Follow

Project Arts Centre, Dublin Previews Jan 22 Opens Jan 23-26 8.15pm (Sat mat 3.15pm) €9-€15 projectarts centre.ie

Although it features just one actor, you couldn’t easily call Shane O’Reilly’s remarkable Follow a solo performance. The inaugural production of Willfredd Theatre Company, which made its award -winning debut at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2011, Follow is a vivid meeting of physical performance, design and technology, where live music and light inhabit the space like supporting characters.

That they all come together in a gently mystifying, then compelling, theatrical language is largely the point. O’Reilly, the son of deaf parents, uses sign language and words to impart a fractured story of playful schoolchildren, casually undermined individuals, a desperately worried mother unable to communicate her distress, and a thousand impediments, large and small, towards clear communication.

Director Sophie Motley renders the piece with a beguiling and sometimes startling beauty, but O’Reilly’s vignettes are as heartwrenching as they come. The irony of this depiction of the barriers between understanding and being understood is that, for all its formal adventure, Follow remains fluently and fluidly comprehensible.

That combination of heart, wit and experiment recently earned Willfredd a nomination for Best Production in The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for last year’s Farm. Here, though, is where it all began.

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