REVIEWS

Irish Times writers review a selection of DUBLIN THEATRE FESTIVAL events

A Woman in Progress

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

“I am my own life’s work,” says a statuesque blonde with a waist as big as a cashew and eyelashes only slightly smaller than storefront awnings. Meet Panti, the drag-queen alter ego of Rory O’Neill, whose solo-performance is part-lecture, part-stand-up and all-woman.

Philip McMahon’s production for the performance company thisispopbaby ushers her to Ciaran O’Melia’s sparing stage with a Blitzkrieg of sound and images worthy of an international superstar or an over-heated product-launch.

Panti is something in between, but beneath her carefully lacquered surface, armoury of wit and claims to heroic drunkenness (some shaky moments suggest it is not a feint), there lies a more compelling vulnerability. The visage is perfect, but you hope the mask will slip.

Panti performs an identity striptease with her personal history deftly mirroring under-explored chapters of Ireland’s. “I am merely using me as a theatrical device to illuminate a greater universal truth,” she says. “A devastatingly drunk theatrical device.”

For this reason Rory O’Neill (who we see only through endearing photographs) may have been the right gay at the right time. Growing up in a glamour-stricken 1970s Ballinrobe, Co Mayo – recalled with Panti’s trademark tone of acidity and affection – his personal epiphanies come at significant moments. The epic letdown of the Pope’s 1979 visit to Ireland instils a burning anti-authoritarianism and a restless search for an identity.

A transformative encounter with a drag queen in the 1980s gives him a sign: “For the second time in my life, a man in an elaborate costume had changed me.” Panti’s return from an awesome Tokyo to a ground-down Dublin, finds an underground gay culture ready to be shaped. Finding its spine in a sequence of letters from Panti to the young Rory, the performance attempts to reconcile both entities, as though Panti, on one side of a long, difficult journey, can offer Rory some shortcuts.

The journey isn’t over, though. Having become the de facto face of gay marriage in Ireland, Panti rails against the depoliticised and airbrushed gay scene around her: “The new gay doesn’t question or search,” she says, “Google does that.”

This comes with an unusual lapse of irony: Panti may bristle against the mainstream assimilation of gay culture, pleading to restore its dangerous edge, but here she is in the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival performing a considered, funny and gently moving show which doesn’t seek to alienate anyone. If agitation has long been the architect of your identity, though, the struggle must be endless.

“I’d have liked it to have been easier,” she tells Rory of the life that made her, “but then I would have been less.” Panti’s life, no less than anyone’s, remains a perpetual work in progress.

Runs Thurs to Sun

PETER CRAWLEY

Once and for All – We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Directed by Alexander Devrient, Once and For All . . . is a sophisticated and complex exploration of adolescent identity. Devised by Devrient and Joeri Smet, with a group of 13 Belgian teenage performers, it is startlingly ambitious, eschewing narrative engagement for a series of physical explosions, whose corporeal excesses prove true counterpoint to the emotional inarticulacy of puberty.

Staring defiantly at the audience, the young actors/authors ask us to reconsider our assumptions about adolescence.

Indeed, the lithe confidence with which the performers play with the audience immediately defies the morose and melancholy cliches of adolescence.

As they flirt with the front row, eyeballing us onlookers, they use the passive conventions of the theatre – the audience’s polite conformity – to assert their power: in the theatre, for these 55 minutes, they are the ones who are in charge.

“What are you looking at? What do you want from us?” their hard silent stare seems to ask us. “Losers! You are the ones who are supposed to have the answers.”

As the edgy soundtrack brings each scene to a climax, the stage descends into chaos, but rebellion is brought into check again as the sound of a school bell imposes order on their chaotic world. If it is the teenagers’ job to break taboos, there are also limits to their defiance. “Is that all there is to the circus?” the moody, husky voice of Peggy Lee asks, as the closing scene begins. Demystifying the tentative exploration of individuality, sexuality and friendship that is adolescence, these teenagers suggest that there is nothing for parents to worry about.

Beautiful, nascent, unknowable, inarticulate, sometimes incomprehensible, and yes, at times, extremely annoying, Once and For All . . .is a joyous celebration of their lives.

And yet I can’t help but suspect that the real drama is happening backstage.

SARA KEATING