And so the Theatre Festival begins, with the most exotic of shows. Chances are you have never experienced anything like this – 40 traditional musicians all singing and playing the ancient songs of their native India. But it’s not just about the sound, there is much to catch the eye as well. The set, a cylindrical semi-circle, reaches nearly the full height of the Gaiety stage. Four stories high, red velvet cubicle upon red velvet cubicle like some giant kalaidescope, and within each one a unique musician. One by one the curtain of each cubicle is drawn back to reveal some new treasure, cross-legged, be-turbaned and dressed in white, sometimes adding to the ensemble, sometimes performing alone, but always part of something greater. All male, they range in age from the very old to the very young – the latter quite captivating. Clearly the songs, performed with elaborate hand gestures, are telling a story, but there’s no surtitles so read your programme beforehand if you want to know what they’re about, though that’s not really the point. The music comes from the soul, and has a genuine feeling of authenticity – no concessions to the western ear – and the presentation is intrinsically dramatic, though the presence of an almost dancing conductor seemed a bit unnecessary, and his relentless underscoring of the rhythmic sections with the hard sound of kharthals (castanets) became a bit grating. Nonetheless a brilliant glimpse of something totally different.
Project
Oh to be a teenager… The intro to this visceral, multi-award winning Flemish show features a perfect specimen of teenhood, all shiny leggings, denim and bouncy ponytail. With a spot-on mixture of gaucheness, supreme confidence and pity she warns us that watching them will make us feel old (it does) and fill us with envy (it does). Then she and her 12 noisy mates embark on a chaotic routine of crazy horseplay – teen spirit personified – repeated, often to quite hilarious effect, to different soundtracks. So we have the ballet version, the script version, the loved-up, male-only, props-only, stoner, mommy and daddy and finally the side-splitting supersized version. Performed with terrific energy by the edgy young cast, very astute and at times very very funny.
BUCK JONES AND THE BODY SNATCHERS
Ionad an Phiarsaigh
This is a great venue for this entertaining promenade show, where the audience follows the action from room to room of an atmospheric Georgian house – there’s even a courtyard and mini theatre out back. Billed as a historical romp, it does exactly what is says on the tin, as the eponymous (and pompous) magistrate Buck Jones pits himself against the heinous bodysnatchers, led by the notorious Larry Clinch. More panto than play, it abounds with double entendres, silly names and sillier disguises. Subplot piles upon subplot, with the busy cast double-jobbing with gusto. Enjoyable, undemanding fare from the pen of Ken Bourke, and tho the links between the scenes could have been stronger and the setting could have been exploited a bit more, the novelty value carries it along.
THE BIRDS
Gate Theatre
Everyone knows something of the story of The Birds: the strange gathering of large flocks that gradually start turning on people, attacking and ultimately killing them. In Conor McPherson’s version the unthinkable has already happened and we are left with the aftermath, a sort of post-apocalyptic nightmare inhabited by three strangers as the outside world disappears into oblivion. Some opening nighters were complaining about the slow pace and the lack of dramatics, but as someone who has neither seen the Hitchcock movie nor read the Daphne du Maurier story, I was fascinated by the whole thing. Instead of milking this fantastical premise for all its melodramatic possibilities, the playwright has chosen to largely forgo the fireworks and the histrionics and focus instead on what becomes of us when the extraordinary becomes the norm, how people thrown together in a desperate bid for survival become a sort of surrogate family, and how tensions and jealousies still seep through. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of high drama – there are, particularly in the second act – and even some light relief, but the overall feeling is one of mood and atmosphere and the dark inner workings of the soul. The lighting is murky and the fluttering soundscape is menacing and oppressive and at times quite scary. With actors of the calibre of Sinead Cusack and Ciaran Hinds, expectations are bound to be high, but the performances are so fine that the next day I found myself thinking about these characters as though I actually knew them.
THE CRUMB TRAIL
Project
There’s a Hansel and Gretel for kids at The Ark; Pan Pan’s The Crumb Trail is the adult version. It’s already played to rave reviews in New York and Dusseldorf, and we’re treated to excerpts of said reviews before the cast introduce themselves – no illusions there, then, as we are led into the dark heart of the Brothers Grimm. Post-modern and deconstruction are words that have become increasingly clichéd, but they’re hard to avoid around Pan Pan, as this fairytale of abandonment is cracked open to reveal an even murkier agenda, interspersed with moments of utter frivolity. Snatches of Hamlet and a particularly queasy dose of skype sex vie with mad dancing, discourses on intelligent tights or the notion of transforming a discarded womb into a dreamcatcher. A clever mix of hi-tech and lo-tech combines live music with the shadow-like filmed version, You Tube out-takes and video, while old-fashioned overhead projectors, framed by dried grass or bits of coloured paper, provide a very effective lighting design.
THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM
Peacock
This could almost be seen as a companion piece to Enda Walsh’s other play for Druid, The Walworth Farce: the intense claustrophobia, the incessant acting out of old history, a family locked in time, an outsider providing just the briefest possibility of change. But where The Walworth Farce was largely male, all vengeful anger and dirty chaos, this is female territory, all sponge cakes, pink shoes and backstabbing jealousy. And where The Walworth Farce was set in a dingy flat where the outside never seeped in, here a little fishing town exists beyond the sittingroom, where Ada heads off to her job in the cannery each day, Patsy the fishman stops compulsively at the front door with his box of fish and his garbled tidings, and the narrow streets with the houses leaning in on you become part of the collective imagery. But the rituals follow the same ordered precision, in this case the events of that fateful night some 40 years ago at the New Electric Ballroom, mecca for dreams and despair, and haunt of the Roller Royle with his gravity-defying quiff and the loaded promise of ‘you meet me after’. Donning the gaudy costumes of their long-lost youth, Breda and Clara relive their stories turn by turn, word for word, with their younger sister Ada torn between orchestrating and escaping.
Brilliant writing as always from Walsh, capturing the rhythms and poetics and dark humour of a strangely recognisable hyper-reality, and terrific acting, particularly from Rosaleen Linehan as the elderly Breda, who conveys all the yearnings and arrogance and sexual longings of a hot-blooded teenager with a simple shrug of the shoulder or curl of the lip.
RADIO MUEZZIN
Samuel Beckett Theatre
This is a strange kettle of fish. Another slice of eastern promise, it couldn’t be more different from The Manganiyar Seduction. Billed as documentary theatre, the emphasis is very much on the documentary side – which might work fine on the telly but makes for quite a dry piece of theatre. It is interesting though; the performers are part of the large community of Cairo Muezzins, who lead the Muslim call to prayer throughout the many mosques, and whose presence is regarded as one of the defining elements of the city. They’re under the spotlight because the government wants to streamline their activities, replacing the thousands of very individual voices with just 30 chosen Muezzins, whose sung prayers will be delivered by simultaneous broadcast – changing an entire way of life in one fell swoop. The three performers, one of whom is blind, tell us something of their history and take us through their daily rountine, while jumbled images of the city play on video screens behind them. The most affecting moments are when they sing the prayers, their voices fluctuating and diverging. And the most telling moments are the cultural differences – no women to be seen, and everything officially overseen by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
TALES OF BALLYCUMBER
Abbey Theatre
Sebastian Barry’s new play certainly looks pretty and sounds lovely, but apart from that there’s not too much going on. We’re greeted by an unseasonal sweep of daffodils, and then the curtain rises to reveal – more daffodils. In fact, so many that there’s not much space left for performing. That’s part of the problem, in a play that hovers between ghostly apparitions and the clouded reality of some lost corner of south Wicklow, forever caught in some kind of time warp. At the centre is Nicholas, a lonely Protestant bachelor farmer – we know he’s Protestant because he gives out about Catholics – whose innocent relationship with young neighbour Evans is thrown into question when Evans is found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The opening scene, where Nicholas and Evans chat around the kitchen table, Nicholas giving advice and telling stories, is full of promise, but what then evolves is just too unlikely to be in any way convincing. Through a series of short scenes we meet some of the other characters in Nicholas’s life – his sister Tania, Evans’ father Andrew, but it’s as if they just don’t make a connection (with each other or with the audience) in any meaningful way. Some of the dialogue is quite beautiful, poetic and evocative, but it’s more like speeches than conversation, and the language is definitely from another era. In fact everything about the play feels old-fashioned, including the directing. In spite of valiant efforts from Stephen Rea as Nicholas and Aaron Monaghan as Evans, the best thing about this production – possibly because he has the best lines – is Liam Carney’s Andrew, a late addition to the cast.
FREEFALL
Project
There’s terrific attention to detail in this latest show from The Corn Exchange. Taking a step back from the noisy boisterousness of their trademark commedia style, Freefall is a thoughtful, funny and moving piece of theatre which sees a middle aged man struggling to make sense of his disintegrating life through the fog of memory and an imperfectly working brain. It’s the morning after the night before, with a vengeance – his marriage has just ended, his body has given up on him, and we view his imploding situation through the bewildered eyes of someone who can no longer communicate with the outside world. The narrow focus of a tiny video camera cleverly recreates his new reality, while scenes from his past, both recent and long gone, show the shaping of his life. The very effective use of simple props – plastic curtains and hospital trolleys – and sound effects performed live by the cast, even down to the warbled whistling of a mobile phone, gives the show an added dimension, but there’s definitely room for cutting some of the more superfluous scenes.
