Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events around the country this week.
Midsummer, Slick, Susurrus
Cork Midsummer Festival
MARY LELAND
At a time when plays seem to be getting shorter and shorter, it appears contradictory to complain about a long one, especially as its duration is the only complaint to be made about Midsummer, at the Half Moon Theatre. Nonetheless, this new piece, written and directed by David Greig for Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre and an Irish tour, loses the run of itself and dribbles to a conclusion at least 10 minutes too late. It's as if Greig, having signalled likely points of resolution, couldn't bear to let his characters off the stage, especially as the songs written by Gordon McIntyre keep the upbeat mood in full swing.
The two main roles are played with vitality by Cora Bissett, as a divorce lawyer with a taste for adultery, and by Matthew Pidgeon, as a dodgy car salesman with a taste for more or less anything that comes his way. In fact, nothing much more threatening than the lawyer, herself experiencing the pangs of self-assessment over a wet midsummer weekend, comes his way. United by desperation and doubt, they set off on a wild weekend, their exploits conveyed in dialogue as crisp as the expensive bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc which starts the whole thing off.
The territory of the city becomes the geography of both past and future, within a set designed like graph paper by Georgia McGuinness, while the philosophical issues of which they are both aware (if differently) strengthen both writing and plot without threatening the humour, or the optimism, of the play.
If Edinburgh is part of the plot of Midsummer, Glasgow is at the heart of Slick, written, directed and designed for Vox Motus by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison. The production, which closed at the Half Moon on Monday, is not for the queasy: the abrasive script embraces anatomical, gastric, sexual and reproductive detail with an enthusiasm which is not publicly commonplace. Basically – and this piece is very basic – it is crude, if that's not too genteel a word for the experiences of Malcolm Biggar, a put-upon nine-year-old. The child of neglectful parents and wistfully anxious to please, his adventures are set among the low-life denizens of high-rise tenements, all of whom, including Malcolm, are presented, or manipulated, by a crew of five players. The number is important because this group is so skilled that the effect is of a cast of many more. As Malcolm, Jordan Young maintains a bewildered innocence along with the comic conviction uniting all the players.
Puppet-maker and costume specialist Anna Scatola has produced squashed facsimiles of the characters (complete even to the mother’s navel stud), while seamstress Kathryn Smith is credited with the resilience of these sturdy mannequins. Their authenticity is part of the hilarity of the presentation as a whole, woefully funny yet composed with a marvellous technical mastery.
Written and directed by David Leddy for Fire Exit, also of Glasgow, Susurrus introduced the Scottish element in this year’s Midsummer Festival. Engaging individual visitors to Fitzgerald’s Park, the piece is a narrative conducted as a series of acts leading to different points in the gardens, with music heard through earphones.
It's not just a walk in the park; the story is a composition of family saga intertwined with an operatic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although contained within the cell of the ear, the music seems to drift among the willows lining the drowsy gardens along the riverside. That the park itself is so dirty, with beer cans among the water lilies, doesn't disturb David Leddy, who says that he rather likes the untidiness, as it reflects "the untidiness of life".
Cork Midsummer Festival ends on Sunday; corkmidsummer.com. Midsummercloses on Sunday and then tours to Limerick, Tralee and Kinsale; Susurrus closes on Sunday
Queer Notions: Victor and Gord, Ali and Michael
Project, Dublin
PETER CRAWLEY
Meet Victor and Gord, two twentysomethings from Dublin’s affluent coastal village of Killiney. Victor is short for Victoria Curtis. Gord stands for “gorgeous”, a nickname bestowed upon Áine McKevitt by her sister, director Una McKevitt, who has elected to put this relationship on the stage.
They are joined there by Kilkenny-born siblings Michael Barron and Alison Barron, chosen to participate in the project on the basis of a photograph discovered on Facebook. For an hour or so they are to tell us about themselves and each other. It is all rather charming, engaging and completely exploitative.
An entire industry has sprung up to name this style of performance, if the word “performance” is not contestable. “Post-dramatic” is a catch-all for something that eschews the slick construction of plays or the persuasive artifice of the theatre. Live art similarly privileges the real over the suggested, the documentary over the imagination. Similarly, this piece belongs to a movement which asks not for something as passé and suspect as the suspension of disbelief. It asks for something much more banal. It asks for belief.
Let’s call it reality theatre. Like reality TV, it requires much research, demands strong personalities, and rests on the careful manipulation and editing of material. The best understanding of this tension between art and reality comes early, when Áine worries that the piece we are watching may alter or misrepresent her friendship with Victor. A physicist couldn’t put her uncertainty principle better: the act of observing alters the reality of the observed.
Consequently, there is an endearing air of the amateur performance. As personal histories are played out through testimony, confessionals and ceaseless childhood reminiscences, the non-actors rigidly follow a text, and are loose on their lines, full of hesitations and apologies, often seeming mildly embarrassed (hands in their pockets, arms folded in self-protection).
Occasional movements, swapped speeches or unadorned songs bring the artifice into view.
For all the politics in such a form. the lives depicted seem sheltered from harsher reality. Genuine bereavement and early responsibilities are referred to in passing and without deeper examination, as though McKevitt retreats instinctively and politely from too much intimacy. You may despair of any generation that chooses to reference Michael Jackson's HIStory album over Bad, Thrilleror Off The Wall, but such is the gulf between us.
The overall feeling, then, is of having met four likeable, content, privileged, well-adjusted people. Who can’t identify with friendship and family, with children who waged territorial combat in their backyards or instigated free love in their treehouses? The confessional form, though, demands more extraordinary, conflicted or struggling experiences. Here it’s attractive and sincere, but it feels like the life story of people who have barely lived. Run concluded; Queer Notions continues at
Project until tomorrow
Glasthule Opera
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
MICHAEL DERVAN
Holst – The Wandering Scholar. Vaughan Williams – Riders to the Sea.
DLR Glasthule Opera's second production is an enterprising double-bill of English opera. Both Holst's The Wandering Scholarand Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Seahave librettos with Irish connections: the former, by Clifford Bax, is based on a tale of the medieval Goliards from Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars(its story of a sexually predatory priest seeming more contemporary than ever), and the latter is based on Synge's play.
Holst’s 25-minute bawdy comedy was first produced in 1934 and seems not to have been performed in Ireland before. It concerns the misfortunes of a Fr Philippe and the object of his desire, Alison, a farmer’s wife. Their dalliance is undone by the wandering scholar, Pierre, who, after being ejected from the farmer’s house by the lovers, is brought back by the farmer, Louis, to whom he manages to reveal all.
It is a piece that’s not just compact, but lean too. Director Ian Walsh presents it with a white-faced cast, their make-up falling somewhere between the effect of a mask and a circus clown. John Molloy’s Fr Philippe chases the flirty Sarah Power with energetic tenacity, and the alliance between Ross Scanlon’s Pierre and Roland Davitt’s Louis provides both performers with a nice foil. However, it was hard to work out whether the Shrek-like green lighting on Scanlon’s face when he stands on the table is an intentional effect by lighting designer Brian Murray.
Vaughan Williams would hardly be the first composer to spring to mind to tackle the anguish that underlies Riders to the Sea, but his patient, brooding score, first heard in 1937, matches the stoicism and tragedy of a family dealing with the harshness of the ocean.
Doreen Curran’s numbly fixated Maurya is vocally rock-solid and emotionally stirring, even though too many of her words are hard to decipher. She is well supported in the cramped kitchen of Fiona Carey’s set by Sarah Power’s Cathleen and Sarah Dolan’s less strongly expressed Nora.
The orchestra, under David Brophy, was altogether finer than in the opening night of Glasthule's Bohème, but the full darkness of the score was compromised by the lightness of some of the orchestral solos.
The double-bill concludes tonight and the Glasthule Opera festival ends tomorrow with La Bohème
