DUBLIN THEATRE
FESTIVAL
Celebration / Watt / Una Santa Oscura / Phaedra / The Rehearsal:
Playing The Dane / The Silver Tassie
Various
venues, Dublin
October, 2010
*** / *** / **** / *** / **** /
*****
The Dublin Theatre Festival continues to cast its net ever more widely
and richly. This year’s programme has brought to Ireland the Belgian
company Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy of one-on-one pieces and a sizeable
strand of Polish work including Factory
2, Krystian Lupa’s seven-hour Warhol homage (reviewed on
this
page last month on its Paris outing) and TR Warszawa’s
Pasolini-inspired T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.,
which moves on to London this week.
Also in the festival was a series of productions at the Gate Theatre
labelled “BPM”, for “Beckett, Pinter, Mamet”. My brief visit did not
allow me to catch Mamet’s Boston
Marriage or Beckett’s Endgame,
but Wayne Jordan’s production of Pinter’s final play Celebration
captured both the
perennial power-play and the more explicit than usual comedy of the
piece, as two dining parties in a swish restaurant hold banal
conversations which are at first intercut and then merge. The most
delicious role was, as ever, that of the Waiter, “interjecting” with
surreal fantasies of his grandfather; Nigel Harman managed all these
riffs with a deferential smile. Sunday’s performance was followed by a
screening of Beckett’s short piece Catastrophe
which united all three featured authors, directed as it was by Mamet
for RTÉ and starrimg Pinter.
BPM also included a second Beckett production radically at odds with
our idea of his writing. Watt
was Barry McGovern’s solo adaptation of Beckett’s 1940s novel in which
he treats his perennial themes of endurance and termination not with
his characteristic linguistic economy but with a deliberately excessive
encyclopaedism. Given a number of permutations of events, he lists
every single one. Part of Tom Creed’s production here was given over to
the croaking of a trio of frogs at varying mathematical intervals.
McGovern himself gave a deadpan yet deceptively vibrant recitation on a
bare stage, dressed in Watt’s footman’s livery.
Creed also directed Una
Santa Oscura
at the Smock Alley Theatre, a remarkable piece which has grown in my
memory. From the disparate inspirations of the writings of 12th-century
saint Hildegard of Bingen and neurologist Oliver Sacks on migraine,
Creed fashioned a wordless piece in which the primary “language” was
that of Ian Wilson’s violin score, as played by Ioana Petcu-Nolan
against electronic soundscapes and video projections. We watched
Petcu-Nolan pottering around her flat, fixing a meal but repeatedly
interrupted by memories and migraine alike. At times, as the character
recalled the failed relationship that left her pregnant, the violin and
electronica assumed an elegiac tone against a backdrop of blurred
cityscapes; at others, a rapid, agitated squeaking accompanied flashing
visual geometries. I distrust my abilities of non-verbal dramatic
interpretation, but was surprised how easily “readable”, and how
deeply, the piece proved to be.
Una Santa Oscura
premièred earlier this year at the nearby Project Arts Centre,
which during the festival presented Rough Magic’s new version of Phaedra, with text
by Hilary Fannin
and a powerful live music score presided over by Ellen Cranitch. Fannin
relocated the tale of quasi-incestuous lust in an unspecific but
contemporary Irish setting, as Catherine Walker’s Phaedra ran mad for
love of her stepson Hippolytus, played by Allen Leech. Action shifted
between the house and the beach, with the sea a constant presence.
Characters’ inner thoughts and other commentaries were sung by a trio
of stylised figures representing the gods. The disciplines meshed well
together, but especially in the latter scenes the text sounded and felt
increasingly like the work of Enda Walsh, with Stephen Brennan’s
Theseus being an archetypal Walshian alpha-male bruiser.
A more audacious, and far more irreverent, take on a classic source was
undertaken by the Pan Pan company with The Rehearsal: Playing The Dane.
They did not so much update and/or deconstruct Hamlet as explode
it. An
introductory mini-lecture by Trinity College fellow Amanda Piesse was
followed by a series of audition scenes which on the one hand gave us a
whistle-stop, non-linear tour through some of the play’s greatest
moments, and on the other involved genuine uncertainty as our votes
determined which of three candidates would in fact play the role of
Hamlet after the interval. Elements of Beckett’s Endgame surfaced
repeatedly (and
appropriately for a production staged in Trinity’s Samuel Beckett
Theatre), and in a master-stroke a group of school students for whom
the play is a set text were brought in for the play-within-the-play and
also to paraphrase the gravedigger/funeral scene. The innovation and
cheek were non-stop; they even dared to stage the proceedings beneath a
backdrop featuring the towering canine features of, yes, a Great Dane.
I did not expect a more intense theatrical experience than this, still
less in the traditional environment of the Gaiety Theatre from a Sean
O’Casey play. O’Casey, and most of Druid Theatre’s recent productions,
have usually aroused in me a considerable admiration, but seldom if
ever that thrilling, electrifying sensation of being confronted both by
a stage
production and by the ideas it embodies. But O’Casey’s 1928 play The Silver Tassie
is a
coruscatingly angry piece, packed with bitterness and accusation about
the horrors of the Great War and the injustice done to its victims –
here’s the rub – by their families and friends at home. Here, the usual
feckless O’Casey Dubliners were led by a double-act of the venerable
Eamon Morrissey and John Olohan; the former played the father of Aaron
Monaghan’s Harry Heegan, a heroic football player crippled at the front
who returns to find his girl has deserted him, the other whose love he
did not requite has also found solace elsewhere, and his family now
regard his wheelchair-bound presence as at best an inconvenience. Garry
Hynes audaciously staged the front-line second act as a kind of
infernal version of Oh!
What A
Lovely War, but with all trace of loveliness, even the
ironic,
brutally extirpated. This war was unambiguously, terrifyingly, hell, as
a colossal field gun pointed straight out at the audience, indicting us
as well as the other characters. The
Silver Tassie paid an all-too-short visit to England last
month;
it deserves to be far more widely seen.