Not a Word: An evocative, heartrending play about yearning and forgotten lives

Not a Word

Bank of Ireland Theatre, University of Galway

★★★★☆

It’s a tough gig, performing solo with a lump of concrete on your head. That he effectively and movingly evokes the pain and loneliness of an Irish navvy in England, while encased in Orla Clogher’s headmask, is down to Raymond Keane’s expressive physicality and skill.

It’s not actually a solo show for the actor: Ultan O’Brien’s live electronic fiddle stirs the isolation and dissonance of a humble life on one hand, and the sweet-bitter memories of home and Irish music on the other.

James Riordan directs performances of delicacy and elegance, for all that the solitary man’s life is one of the hard, rough work and clumpy, muddy boots of an emigrant building a country not his own.

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Andrew Clancy’s set, for the piece devised by the Galway-based Brú Theatre, is grey-grey and the man himself is grey: every pore of Keane’s Irish builder is filled with the grey dust and dirt of the building site, as he sheds his work clothes after a day on-site. We feel the grit permeating Saileóg O’Halloran’s costumes.

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His evening is simple and solitary, his digs bare, dim and soulless, and his routine simple. The small, restricted life is painful to watch: both the physical pain from back-breaking work and the soul pain of exile. Behind it, the concept of home, and what it means when you pine always for somewhere else.

Clogher’s mask is a lumpen grey mass that shields Keane’s face, Elephant-Man-like, from the world the labourer finds himself in. A permanent unmoving face of woe, it is anonymising and dehumanising, but also indicative of an exiled everyman.

In the hour-long show there is physicality, mask and music, but there’s not a word, aside from briefly at the end, in the brutality of Peter Woods’s poem Exile is Not a Word.

An evocative heart-rending piece about yearning and forgotten lives that weaves a spell.

Not a word continues at Bank of Ireland Theatre at the University of Galway, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Saturday, July 22nd