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14 | THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Culture
When Lisa McGee was 13, she wrote a
letter to Chelsea Clinton. It was Novem-
ber 1995, and President Bill Clinton was
scheduled to visit the city of Derry in a
show of support for Northern Ireland’s
peace process. It would be the first time
a sitting president of the United States
had come to the troubled region.
In an interview, McGee, the creator of
“Derry Girls,” recalled that she saw an
opportunity to make a new friend. So
she wrote to the president’s daughter to
invite her to see a film at the city’s
Strand movie theater.
“She never replied,” said McGee, now
- “The innocence of that. Living in this
place that’s violent and scary, but we
were these eejits running about writing
letters to Chelsea Clinton.”
That missed connection makes it into
the final episode of the second season of
“Derry Girls,” a hit sitcom streaming on
Netflix. But, in a tweak to history, the
show’s Catholic schoolgirl heroines —
Erin, Orla, Clare and Michelle — invite
Chelsea Clinton to sample the wave ma-
chine at the local pool instead. (“I hope
she remembers her swimming cap,”
Orla worries. “They’ve got dead strict
... ”)
In the “Derry Girls” universe, the
mundane and the profound sit side by
side. Cease-fires, bombings and kidnap-
ping are given equal narrative weight
with teenage crushes, field trips and vis-
its to the chip shop, which is to say that
they are barely given weight at all.
In the first episode of the first season,
a character is distraught at news of a
bomb on a bridge, because it means she
can’t get to the tanning salon. In a subse-
quent scene, when the girls’ school bus
is stopped by British soldiers, one of
them stares down the barrel of their ma-
chine guns — and flirts. In the second
season, a scuffle at a school prom is in-
tercut with euphoric street scenes after
the 1994 cease-fire by the Irish Republi-
can Army.
McGee based the show on her own ex-
perience of growing up in Derry. The
city, which is also called Londonderry by
unionists who want the region to remain
part of the United Kingdom, was a mael-
strom of sectarian violence and adoles-
cent angst in the 1990s.
She remembered key events in “the
Troubles,” as the conflict was called,
“like they were yesterday,” she said: the
1994 cease-fire, Mr. Clinton’s visit and
the 1998 Omagh bombing. “But a lot of it
for me was just having to go a different
way to school because of a bomb scare,”
she said.
“Derry Girls” premiered on Channel 4
in Britain in January 2018 and was an in-
stant hit: It became the most watched
television show in Northern Ireland
since records began in 2002, with a 64
percent audience share. On Netflix, it at-
tracted a global audience, including
from India, Pakistan, Mexico and the
United States.
In April 2018, Gleann Doherty, a tour
operator in Derry, added a “Derry Girls”
guided walk to his repertoire. A 90-
minute tour around the show’s loca-
tions, it was particularly popular with
fans from the United States, Canada and
New Zealand, he said in a telephone in-
terview, adding that many international
viewers said they watched the show
with subtitles to decode the accent and
slang.
“It’s now my second most popular
tour, after the Bogside tour,” Doherty
said. “Now for every ticket I sell for the
City Walls tour, I sell five for ‘Derry
Girls.’”
The show has been commissioned by
Channel 4 for a third season, which
McGee is writing now. In time, she said,
she would like to take the story up to the
Good Friday Agreement that ended the
conflict in 1998.
What makes “Derry Girls” stand out
is the light touch it uses to deal with the
heavy hand of history.
“We couldn’t present that dreary
Northern Ireland again, where it’s al-
ways men in leather jackets, every-
thing’s gray, and nobody has a sense of
humor,” McGee said.
Seamas O’Reilly, a writer whose
memoir about growing up in Derry in
the 1990s, “Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?,”
will be published in March 2020, called
the show “the first bit of good publicity
that Derry has had in 20 years.”
“It shows it as a very boring, normal,
mundane place — with teenagers, dis-
cos and funny neighbors,” he said. “It’s
not like Sarajevo with everyone sleep-
ing on sandbags. It captures very well
that Derry is a chirpy, well-meaning
place, but it also has a legacy of so much
trauma.”
The second season ends with archive
footage of Mr. Clinton’s 1995 speech in
Derry: “You have so much more to gain
by working together than by drifting
apart. Have the patience to work for a
just and lasting peace.”
It was a deliberate choice, McGee
said, in light of the current turmoil in
Northern Ireland over Britain’s impend-
ing departure from the European Union,
known as Brexit.
Derry is on the border with the Re-
public of Ireland, which is a member of
the bloc; and in the 2016 referendum, 78
percent of voters in Foyle, the parlia-
mentary district that contains Derry, fa-
vored remaining in the European Union.
Many fear that the return of a hard bor-
der between Northern Ireland and the
Irish Republic will inflame sectarian
tensions and threaten stability.
“There’s always a belief in your head,
when you’re from there, that it could
turn, because you’ve seen it turn be-
fore,” McGee said. “It’s made me double
down on how important peace is.”
The killing of Lyra McKee, a journal-
ist, by a dissident republican group
called the New I.R.A. during riots in the
Creggan area of the city in April, was a
grim marker of the city’s current prob-
lems and the dangerous disaffection
they can breed. Foyle has an unemploy-
ment rate of 5.2 percent, more than
twice the average in Northern Ireland.
In 2017, Derry was listed last of 57
United Kingdomcities surveyed by the
accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoop-
ers in its “Good Growth for Cities” re-
port.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the peo-
ple of Derry this angry,” McGee said of
the aftermath of the murder. “There was
a very clear message being sent: that
we weren’t going back.”
The famous mural in the city that
reads “You are now entering Free
Derry” and features in the opening
scenes of “Derry Girls” was graffitied
with the words “Not in our name. R.I.P.
Lyra” in the days after the shooting.
“To paint over a dissident republican
slogan is a very, very brave thing to do,”
McGee said. “And it’s ordinary people
doing it. That has never happened be-
fore.”
The city has a new mural now, too. In
January, a 30-foot-high painting of the
sitcom’s lead characters was painted on
the side of Badgers Bar on Orchard
Street. It’s where Doherty ends his
“Derry Girls” tour, and it has become a
magnet for tourists and a symbol of
pride for city dwellers.
“I’m just determined to tell positive
stories about where I come from,”
McGee said. “What happened in Creg-
gan that night — nobody wanted it, the
people who did it represent nobody. I
feel it’s my responsibility to show Derry
for what it really is.”
Adolescent angst amid cease-fires
LONDON
A light touch with history
informs a sitcom set in the
’90s in Northern Ireland
BY ALICE JONES
HAT TRICK PRODUCTIONS
The creator of “Derry Girls,” Lisa McGee.
Now 38, she grew up in Derry.
JEFF SPICER/GETTY IMAGES
HAT TRICK PRODUCTIONS
Above, Nicola Coughlan as Clare and
Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Erin, fore-
ground, from left, in “Derry Girls.” From
far left, Ms. Jackson, and President Bill
Clinton visiting Derry in 1995.
INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS IRELAND, VIA GETTY IMAGES
It was as a young and, by her own de-
scription, “green” opera student at the
Aspen Music Festival and School in Col-
orado that the soprano Renée Fleming
honed her art over several summers.
Now she’s coming back to help run it.
The festival announced this week that
Ms. Fleming, one of the world’s leading
singers, and the conductor Patrick Sum-
mers, the artistic and music director of
the Houston Grand Opera, would take
over and redesign its opera program as
the program’s new artistic directors.
“I always thought I would come back
to Aspen,’’ Ms. Fleming said in a joint
telephone interview with Mr. Summers.
“It was my escape fantasy over the
years.”
Ms. Fleming, who will continue to per-
form, said she was drawn to the oppor-
tunity to reimagine the program to bet-
ter prepare young singers for today’s in-
tensely competitive, rapidly changing
opera environment.
“Singers in the future — not only do
they have to be able to sing a wide varie-
ty of repertoire, even outside the genre
of classical music — they have to market
themselves, they have to really almost
manage themselves,” she said.
Mr. Summers added that he, too, be-
lieved that “the future of opera is going
to look very, very different from what we
matured into” — and that training pro-
grams needed to reflect that.
The Aspen program, which is being
renamed Aspen Opera Theater and Vo-
calArts, draws about 50 graduate, post-
graduate and pre-professional singers
each summer. Tuition, room and board
cost $9,500 for the eight-week program,
but many students get financial aid.
Next year, approximately 14 singers will
be named Renée Fleming Artists; their
costs will be fully covered, and they will
work closely with Ms. Fleming.
Ms. Fleming’s new role in Aspen,
where she has taught in the past, is com-
ing as her career has entered a new
phase in recent years.
Even as she has stepped away from
some of her best-known operatic roles,
she has remained active in concert halls
and on stages around the world. In re-
cent months, she has opened the Shed in
New York, appearing with Ben
Whishaw in “Norma Jeane Baker of
Troy”; appeared in the musical “The
Light in the Piazza” in London; given a
televised outdoor concert in Munich;
and sung the premiere of “The Bright-
ness of Light,” a song cycle by the com-
poser Kevin Puts, who is also writing a
work for the Metropolitan Opera in New
York that she is scheduled to appear in.
But she has also been taking on off-
stage positions — recently as creative
consultant at Lyric Opera of Chicago
and artistic adviser at the John F. Ken-
nedy Center for the Performing Arts in
Washington. (It has been a big summer
for veteran singers taking educational
roles: Opera Theater of St. Louis an-
nounced last week that the soprano Pa-
tricia Racette would become the artistic
director of its young artist programs.)
Ms. Fleming said that she had fond
memories of her student days at Aspen,
and of biking each day to nearby moun-
tains, the Maroon Bells. It was in Aspen
that she first performed the role of the
Countess in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figa-
ro,” with which she later made her debut
at the Metropolitan and other top opera
houses. And she praised the program for
helping her develop as a singer.
“Somebody said to me when I was
here, ‘You’re going to be a great Mar-
schallin one day.’ And I said, ‘What’s a
Marschallin?’”
She soon learned: The Marschallin,
the bittersweet leading lady of Strauss’s
“Der Rosenkavalier,” became one of her
defining roles.
Renée Fleming now an opera leader
Star soprano will help
to reshape summer agenda
at Aspen Music Festival
BY MICHAEL COOPER
ELLE LOGAN
Renée Fleming, far left, teaching a master
class in July in Aspen, Colo., with the
soprano Victoria Lawal, and above, per-
forming there in 1988.
CHARLES ABBOTT
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