Rose Lawless by Isobel Henihan

for more paintings check out www.isobelhenihan.com

My Declaration

I’m Rose Lawless. I’m kind of a rich girl gone wrong. My pedigree is dark but dramatic. I’m the fallout of an illicit passion between a romanian street entertainer and an Irish diplomat’s wife. My life, like my art, is like the international scandal they could never manage to hush up. I sit on a barbed wire fence between heaven and hell and sing my blood red songs of longing and rage. Welcome to the Cabaret. This is my world. This is my roar!’

THE STORY OF ROSE LAWLESS

(A SYNOPSIS OF THE FILM SCRIPT AND NOVEL: ‘ROSE LAWLESS AND THE DAZZLING QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL,‘ A CABARET FAIRYTALE.)

Rose Lawless is a Cabaret singer,’ a rich girl gone wrong’. As she tells her audience, she ‘is the fallout of an illicit passion between an Irish diplomat’s wife and a romanian street entertainer.’

The illegitimate circumstances of her birth contain the seeds of her whole life’s quest to discover who she really is. The story reveals itself in fairytale form.

As she believes she was born to sing Cabaret, she addresses her readers like an audience, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen.’

She spends her early years in Paris living with her ‘wicked step-father’, mother and two brothers. Rose’s mother (to compensate for her daughter’s treatment at home and because of the particularly romantic circumstances of her conception) gives her the most aspirational upbringing possible.

She takes her to see street performers, brings her to art galleries, reads her the great poetry of history: She shares with her the great search for the meaning of Life through the eyes of History’s great visionaries.

In particular, she shows her the famous french painting, by Eugene Delacroix of Liberty Leading the People.

This painting is the central piece of work that informs and inspires the whole of Rose’s life – and also the whole story.

Molly Lawless tells her daughter about the struggle of the poor people of Paris for equality and freedom. She inspires her with the importance of being the inheritors of that struggle.

True to fairytale form, Rose’s mother dies when she is still a child. She is left in the cold desolation of her step-father’s home.

But through the despair, comes a quest to stay true to the upbringing her mother gave her: To remain faithful to a life of passionate quest for meaning. Because she is a child and this is a fairytale, the search for meaning manifests itself in a lifelong search to find her real father.

The struggle takes her on a long journey; from running away from Boarding school, to living in anarchists squats, to creating an outdoor circus of street entertainers outside the Louvre in Paris, called ‘The Circus of sewage rats under the sun’.

Her life is colourful and rebellious. She meets political idealists, environmentalists, spiritual seekers, men (she has many lovers). She pours the passion of her quest into her own beloved artform: Street entertaining.

This is the great love she shares with her unknown father.

And she comes to realise her own part in the caravan of humanity’s search for meaning.

Her life is also one of great pain. It is a pain symbolised by the anguish of her illegitimacy – and this illegitmacy is like a symbol of the painful birth of all History: A painful birth that all the great artists and visionaries were somehow trying to midwife through their work.

She comes to see art as the great midwife of History.

Through her experiences and relationships, she discoveries the loneliness of staying true to her this vision. And she realises the difficult choice in life of staying faithful to one’s inner voice and integrity.

Ultimately, she chooses integrity, and true to fairytale form, she endures to see the fulfillment of her life’s artistic aspirations. As she completes her life’s task, as in all quest stories, everything else falls into place. She sees the true meaning of the freedom her mother spoke to her about at the painting by Delacroix in the Louvre.

And she comes to see its place both in her whole life and in the march of History. She realises that as one person has the courage to follow life to its very edges to discover who they really are, then they have the power to liberate, not only themselves – but the world around them.

She meets the man whose destiny has been waiting to join hers – and she comes home to her own deepest longing as artist and woman – to birth her own child.