REVIEW

PETER CRAWLEYreviews Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summerat the Project Arts Centre

For the first production of Rough Magic's 25th anniversary year, associate director Tom Creed has chosen to stage not a play so much as a score. Michel Tremblay's Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, as breezy a piece as its title suggests, turns love into a liturgy, making the inhabitants of a three-storey Montreal apartment building into a congregation. Gathering on their balconies to worship the moon, they raise their voices in praise, in anguish, in impassioned prayer.

In both design and delivery, it is as structurally challenging as a work can be. The set, beautifully realised by Paul O’Mahony, rises up in vertical columns. The voices have a similar architectural precision, following a blueprint of unison chants, overlapping speech, sombre refrains or trickling heterophony. One or two missteps and you could end up not with the temple of secular worship Tremblay has designed, but a tower of babble.

That Creed’s production works at all then is admirable in itself, but that it works so well, overcoming the whiff of pretentiousness to become a genuinely moving experience, makes it a more towering achievement. It may take a moment to adjust to the responsorial rhythms, to untangle individual speakers from the chorus, but the marvellous 11-strong ensemble allows each lusty desire, each heartbreak, each hateful outcry to emerge distinct from the din.

The compromise is in character. On the top floor we find libidinous young lovers (Aoife Duffin and Diarmuid Noyes) and a lesbian couple drifting towards contempt (Jane Brennan and Eleanor Methven). On the mezzanine there’s a jilted gay man and his pious mother (Ronan Leahy and Áine Ní Mhuirí), next door to a suffocated young woman and her amputee father (Cathy Belton and Barry McGovern). A stoic gay man and his Aids-suffering partner (Darragh Kelly and Arthur Riordan) share the ground floor with a grieving widow (Ruth Hegarty). It’s an unconvincing panoply, but these are the people in your neighbourhood.

Tremblay strips away their individuality further by mirroring his characters’ pains: Belton and Kelly remonstrate against their self-sacrifice at the same time in the same words, while Leahy and Hegarty recall their absent partners with lock-step reflections. Creed’s production understands the succour of ritual, though. The humane inclusiveness of this church recognises that in these faithless times individual griefs need a new choir.

Unlike the heavy idioms of the Scots version, Brian Delaney’s new translation is sparing with understated colloquialisms. The piece is still heightened, though, matching the lull of mantra with the gut-punch surge of a requiem. Here Brennan and Methven are burningly poignant, while Riordan and Kelly bring the mass towards a stirring sense of true communion. Until March 28