Illness as Metaphor
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre
★★★★★
At the beginning of Illness as Metaphor, the latest play from Dead Centre, a theatre company known for smart, layered work that sits between academic thesis and visceral theatrical experience, director Ben Kidd says he wants to tell the truth. He tells us about his own illness and how it inspired the idea of adapting Susan Sontag’s book about how the language used to describe diseases can transform our experiences of them. Moments later, he says his name is Susan Sontag. The transformation continues when Una Mullally (an Irish Times columnist) introduces herself as Ben Kidd, and speaks a truth about Kidd’s illness that he could not.
What follows is a clever, moving and genuinely new piece of theatre, performed and devised with six people living with long-term illness. It explores the necessity and absurdity of metaphors, what it means to be ill and how to talk about it, and the meaning in having a body at all.
The production has everything audiences have come to expect from Dead Centre. It explores deeply serious ideas with considerable wit. It is playful and pretentious, and it makes ample use of devices both metatheatrical (the action takes place in the play’s own rehearsal room) and technological (camera work, blue screens and projection abound).
[ Dublin Fringe Festival 2024: 19 shows to catch as the festival turns 30Opens in new window ]
This is a play about lofty things: the nature of disease, truth in art, Sontag. But its real achievement is in the way it presents the lived experience of long-term illness of the six remarkable performers – Mullally, Cabrini Cahill, Eamonn Doyle, James Ireland, Conor Lenehan and Megan Robinson – on a beautifully spare and agile set by Ellen Kirk.
By the time it reaches its Beckettian conclusion, Illness as Metaphor has found a language through which to tell these stories, to say what is often unsayable. It’s theatre, then. At its best.
Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 14th
