Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events

Galway Arts Festival: Furioso

Black Box Theatre

Australian circus company Circa makes a welcome return to the Galway Arts Festival with this fury-fuelled, physically astonishing display. Fusing traditional circus skills with dance, beautiful music, theatrical expression and technical accomplishment, Furiosolives up to the high standards we've come to expect from this Brisbane-based company, which made festival appearances in 2008 ( By the Light of the Stars Which are No Longer . . .) and in 2007 ( The Space Between).

Created by artistic director Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble, the show features five performers who appear to be able to do as they please with their lean, muscular, compact bodies. From somersaults and back-flips, to contortions and acrobatic leaps, the three men and two women performers succeed in mesmerising for the entire hour and 15 minutes of the piece.

But it is the poetic resonance and emotional charge of the work that makes it more than just another circus performance. Bypassing any rational narrative and appealing directly to our aesthetic senses, Furiososuggests our fragile human existence is fraught with violence, as we suffer at the hands of some invisible, malevolent force.

This idea is communicated in the opening moments of the show, as a performer repeatedly tries to exit the stage, only to be viciously thrown back by some unseen assailant. The combative interactions between the performers also suggest a world where human exchanges are dominated by aggression and competition.

However, in a show that repeatedly shifts gear between the furious and gently poetic, a softer vision is also offered: mainly in the awe-inspiring trapeze work, where the male and female performers require perfect unity and balance to support each other. Here violence and competition give way to the exact co-operation that each performer needs in order to remain safe in the dangerous heights, as they are suspended from ropes, chords and the trapeze.

Throughout this engrossing work, the audience could not help themselves but show their appreciation at regular intervals with a cacophony of clapping. The standing ovation at the end was immediate and total, as well as deserved. Surely Circa has once again delivered one of the best shows of the festival. Is it possible to conceive of something better next year? Until Sunday IAN KILROY

The Hostage

Pearse Centre, Dublin

The hostage in Brendan Behan’s absurdist political work from 1958 is a little like the play itself. A British soldier kidnapped by the IRA in retaliation for the loss of one of their own, Pte Williams is giddy and disorientated, given alternately to sober reflection or whirling panic, and his identity is complicated by his origin and relocation.

Wonderland Productions' rather faithful production of Behan's long, cluttered parody of nationalist hypocrisy and British incompetence makes a strong case that The Hostagemay be the maddest play ever written. But this tangled text of politics, period drama, sex farce and social tragedy is the result of a less than sober process of collaboration and revision, a form of dramaturgy under the influence.

Adapted from Behan's An Giall, augmented with a ceaseless stream of musical numbers and a scrum of characters under Joan Littlewood's advice for a London audience (where the English language version premiered), and decorated with ingratiating references for an American audience (vestiges of a 1960 Broadway transfer), it now resembles a happily battered suitcase, pasted with the stamps and stickers of its travels.

Director Alice Coughlan accepts such baggage without hesitancy, staging the political parlour comedy in two awkward rooms of the Pearse Centre, birthplace of the martyr of the Rising.

There is a bravely jarring dissonance between a play that flails with satire and a space so reverent. But when everything here is at odds with everything else – Irish and British, sex and religion, song and dance – the play and production seem neither here nor there: too moithered with drink and meandering dialogue to be incisive; too choked with characters and ballads to be stingingly funny.

A talented cast dance, sing, play various instruments and

pick their way through the audience with great ability, but the intimacy of this parlour makes musical comedy overbearing: 14 performers dancing a surreal conga line through the halls, are less raucous than cacophonous. That is largely the consequence of taking the author seriously, Behan himself becoming a hostage of his own popularity and suggestibility.

Even now he should be given a strong cup of coffee, edited, and rescued from his worst excesses. Until Aug 16 PETER CRAWLEY