Mm.

Um, so in that sense, it was a very sad story, emblematic of, of, of a kind of a, a darker, older Ireland.

Um, but actually Brendan, once he gave Charlie his story, he panicked.

Um, and he asked Charlie to, to take it out and, and not put it in the book, and we had to disguise his name in the play.

Um, and he didn't stay in touch with Charlie.

Um, and he, transpires he fell into a depression.

Um, and he always regretted that moment of fear that had had him, you know, he initially talked to Charlie, but then, but then pull back again.

Mm

How do you bring Ulysses Joyce to the stage and a general audience? What is that experience like?

The first thing that comes to mind, Mark, is that you or I have to assert the right to do it.

Because I'm not a Joycean.

I don't have that expertise.

I didn't have that expertise.

I still don't.

And what I am is somebody who looks for good stories and then looks for the best way in which to tell them.

Here, when they, that court scene, that's...

W- what was it, why was it you decided to do it?

Yeah.

I, I mean, it's, it's not too far from that.

So if you think, y- you and I wouldn't have been around, but 45 years ago when the Great North Run started, Brendan Foster, our founder, you know, he was an avid runner and a, and a big believer in how good it is for you.

And, and before running, mass participation running was a thing in the UK, he kind of thought, "Well, this would be wonderful." He saw an event in New Zealand, he brought it back to the UK, and the Great North Run was born.

And, and all of a sudden you weren't just a lone runner on the streets, you were with a community, and you ran together, and you ran better, and that's been one of the hearts of, of what we do for a long time.

Um, almost 20 years ago, there was a thought, you know, that this wasn't just for running, and we did it for swimming.

Well, then let, if we move on to the Seven Valleys, 110 kilometers, now that presumably goes through the night, and that, that requires a little bit more knowhow or a little bit more kit [laughs] that you're carrying around with you.

Yeah.

Well, obviously, we're working closely with the council, Birmingham City Council and Joanne.

What we have is a shared vision.

A shared vision does help you get to the right place with the right aspirations.

We achieved planning after a couple of bumps, but we achieved planning about a couple of years ago.

And now we're getting ready to start inside the back end of this year, initially with the infrastructure works and then with the vertical builds thereafter.

So it's quite an exciting future ahead for Smithfield.

From a market perspective, what does this kind of partnership signal? More importantly, what difference does it make practically to how you can deliver a complex project like Smithfield, which has got so many different moving parts in?

Yeah, plays or the moment or those periods of time as well and the decisions that were made around that time as a consequence of what was going on.

Gosh, I wonder, do they say, yeah, I don't know what, if anything, they say about Ireland as a collection of characters and a collection of stories and that.

I mean, I, like in the literal sense, the first two plays chronologically inside the GPO, which is set inside the GPO during the Easter Rising, and the Treaty, which is set in London during the treaty negotiations.

They're an attempt by me to capture what it might or must have felt like by those people to be there in that moment and to be carrying the burden of making decisions that they know are going to shape the future of their country and the lives of not just their generation, but generations to come.

So I'm not trying to say something about Ireland.

I'm trying to get as close as I can to what I would like to think may have been the truth of those moments as experienced by those people.

And one of the things that I think is at the heart of that and is that I think can get missed in certainly in the teaching history in school, but maybe even a lot of kind of thinking and talking and teaching about history is the uncertainty and the indeterminacy of things that we will come to feel were almost predetermined or predestined because we will enshrine them in aspic.

Whenever you're writing, are you thinking about future scenarios in a bar where a man will come up to you or a person will come up to you and say, "You took one too many liberties there, boy"?

I push off from the bottom step, out into nothing.

[applause] It is 1932, the age of jazz and prohibition.

Ulysses has been found obscene by the American courts.

You can't buy it lawfully.

All you can get are contraband copies of the Paris edition or pirated excerpts published by an actual pornographer.

Then a young publisher, Bennett Cerf, spots in Ulysses an opportunity to make a name for his new company, Random House.

He visits Joyce in Paris, secures the rights, and hires a leading lawyer, Morris Leopold Ernst.

But are you the same with The connections or seeing links? Yeah,

I don't know.

I think, so I run and you used to run and I recognize something similar that happens in my head when I'm running well is when I'm writing well.

And I think it's something like when they talk about state of flow.

And I find running very creative.

And I can use it.

If I've got a problem with what I'm writing and it's also the day and the week, I'll try and sort of prep for the run by just reminding, going over my notes or whatever, and then take that with me.

Okay, just enjoy that.