Reviews

Irish Times writers review the latest offerings from the arts world.

Operation Easter, Kilmainham Gaol

There are good reasons why representations of the Easter Rising in the Irish theatre, from Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars to Denis Johnston's The Scythe and the Sunset to Des Bishop and Arthur Riordan's recent Shooting Gallery, have tended towards scepticism. One is political: artists less than enamoured of the State taking pot-shots at its founding myth. The other is aesthetic: since the Rising was itself so self-consciously theatrical, adding another layer of drama makes hyperbole almost inescapable.

For playwrights wanting to take a more sympathetic view of the rebels, therefore, questions of form are uppermost. How, they have to ask, can you temper the self-dramatising gestures of the rebel leaders without at the same time undercutting the heroism of their sacrifice? The answer, in the relevant parts of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's epic Non-Stop Connolly Show and in Tom Murphy's The Patriot Game, lies in some variation on Brechtian alienation effects, using framing devices and discontinuous narratives to achieve a sense of distance. Donal O'Kelly's Operation Easter, staged by Calypso Productions in the resonant setting of Kilmainham Gaol, adopts a broadly similar approach.

The first thing to be noted is that the gaol itself is little more than a venue. Staging a play about Pearse, Connolly, Clarke and Plunkett in the place where they spent their last hours raises expectations of a site-specific piece. They are not fulfilled: Bairbre Ní Chaoimh's vigorous production happens in front of the cells occupied by four of the executed leaders (Eamonn Ceannt, Michael Mallin, Sean Huston and Con Colbert) but the setting functions as little more than a borrowed backdrop.

Indeed, the production has to actively compete with the setting, both because its acoustics demand high volume from the actors and because its ghosts are at least as haunting as any piece of theatre can be. (The audience also has to compete with the tomb-like cold - the order to wear warm clothing should not be countermanded.) Donal O'Kelly's writing is, for the most part, sufficiently energetic and well-seasoned with salty humour to overcome these barriers. The cast works hard to narrow the gaps between itself and the audience and it gets a lot of help from Robert Ballagh's ingenious set design and Ní Chaoimh's fast pace and bold use of space. The problem, though, lies with O'Kelly's intellectual honesty. He starts by presenting the play as an exploration of historical memory, beginning in contemporary times outside the shop in Moore Street that was the rebels' last headquarters, and having the excellent Mary Murray suddenly channel the spirit of Elizabeth O'Farrell, the nurse who carried their surrender to the British. He then moves back towards 1916 with two brothers who live in the street (Tom Murphy and Arthur Riordan) and are caught in the crossfire. They embody the arguments for and against the Rising. The play seems therefore to be about memory and ambivalence, about the difficulty of dealing with an unresolved past. This is a very proper subject, but a very tough one for a play in which the establishment of a coherent narrative demands the resolution of ambiguities. Unwilling to come up with an easy answer, O'Kelly ends up with an uneasy form.

Operation Easter ends up being a little like the Rising itself: moments of extraordinary vividness but, in strategic terms, a bit of a mess. O'Kelly is at his best when he gives his imagination its freest rein, as for example in his witty potted dramatic biographies of the leaders. But he is (and this is greatly to his credit) absolutely hopeless at being didactic. The basic narrative exposition is at times so bad it's almost good, with lines such as "Plunkett, you masterminded the Easter Rebellion, what do you think?" having the absurd if unintentional humour of an amateur pageant. The result is a strange patchwork of conflicting styles and of wildly divergent quality.

The bad and the good are both summed up by the ending. On the one hand, it leaves the framing device with which we started dangling, as if the author simply forgot that the whole thing was being enacted in contemporary Moore Street. On the other, it swerves off into an entirely unexpected and quite brilliant conclusion. If this is designed to make the audience feel as ambivalent about the play as some of its characters feel about the Rising, it works. Fintan O'Toole

International Dance Festival: Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Project

Four years ago, when Jérôme Bel performed in the first Dance Festival Ireland, he created a scandal that ended up dragging through the courts. This year, no nudity, no wee on the stage; instead, it's the Jérôme Bel chat show, except without the faux Dublin-skyline-at-night backdrop.

It could have gone so very wrong, but thanks to Bel's impish sense of humour - and, one suspects, a touch of the same on Thai dancer and choreographer Pichet Klunchun's side - the time flies by in a bizarre conquest of the meaning of art, communication and contemporary societies. The performance - is it performance? - recreates Bel and Klunchun's first encounter in Bangkok and their admiring, amazed and bemused reactions to each other's work. Although active in contemporary dance, Klunchun represents traditional art culture based on his extensive work in Khon, the Thai classical mask dance; the two choreographers play good cop and bad cop - you pick the sides - as they juxtapose seemingly irreconcilable world views.

Klunchun's demonstrations of Thai dance and its vocabulary - every movement, it seems, conveys a specific meaning to a schooled audience - were literally poetry in motion. One moment his hands were hands; the next, they were tapered stems or ruffled wing feathers as his arms singed circles in the air like sparklers' trails in the dark. He teaches a few moves to Bel who can imitate but not emulate them. The tables turn, Klunchun asks the questions, and Bel treats him to his favourite dance phrase: in which he stands silently, expectantly, indulgently, as if waiting for his date to come back from the loo.

Interspersed with other elements - including a hilarious bit to Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly in which he slowly dies midtrack - Bel explains the rationale behind contemporary conceptual performance - as well as showing the bravery to hold it up to ridicule. This piece isn't for everyone - which, in a way, is the point: it's like trying to find the real figure in a hall of mirrors - but it was quirky, cheeky, thoughtful and thought-provoking. In a way, it's like a microcosm of the dance festival. Is it egocentric intellectual self-pleasuring on stage? Is it a wickedly clever, insightful and entertaining exploration of communication, contemporary art and society? Maybe both. Christine Madden