used to be the day the new season’s produce, Beaujolais Nouveau, was released. That was once a purely domestic affair. Then the cunning French promoted it abroad as an excuse to export wine that, as one critic said, was like drinking “cookie dough”.

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I see the Mitchelstown Heritage Society is hosting a talk this coming Wednesday on “Burying Bad Luck: Magical Protection for Homes and Farms in 19th and 20th century Ireland”. Given by Clodagh Tait of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College, it will detail the many ways – often using concealed objects – in which people once protected the boundaries of their homes and farms “against human or supernatural enemies”.

It was an early spiritual equivalent of BER rating, I suppose. But this insulation against misfortune surely included one of Ireland’s old Martinmas rituals – in which an animal was sacrificed and its blood sprinkled in doorways.

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For the past week , I have struggled with a back pain that has been keeping me awake at night. It’s not so bad during the day, in fairness, except when I’m in one of two positions: sitting or standing.

Driving to Offaly for a feature on faith-healing last weekend, I spent much of the journey with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on my upper lumbar region, trying to anaesthetise it.

My usual cure for everything, Lemsip, has been no use. Nor has Nurofen. The benefits of a torture session with my physiotherapist were not immediately apparent.

By midweek, feeling oppressed from deadlines and lack of sleep, I was tempted to skip such unnecessary outings as Thursday’s opening night of the Ulysses play.

Then I got a call from my friend Sarah, who was due to chair the post-play interview with Michael McDowell and writer-lawyer Joseph Hassett.

And before I could tell her about my sufferings, she shamelessly upstaged me by revealing that she was in hospital, on morphine, and awaiting possible emergency surgery on some mysterious but excruciating ailment. After having which, sometime later, she added by text: “You’re doing the interview now.”

Oh well. Stressful as it was, at least I may have been in on the start of something big. Among other destinations, Murphy and his team now hope to bring the play back to its source next year, following an invitation to stage it in the former New York courthouse where the trial happened, now the Jefferson Market Library.

That will probably depend, however, on funding from Culture Ireland. Prayers for the intercession of a saintly namesake, Catherine Martin, are ongoing.