Dublin Theatre Festival reviews

The views of some Irish Times journalists on the Dublin Theatre Festival

Uncle Vanya

Gate Theatre

Great playwrights don't always make the best adaptors of great plays. They tend to translate the work as if they had written it themselves: Brecht's version of Riders to the Sea, for instance, reads as if Synge had written a Brecht play. But Brian Friel, in his version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, first produced at the Gate in 1998, did something startlingly different. He wrote it as if it were not a Chekhov play or a Friel play, but a Samuel Beckett play. Such is Friel's unerring touch that this bold move seems not just proper but utterly inevitable.

The reach from Beckett back to Chekhov is not so far, after all. Both give us people enduring in an entropic universe where politics and religion have lost their power to provide meaning. And Friel makes the connection, not through any radical changes in the mechanics of the play, but through his superb control of mood and tone. He pares the language down and cuts away all the fusty classicism that clings to literal translations. Where, for example, Vanya, in a standard translation, tells Elena that the blood of water nymphs runs through her veins, Friel has him call her a mermaid and urge her to take the plunge. But Friel also uses Beckett's tone to give us a humour that does not descend into farce and a sorrow that is not mere melancholy.

Staging Friel's version demands a certain reticence on a director's part, a recognition that the work of interpretation has already been done in the language and that the job at hand is to fully inhabit its nuances. Robin Lefevre's elegant production does just that. It is brilliantly cast, from Stella McCusker's serenely resigned Marina to Anthony Calf's perfect blend of charisma and self-loathing as Astrov, from Tom Hickey's touchingly absurd Telegin to Catherine Walker's icy Elena, and from John Kavanagh's pompous, self-pitying Serebryakov to Cathy Belton's movingly yearning Sonya. And at its core it has a career-defining performance from Owen Roe as Vanya, who uses his bear-like physicality to prise open a tender fragility, making each quality hold the other in check.

It would be interesting to see the stringency of Friel's text given a less opulently beautiful setting than Liz Ascroft creates. And it is possible to quibble with some decisions in the production: Astrov's lusty embrace of Elena in the last act, for example, is at odds with the resigned mood that Chekhov and Friel create. But this is in general an enthralling production that melts away the century that separates us from Uncle Vanya and gives us both its poise and its immediacy.

Until Oct 13

Fintan O'Toole

BLACKland

O'Reilly Theatre

BLACKland is a metaphor for the modern world, a world full of corruption, murder, child abuse, suicide, violence, pollution and war. It is a world where the ridiculous is real and real life is absurd. The Krétakör company's uncompromising vision is as uncomfortable and as compelling as such a paradox will allow.

BLACKland was devised by the Hungarian company from a series of news headlines received by director Árpád Schilling on his mobile phone over the course of six months. These headlines are displayed to the audience on a screen as text messages. They encompass statistics about Hungarian poverty, the rate of abortion, state-sanctioned neo-Nazi activities, and the actions of Hungary's army in Iraq. These headlines prompt and structure the chaotic scenes that unfold in the 90-minute performance.

In the clinical white light of a maternity ward (designed by Márton Ágh) the 13 elegantly dressed actors give birth to a world that burns visceral images on the brain. Many of these scenes are difficult to watch: the humiliation of naked men; the torture of prisoners; the violence that women will perpetrate against themselves before it is visited upon them.

Punctuating the often-disturbing scenes are choral harmonies, catchy rap rhythms, and popular songs, whose familiar upbeat tempos create a jarring juxtaposition that goes some way towards deflating an audience's discomfort, even with the dark, rewritten lyrics.

For some, this constant assault upon their senses and sensibilities might be disquieting, gratuitous, even offensive. For others, it is strangely hilarious. However, there is a particular moment towards the end of the play when the profound political purpose behind BLACKland reaches out to the audience on a personal level. But it is not when a cast member brings up the lights and proceeds to explain and interpret the "random dramaturgy" for the audience (and most especially, one has to laugh, for the critic).

It is when one of the ensemble asks an audience member to film him torturing three men, while a musician singing a rousing nursery rhyme asks us to join in. It is in this uncomfortable moment that the audience is forced to recognise its own complicity: its willingness to sit back and laugh at humanity's cruelty, to applaud violence, to clap along as a man is castrated. It is for this forced recognition that BLACKland is a truly remarkable and profoundly political piece of theatre. It is difficult but essential viewing. Until Sun

Sara Keating

Radio Macbeth

Project Arts Centre

Some plays stay with you, their memories growing both more vivid and distended, yet never loosening their hold. For Anne Bogart, director of New York's SITI, one suspects that Macbeth is such a play. "The experience was frightening but compelling," she once wrote of seeing it as a school kid. "I didn't understand the play, but I knew instantly that I would spend my life in pursuit of this remarkable universe." Why that journey has led her ensemble to an American radio studio, circa 1940, for what seems to be a rehearsal of the play (without a director), materialising in the semi-darkness, is not immediately apparent. But if life is a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing, the acute silence that begins this production - charging the atmosphere rather than deadening the air - sharpens our attention for what's to come.

As the actors take the space, clattering from backstage, locating their prompt books and rehearsing their own tensions, the universe of Macbeth is suggested not through specifics of the stage - which is almost bare - but in the wide-open space. Every Shakespeare play is a palimpsest, its performances inscribed and roughly erased in our minds, but in its sepia tones and self-reflexive wiliness, Radio Macbeth encourages us to mingle our memories with our present, watching both like a double exposure.

Bogart is clearly playing games with the theatre: her actors are playing actors playing characters. The squabbling, competition and ambitions that flare between the members of the radio troupe not only refract the concerns of Macbeth, but also, you suspect, those of SITI's ensemble. That might seem dreadfully self-involved, were it not for the fact that, following last week's bobrauschenbergamerica, festival junkies may already feel a relationship with these fine performers.

Ellen Lauren assays both her lead actress and Lady Macbeth roles with icy composure and gradually fraying nerves, while Will Bond, playing a boozy ham with his eye on the lead role, underscores the politics of the text. Stephen Webber is solid and still as Macbeth, often held in a frozen spotlight, delivering his speeches with clarity but not conviction. Intriguingly, in a production of artifice, it is Kelly Maurer as all three witches, stirring a coffee cup rather than a cauldron, who seems truly in command.

For an experimental theatre company, SITI actually treats the text (edited down to 90 minutes or so) with more reverence than the production. The stage devices, for instance, are inconsistent: if the actors produce all sound effects, from tolling bells to clashing swords, Darron L West's soundtrack is a distraction.

Bogart never maps out the universe of Macbeth, but she opens our ears to its echoes. In a radio studio, at least, sound and fury signify everything. Until Sat

Peter Crawley

Minor Matters

The Ark

By choosing to have the audience seated behind the stage curtain just inches from the performance space, Junges Ensemble Stuttgart from Germany created an intimate setting for the second show in the family season of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Right from the start, the Swiss actor and musician Peter Rinderknecht engaged his young audience with the same superb subtlety that he displayed in Portofino Ballade, his wonderful show about a father and son performed in the Ark in 2004.

This time, the story is about a farmer, and Rinderknecht asks the children in the audience to help him decide what animals and tools he needs for the unsophisticated farm he creates inside his accordion box. Rinderknecht continues to engage the children admirably as he asks them to make animal sounds and then later chooses names of children in the audience for his wife and the three children they have. The real beauty of Minor Matters comes both from Rinderknecht's skills as a storyteller and his slightly disrespectful way of connecting with the children in the audience.

The story ends sadly, as the farmer's wife and children leave him to go to live in the town, and the farmhouse is destroyed in a fire. Rinderknecht himself becomes the homeless man and we realise that's who he was at the start of the play. "Is that story about you?," one child asks in astonishment, so convinced is he by the tale. But rather than leaving the young audience depressed, this talented and sensitive actor manages to invoke in this sophisticated young audience a sense of sympathy towards others.

Sylvia Thompson