Reviews

Irish Times writers review Dublin Theatre Festival events.

Festen

Gate Theatre, Dublin

Peter Crawley

Unlikely material can be adapted to suit the theatre, but can the theatre be adapted to suit unlikely material? This is the question posed by Selina Cartmell's ambitious production of Festen for the Gate theatre, which, from its first unsettling moments seems intent on subverting this theatre's quaint traditions.

A strange, starched figure advises us to switch off our mobiles, before calmly walking on to the stage. In any other theatre this wouldn't seem radical, but beside this handsome proscenium stage it is an act of rupture - one that beckons a night in which surreal and stark horrors constantly break through a veneer of formality. The celebration has already begun.

The founding text of the ascetic Dogme 95 film movement, Festen has always had a certain kinship with the stage. There is as much revenge tragedy as psychodrama at play during the 60th birthday party of hotelier and paterfamilias Helge (Owen Roe) when eldest son Christian (Ronan Leahy), spurred into action following the suicide of his twin sister, brings shocking revelations of incestuous abuse.

Something is clearly rotten in Denmark, but there is a grim humour as indictments and refutations crackle across ceremonial toasts and jaunty Danish party songs and decorum refuses to break down completely. As the night wears on each fresh horror comes with a sinister tolling: the toastmaster's clink of silver on crystal.

Leahy's Christian is a conflicted protagonist, easily cowed, but urged by his downtrodden allies among the hotel staff to be a revolutionary hero. Roe meanwhile makes for a more complicated tyrant, facilitating slalom-pole switches between jocular warmth and brutal control. It's a vital contradiction, one that preserves the story's intrigue: is Christian all that reliable? Among the large cast, Rory Keenan's explosive brother Michael, Cathy Belton as his free-spirited wife and Simone Kirby as his fretful sister each distinguish themselves with similar pivots in behaviour: all of them in various states of collapse. David Elridge's script, on the other hand, feels less dynamic; a faithful but flat adaptation where lines often land with the dull thud of literal translation.

Cartmell seems more occupied with context than text, however, spilling action into the auditorium while creating new rules for stage behaviour: characters may peer at each other across the long dinner table at impossible angles, while scenes criss-cross the same space but along different timeframes. Like Giles Cadle's set (which apes the fixtures of the auditorium), such scenes don't always move fluidly. That suggests that though the Gate may be keen to experiment, its physical constraints can only bend so far.

With enough transgression, Christian knows, stiff formality must eventually buckle. But when a defeated Roe trudges through the auditorium and so few people turn to watch him, it illustrates the tension underlying the production. Despite Cartmell's challenging and thoughtful attempts to budge us from custom, some people are still sticklers for tradition. Until Oct 14

La Tempête (The Tempest)

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin

Eileen Battersby

Shakespeare meets Star Wars in this pretentious 4D Art production and the central issue is deciding who wins - theatre or technology? This show performed in French comes from Quebec laden with awards, but sadly one of Shakespeare's most beautiful, profound and moral works is overshadowed by the technically impressive wizardry. Much of the poetry and poignancy is lost in what becomes a visual bombardment. Another problem is the strident, warlike performance of Richard Thériault's Prospero who never conveys the sense of having come to wisdom through loss.

His awareness of the hollowness of revenge is reduced to a footnote, losing the heart of the play.

Yet before his harsh, miscast Prospero begins to oppress the action, the production does achieve a powerful opening with a magnificent storm sequence. The backdrop is a storm ravaged night sky. High-tech effects, shimmering shapes and inspired lighting work by Alain Lortie - the lighting throughout is superb - establishes an atmosphere of tension rather than magic. Michel Smith's score is surreal and water-like, and true to the essential strangeness of the play with its time shifts. The island, physically evoked by Anick La Bissonnière's layered set over which the actors clamber as if on a beach, is a prison.

Some grace is provided by Maude Campeau's enchanting traditional Miranda whose loneliness undermines her natural delight in life. Campeau and her young suitor, Ferdinand, played by Pierre Etienne Rouillard, succeed in articulating through their movements, the resilience of youth. Also convincing are the old reliables, Stéphano and Trinculo, the drunken sailors, played with traditional zeal by Jacques Girard and Robert Toupin.

Although the dancer-like Manon Brunelle worked hard performing both Ariel and Caliban, her attempts to define the two characters all too often merges into a Gollum-like presence straight out of The Lord of the Rings. Her Caliban never achieves the tragic dimension intended by Shakespeare, nor does Brunelle express the playful malevolence of Ariel. She glowers and struts, yet there is no personality.

This is true of the entire performance; the laboured use of virtual screen-generated images for the rest of the cast succeeds only partly. All too often, the huge faces generated on to the stage backdrop appear comic and grotesque. Cold and efficient, this exhausting high tech show has no emotional register, losing Shakespeare's ironies and pathos in an unsubtle multimedia web. Until Oct 7

The Vacationers

Gaiety Theatre

Helen Meany

In Gorky's post-Chekovian satire on the nouveau riches, the holidaymakers love to talk: torrents of rhetoric fill the summer afternoons as they go drinking, picnicking, and lusting on their newly acquired country properties. The hot air they generate is part of the point, but a lot of its impact was lost on the opening night of this production from Omsk State Drama Theatre, since the task of following the Russian dialogue was made almost impossible by the unco-ordinated surtitles. Halting repeatedly on a single sentence, then galloping through reams of text to catch up, at times the translations were so badly out of synch that the audience tittered - which can't have been easy for the cast.

Even without this added obstacle to concentration on the stage action, Gorky challenges our sympathy in this work (usually translated as Summerfolk), written in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1904, amid accelerating social change. Through its depiction of the new middle class, with oafish men such as the lawyer Bassov and the jaded, cynical writer, Shalimar, the text spends a lot of time showing us just how unattractive these characters are, in their unappeasable search for instant gratification. ("Man is first and foremost a zoological phenomenon" wanting only "to eat, drink and have a woman.") Only Maria Lvovna, a doctor with radical impulses and Varvara, Bassov's isolated, elegant wife, offer alternative perspectives, political and feminist, as each in her own way counters the men's relentless, all-pervasive misogyny.

In this production there isn't any compensating sense of atmospheric languor. Director Marchelli Evgeny Zhozefovich takes his holiday-home owners as far from the decorous Chekovian dacha as possible: here the cherry orchard has been bulldozed without a backward glance and the stripped white stage has a crude, temporary air, not so much unfurnished as unfinished, as if the cowboy builder is still waiting to be paid.

In a deliberately brash performance style, the ensemble of 21 main characters - engineers, lawyers, local officials, third-rate poets, frustrated wives - act out their desires with huge physical gestures: boorish, boozy men wrestle each other and grab at the women, lovemaking takes the form of brutal attack, and their frustrations and discontent are expressed by jumping and screaming. While more subtlety informs the final act, in which each character pontificates on a stage as the others form an audience, it's too late. "It's not important", Shalimar concludes wearily, and it's hard to argue with that.

Until Oct 7

Dublin Theatre Festival runs until Oct 14. For booking, see www.dublintheatrefestival.com or tel: 01-6778899