Latest reviews
The Story of the Bull O'Reilly Theatre
There have been complaints about the dearth of new Irish work in this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, but they can be put to bed. Already, the festival has had a hilarious new Irish comedy, a scintillating new satire on Celtic Tiger Ireland, a profound reflection on the continuing resonance of Irish mythology, a raw, fast-paced Irish crime thriller, a vastly impressive exercise in avant garde physical theatre, a quirky new Irish musical, and even a new post-Riverdance Irish dancing show.
So what if all of them are contained in a single, dazzling production, Michael Keegan-Dolan's The Story of the Bull? After the triumph of his last show, Giselle, Keegan-Dolan carried a heavy weight of expectation, but he has brushed it off like a bull flicking a fly away with a nonchalant flick of his tail.
For all the immense array of physical and creative resources that have been brought to bear on it, The Story of the Bull feels playful, careless, irresponsible. For all its violence, obscenity and darkness, its driving force is a pure, almost innocent pleasure.
For all its serious encounters with both timeless myth and up-to-the-minute politics, it is gorgeous fun. As with most works that brush against genius, Keegan-Dolan's is the art that conceals art.
The Bull reminds me of one of those revolving glass balls that used to hang from the ceiling at discos, a trashy surface that refracts light in every direction while maintaining its own steady orbit.
The show's relentless energy whirls off into mordantly witty social commentary and visceral prehistoric ritual, into opera and Irish dancing, into horror and beauty, into cabaret, drama and ballet, into pop and baroque, into schlock American movies and Irish rural comedy.
But it holds together with an unfaltering rigour, sweeping through two hours without a moment's lapse.
Keegan-Dolan uses the Táin Bó Cuailnge in the way that James Joyce's uses The Odyssey in Ulysses - as a mythic structure to support an omnivorous take on the contemporary world. Medb and Ailill (beautifully played by Olwen Fouere and Michael Dolan), counting and comparing their possessions, are Dublin millionaires, and her pursuit of the brown bull is a parable of acquisitiveness.
Cúchulain (the Slovakian dancer Vladislav Benito Soltys) is Colm Cullen, a member of a family of cowboy builders.
Medb is an investor in a Lord of the Riverdance-type show called Celtic Bitch, in which Fergus her champion and lover (played by the great Riverdancer Colin Dunne) is the lead dancer.
Aspects of contemporary Ireland, from multiculturalism to organised crime and from the decline of the church to the state of the A&E service in hospitals, are fixed with Keegan-Dolan's satiric eye.
What makes The Bull so special, though, is that it is simultaneously mock-heroic and heroic.
The myth is sent up and honoured. Dunne's Celtic Bitch choreography is as astounding as it is uproarious. The violence is both cartoonish and catastrophic.
The panache and flamboyance are rooted in hard discipline and tough skill. Dunne's hard-shoe taps, Angelo Smimmo's astonishing falsetto voice, Daphne Strothmann's and Rachel Poirier's classically-based dance, Robbie Harris's ecstatic percussion, Conor Lovett's wonderfully weird presence as the narrator - these and so many other elements of the show are drawn from the highest levels of accomplishment.
The result is sensationally unsettling, deliriously funny and awesomely savage, the first great piece of theatre about the new hyped-up 21st-century Ireland.
The best joke of all is that the last Irish production to carry this kind of visceral surprise and stunning immediacy was Riverdance.
Until Oct 15 - Fintan O'Toole
I Am My Own Wife Gaiety Theatre
"He", "she" and "it" may be fixed categories in the grammar of the German language, but when translated by American playwright Doug Wright, they slip their moorings. Basing his play on the biography of a celebrated German transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, he presents a character who is un-gendered, neither he nor she but someone who primarily identifies with "it", with objects and artefacts, the more polished the better.
An obsessive collector of antiques, salvaging them from the ruins of 1940s Berlin, Charlotte says at one point that the furniture is her. She is the ultimate survivor, a boy who dressed as a woman from his adolescence onwards and managed to avoid deportation during the Nazi regime, later running a furniture museum and underground gay refuge in East Berlin.
Intrigued by her story, Wright conducted a series of taped interviews with Charlotte, which became the basis for this play, which is part drama, part self-conscious documentary. Performed with extraordinary virtuosity by Jefferson Mays, who plays all the characters including the playwright himself, this is a paean to the power of imaginative metamorphosis and self-invention.
Different facets of Charlotte's life are evoked, like glimpses into a musical jewellery box, as David Lander's lighting design picks out details from the exquisite dolls' house set created by Derek McLane. When his research unearths facts about Charlotte's past that threaten to cloud his view of her, Wright, in his stage character, explicitly expresses his feelings of ambivalence, which his play does not resolve.
To the somewhat naive stage version of the playwright, Charlotte is "a museum", an astonishing repository of rich experiences and anecdotes, a sophisticated European survivor of whom he is in awe. But his admiration, combined with the documentary element of the writing which absolves him from making any moral judgements, also prevents his piece from having the emotional force that it needs, so that Mayes's wonderful acting achievement is at times reduced to a series of brilliant impersonations. In the end the play's fascination with the surface of things smothers the complex human life beneath.
Until Oct 12 - Helen Meany
Bookings for the festival on 01-6778899 or www.dublintheatrefestival.com
