Ship Street Revisited

Ship Street, Drogheda

To those who say you can’t go back, comes this second riposte from Upstate Theatre Project, which floods the present with the past. In an accomplished artistic rehousing of Drogheda’s vacated Ship Street, whose two neat rows of terraced houses lead straight towards the banks of the Boyne (unfortunately a regular visitor to the neighbourhood), director Paul Hayes and writer Aidan Harney take the oral histories of Upstate’s Shared Heritage Programme and place them in the mouths of more than 50 characters, ably served by a community cast.

“The doors were never locked,” recalls one woman in a post-war apron. “You could walk into any house.” That, precisely, is the gift Hayes affords to the audience. Immediately transported back through the decades, we are introduced by a young local chaperone to a street where children play and stories spill from each door step. Four women clean a living room, for instance, trading gossip, advice and street reminiscences, and although there’s more labour than such a tiny space demands, nor anything to allay the suspicion that several people are sharing the memories of just one person, the sequence moves with the associative rhythms of memory, thickening with detail.

The obvious danger of such immersive, site-specific theatre is to render it as an historical theme park, one that the street itself helps to avoid with its pleasingly jarring aesthetic: one roof has a satellite dish, for instance, while at least two others are caving in.

For the most part, Harney is similarly sensitive not to impose an artificial shape on the found text. No embellishment is necessary, for instance, for the shortest, saddest of opening lines, delivered by a solitary elderly woman (heartbreakingly played by Anne Nolan) in the grip of dementia: “I was engaged once.” To play with the details, designer Kieran McNulty accumulates clocks and mirrors around her with more pointed symbolism than simple character eccentricity. The whole project, he reminds you, is a game of time and reflection.

In its wittiest moments it is also one of projection, nowhere more than with the impassive face of a brilliantly laconic sailor named Lark (Michael Duffy), now moored in conversation with redundant fishermen, but with the unblinking stare of someone still lost at sea.

Through it all we get a picture of industry, of community, but most vividly one of people; alive to the emasculation of brewery layoffs, the unofficial fashion show of Sunday morning Mass, or, in one of Harney’s most lingering tales, the difference between duties and dreams. Recalling his hard efforts to put bread on the table, while encountering someone revelling in the chance to photograph a spider in dawn’s dew, a retired factory worker puts it succinctly. “One of us was mad.”

Run ended