Tragedy and songs

Fintan O'Toole finds Nicholas Kent's production of Bloody Sunday always worthwhile and occasionally gripping.  He and other Irish Times writers review a selection of Dublin Theatre Festival events...

Bloody Sunday, Abbey Theatre
Fintan O'Toole

Tribunals of inquiry are a little like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme agitation. They are also a kind of loose, unstructured theatre. Occupying a space half way between the confessional and the court of law, their primary function is as a ritual of truth in which participants in public events are called on to explain themselves. The Saville Inquiry into the killing of 14 civilians by the British Army in Derry in 1972 took both of these features to extremes. Immensely long and at times tediously repetitious, it was nevertheless about the most dramatic and appalling of events. And, since no reputable independent historian doubts the innocence of the victims, the element of ritual is especially pronounced. The process itself, the act of remembering and calling to account, may ultimately be more important than the findings.

The one regrettable aspect of Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry is that it pays little attention to these theatrical aspects of the tribunal. Highly accomplished though it is, Nicholas Kent's production of Richard Norton-Taylor's summary of the evidence, originally for the Tricycle Theatre in London, affects a straight documentary style that both reproduces some of the tedium of tribunals and suggests that the process of editing millions of words down to mere thousands is simpler than it is.

Kent's staging goes for a punctilious realism that invites the audience to feel that it is present at the hearings in Derry and London. A witness told to sit closer to the microphone has indeed been barely audible. The Guildhall clock can be heard striking in the background. Some of the hesitations and repetitions of the witnesses and lawyers are reproduced.

All of this is very finely done, but it does tend to limit the power of the piece as theatre. And it also dodges the question of editorial judgement. Norton-Taylor omits the evasive evidence of Martin McGuinness entirely, though it is thought important enough to include in the programme notes. (He does include the even more evasive evidence of Bernadette McAliskey, superbly rendered by Sorcha Cusack.) The problem is not that value judgements have been made but that the style of the production tends to obscure them. A looser approach might have been more dramatically powerful and more up-front with the audience.

Within these limitations, Bloody Sunday is always worthwhile and occasionally gripping. The tightness of the courtroom format means that the moments when it is broken are all the more powerful, as when Heather Tobias, as Geraldine McGuigan, stands up to demonstrate the position of Barney McGuigan when he was shot, or when Alan Parnaby's Lord Saville asks for a moment's break after a soldier admits shooting the same man, and we realise that somewhere in the public gallery his family must be crying. At such moments, the emotion that the legalistic format of tribunals is designed to exclude looms up from the dark and fills the theatre.

Until Sat

Some Girls are Bigger than Others, Olympia Theatre
Tony Clayton-Lea

Despite a belated start time that had some people heading for the exits after 30 minutes of twiddling their thumbs, this show kept the remainder stuck to their seats through a mixture of inventiveness, boldness, downright scandalous cheek and some of the most compelling interpretations of Smiths songs you'll probably ever hear.

As far as I could make out, there is little in the line of story - it really is no more and no less, as the show's director Andrew Wale has it, than a piece of musical theatre using linked Morrissey & Marr songs. Sung as standalone and as segued sequences, the songs include Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, Rubber Ring, How Soon Is Now?, Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want and There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Rarely are the melody lines so distorted that you can't recognise them, but what makes them different (and at times confrontational) is the context: part contemporary opera, rock musical, and avant-garde theatre.

The performers are first class; Krysten Cummings, Sean Kingsley, Katrine Lunde, Garrie Harvey, Sigalit Feig, and Katie Brayben come from a musical theatre background, but there seems a greater discipline and creative stretch here that might not be obviously apparent in, say, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

By rights it shouldn't work, yet through an ingenious mix of almost sculptural tableaux, kinetic mime, signed language, video projections (some of which are very rude), string quartet arrangements, sound loops, singing as sublime as it is strident, and slices of surreal humour, the entire enterprise delivers one sustained treat after another.

Until Sat

The Wrong Man, Tivoli Theatre
Gerry Colgan

Danny Morrison's first play, adapted from his novel, is now having its Dublin premiere. As the author is a former member of the IRA and Sinn Féin, one might expect it to delve into the political scenario that underpins its action; but here the action is all. The play is a hard-boiled little thriller, and not without its merits as such, but those who seek more will be disappointed.

It opens as three men, ostensibly Protestant militants, drag a hooded Catholic prisoner into an empty room with intent to torture and kill him. He pleads for his life, vowing that he is a police informer. The hood is removed, and Tod sees that his captors are in fact IRA men, one of them his friend Raymond. But police are near and, as they all leave in a hurry, Tod and Raymond are shot dead.

The wives of the dead men meet and form an unlikely alliance. Flashbacks begin, and we are shown Raymond and Tod on a killing expedition that goes wrong. Tod, a womaniser, meets Raymond's wife Róisín in a park, and has sex with her. A scene is inserted depicting the troubled marriages of both men.

Finally, Tod is in an RUC interrogation centre, and questions are answered in a well-crafted ending.

None of the characters is explored in depth, nor are their motivations. The IRA are brutal killers, the police desensitised and corrupt. The play's structure is artificial, with a degree of contrivance that clearly marks it as a suspense fiction. The acting, however, is taut and the dialogue authentic. If the play is a low-flying object, it at least entertains as it skims its terrain.

Runs to Nov 5

Tshepang, Samuel Beckett Theatre
Peter Crawley

No one is innocent in Lara Foot Newton's intelligent, startling and harrowing play Tshepang - not the engaging narrator Simon, not the traumatised and silent mother Ruth, not the unseen denizens of a South African township rocked by unimaginable horror, and certainly not the audience.

"Nothing ever happens here," runs Simon's refrain. But as Boitumelo Shisana's compelling performance develops, steadily evoking the moral stagnation of the heat-scorched town, occasionally alluding to the day "it happened", we are all too aware of what "it" is. Tshepang is the name of a baby girl, raped and sodomised at the age of nine months, and left for dead. Miraculously, she survived.

Though the story of Tshepang is true, Foot Newton (who also directs) has wisely avoided constructing a docu-drama. Rather, she retains such details as the six men arrested for Tshepang's gang-rape and the media scrummage that descended on Louisvale, "the town of shame", but presents an imagined community, representative of the 20,000 child rapes reported in South Africa each year. It would be easy for both the production and the audience to be cowed by this brutal event (or the statistic), to retreat into an uncritical, stunned silence by Simon's description of Tshepang's discovery, or the inevitable, though symbolised, enactment of her attack. But Foot Newton's intention is braver and more difficult to achieve.

Through pared-down stagecraft and involving story-telling, Tshepang aims to understand the failure of a community without judging, to trace the stifling legacy of apartheid without becoming didactic, and to fathom how children are sexualised and brutalised when their hopes are denied and dreams deferred.

Such profound intention demands light-footed invention, and Gerhard Marx's simple scenography sees props acquire spry, alternate lives. The blind eyes of the town are symbolised by glasses perched uselessly on tree branches; Kholeka Qwabe's impassive Ruth bears a small bed on her back as a totem of her shame; a loaf of bread, cradled maternally, becomes the sleeping figure of her child.

As delicately suggestive, nativity figures carved by Simon mingle African fertility idols with Christian icons, standing watch over the stage while he yearns for the coming of Jesus's sister: "We've all been waiting for her," he says. "Jesus was way too long ago."

Tshepang, whose name means "have hope" and "saviour", may not ultimately offer that longed-for second coming, the play's subtitle, The Third Testament, a leap too far. But in the integrity of Foot Newton's production and in Shisana and Qwabe's absorbing performances comes the beginning of catharsis, a taste of salvation.

Until Sat