DUBLIN THEATRE FESTIVAL REVIEWS

Reviews today looks at Black Watch, La Omisión de la Familia Colemanand While We Were Holding It Together

Black Watch

RDS

Black Watchopens with a festive fanfare, the first of the many ritual devices that will be employed in this remarkable representation of the history of the Scottish Black Watch Regiment. However, the celebratory tone is soon shattered by the sound of shell-fire. This is no triumphant tale of heroic glory, no romantic commemoration of male bonding and national pride. In fact, Black Watchis a complex study of real life stories that refuses any easy accommodation with the brutality of war, the intricacy of political conflict, or the indefinable ties that bind communities - like soldiers - together.

This National Theatre of Scotland production, internationally feted since its premiere in 2006, employs every theatrical and technical element at its disposal to create a total immersion in the dramatic world. John Tiffany's stunning production is an assault on the senses; using marching songs and fall-out formations, multimedia imagery and reportage, real testimony and fictional sequences, aerial choreography and contortion tricks, to create a piece of theatre that is rich and imaginative and absolutely absorbing.

Movement director Steven Hogget elicits an incredible uniformity of movement from the magnificent ensemble cast, whose physical performances both underscore and interrogate the corporeal essence of what it means to be a soldier. While physical strength is objectified in a brilliantly choreographed costume scene that draws attention to the fetishised soldier's body through the evolution of the battalion's uniforms, the profoundly moving Letters from Homesequence presents an entirely different outlet of expression for the soldiers, one that - through silence and movement - allows them to momentarily discard the hard masks of masculinity.

However, the contrast between the epic beauty of the dance sequences and the violence of war is more unsettling than emotionally manipulative. Gregory Burke's sparse, suggestive text never allows us to get close enough to the individual personalities - their personal lives, their motivations - to empathise with them and, combined with the traverse setting — in which the partially lit audience is always aware of its own role - we are always kept at a distance.

This enforced aloofness denies us any catharsis in the crescendo of the extended closing scene. But this is not a complaint. In fact, it is a compliment, because this extraordinary production, uses theatre not merely to represent this alien world of ritual and self-sacrifice to the uninitiated, but to interrogate our preconceptions of that world. We may indeed be able to bear witness, but we can never really understand. Until Sat. SARA KEATING

La Omisión de la Familia Coleman

Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

"Come with me and you can help me clean my dentures." So speaks the mighty Argentinian matriarch at the centre of Claudio Tolcachir's alluring, somewhat grotesque drama of a dysfunctional family, La Omisión de la Familia Coleman, which kicks off a brief season of Latin-American theatre at Dún Laoghaire's hospitable Pavilion Theatre. Tolcachir, who wrote and directed the piece (one which feels like a remarkably tight and fresh improvisation but has in fact been touring international theatre festivals and garnering awards for the past four years), populates his play with five characters on the cusp of seismic change, who approach their impending fates with the insouciance of a family of bears off to picnic in the woods. And it is this sense of foreboding that gives tension to an otherwise impudently casual and brutally humorous drama. Capturing the mood of cruel inevitability, the viciously indifferent grandmother (Araceli Dvoskin) tells the family a story of a young bride who came to her for advice about what to wear on her wedding night, a flannel robe or a negligee cut down to her navel. Matter a damn, responds granny, no matter what you wear, they're going to f**k you anyway.

By the end of one hour and 40 minutes of intense and rapid Spanish fired between a confident and ultra-natural cast (the dialogue is translated on surtitles), the family Coleman, hardly the most robust of institutions in the first place (emotionally challenged son sleeping with his mother, promiscuous daughter hanging by a thread to middle-class respectability), has entirely dissolved, and it is the weakest and most vulnerable family member who is left to face the void. Maybe this complex, lithe and resonant drama of marginalised, deadpan kin, living on the charity of their one apparently "average" child, is some kind of metaphor for a country which appears to have experienced the rapid social and political change to which we in this country are no strangers.

Funny, dark and engaging, and performed with enormous ease on a simple set littered with the detritus of poverty, this strangely appealing piece of theatre, with its hospital beds, incest, emotional blackmail and knickers drying on the oxygen tank, is a fascinating, speedy glimpse of the Argentine psyche. Until Sun HILARY FANNIN

While We Were Holding It Together

Project Arts Centre

The auditorium is in thick darkness and we hear disembodied voices in the void. Intermittent sensory deprivation of the audience is part of the purpose of this game of make-believe, presented by director Ivana Muller's award-winning company in a German-Dutch co-production.

When visibility returns, we are asked to fill in the gaps, to contribute missing information, as five figures are motionless on a bare stage, holding their positions for over an hour. Locked in a tableau vivant, they move their lips and use language to conjure up images and possible scenarios, uttering sentences that all begin with the words "I imagine . . ." "I imagine I am a fox", one speaker says, arm outstretched. "I imagine we are all beggars." Or, bodies excavated by archaeologists. Or statues in a museum. Or members of a rock band. Or terrorists in a hostage siege. Or the last creatures on earth. Or - you guessed - performers in a tableau vivant.

In the spaces between words, I imagine it's a homage to Happy Daysover at the Abbey, in a clever piece of festival programming. I imagine these artists must have been force-fed Pirandello in their youth. Fade to black.

I imagine that it might never end, as there is no reason that it should. By its own internal logic, this hermetic, self-interpreted performance about the nature of performance should continue for as long as the audience is content to remain seated, watching these bodies, inventing meanings for them, laughing occasionally at the disjunction between their words and their frozen forms. Or it could continue even without an audience. I imagine that's a good option . . .

But, cheating a little, it's the performers who withdraw from our view, leaving only their voices on soundtrack. "Are we now only thoughts?" "No, we are still an image." I imagine they don't realise how laboured this is, what a cul-de-sac of self-referentiality they're trapped in. I imagine it seemed original while it was being work-shopped. Fade to black. Until Sat HELEN MEANY