Dublin Theatre Festival: Reviews of Bear, the Story of a Hero, Today - a leaning axis, Revolutions - Programme One, The Battle of the Boyne . . ., Blood Wedding, the far side of the moon and Duck.
Bear, the Story of a Hero
The Ark
By Bernice Harrison
The youngest festival-goers this year have one of the biggest treats. For four- to eight-year- olds the Ark has brought over the internationally renowned Dutch children's theatre company, TamTam, for a week-long run. The company's specialisation is object theatre - using everyday objects to tell a story. Bear and his dolly friend, Nora, are little toys that live in a trunk in the attic, have tea parties and go on adventures. Then Nora is abducted by a spidery umbrella and bear bravely sets out to find her. The only human on stage is the instantly engaging Marije van der Sande, who devised the show and who moves her little cast around with a lively sense of fun.
Bear clambers into a top hat to sail over the folds of a dress lying on an ironing-board; tiptoes along a washing-line, and rides through the air on an iron - and of course he rescues Nora.
Directed by Gerard Schiphirst, Bear is a gentle, quiet show, like a vivid picture-book come to life, and it probably works best for the younger end of its target audience. It's a simple linear narrative told through the instantly recognisable medium of child's play. Adults smiled in recognition because they see children play with the same kind of imagination every day and children laughed because all of them at some point pretend their teddy bear likes tea or urgently needs a bandage.
Ends today.
Dublin Theatre Festival booking: 01-6778899 or www.dublintheatrefestival.com
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Today - a leaning axis
SS Michael and John
By Michael Seaver
Creeping up from the middle of the audience and concealed under a black anorak, Oguri begins his journey across the spacious floor of the upstairs venue at SS Michael and John. Barefoot, his toes curl and cling to the wooden floor as he slowly follows the strips of light, bow-legged and hunched.
The dark soul that is the essence of Butoh, a Japanese post-second World War form of contemporary dance, is visible in Oguri's straining face and body, and while his vocabulary is a kind of personal "nouveau Butoh", there is no dilution of the slow, considered movement style.
The range of movement possible in his body is incredible and common assumptions about weight and balance are constantly challenged. Ultimately it is this facility, allowing a huge range of expression, that resonates most after the performance.
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Revolutions - Programme One
Project Space Upstairs
By Michael Seaver
There is nothing revolutionary in the first 'Revolutions' programme, made up of studio works created during the Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland's 'Platform' series, performed along with Fergus Ó Conchúir's new work, Tearmann. The inclusion of studio works is questionable in the context of the Fringe and grouping the inexperienced choreographers in the second half did them no favours.
Ingrid Nachstern's Peace and Demons is, for her, very under-developed, while Olwyn Grindley's Nepo Eht Rood has a clear structure but little personality.
Lisa McLaughlin's quirky and clever Tender Hooks of Honesty fares best, with its inventive vocabulary and honest presentation.
In Tearmann, Ó Conchúir continues to grapple with identity and community through text and movement. A somewhat uncertain flabby structure conceals what is in essence a considered work. In spite of the use of contextualising text it is the movement, within clear lines and boxes of light, that speaks most eloquently, particularly in the opening and in the duet between Ó Conchúir and Nanette Kincaid.
Tearmann runs until tomorrow with works by Mairead Vaughan, Julie Lockett and Nanette Kincaid.
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The Battle of the Boyne . . .
THEatre SPACE
By Fíona Ní Chinnéide
One look at the our two timeless narrators, one with bowler hat planted firmly on his head, the other with it jauntily tipped backwards, and we know exactly where we are - and who they are. Over the next 95 minutes, this comic duo takes us on a hugely entertaining journey through 17th-century Ireland, never once letting their (divided) characters slip, even when acting out the other's version of the story.
With high energy and enormous talent, psalm-spouting McKeague (Kieran Hurley) and roguish O'Brien (Alastair Mac Aindreasa) create schooners, besieged cities, even the River Boyne itself out of four blue crates, a white sheet and a ladder. Although it spins out of control towards the end when what has been subtle and understood all through becomes faintly silly, ultimately The Battle of the Boyne and by way of interlude The Siege of (London) Derry is not intended to deliver moral judgments or to shatter stereotypes but to tell a good story. What a performance!
Runs until October 11th
Dublin Fringe Festival booking: 1850-374643 or www.fringefest.com
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Blood Wedding
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
By Jane Coyle
It begins with footfalls in darkness: the staccato rhythms of clicking heels along narrow, cobbled streets, the sultry heat of southern Spain conveyed by the rasping voices of the North of Ireland. And it ends with a spectacle of grief, awful in its familiarity - two young men violently killed, a handful of black-clad mourners and a widowed mother, keening for two dead sons while vowing to carry on living and to honour their memory.
David Johnston's muscular translation of Federico García Lorca's lusty, blood-soaked tragedy has the senses drowning in a torrent of images, terrible in their beauty: crushed white oleanders, sweating horses, fragrant carnations, flashing knives, gushing rivers. It is brought to the stage by the remarkable imagination and vision of Bruiser Theatre Company's artistic director, Lisa May, and an exceptionally effective cast, who clearly feel the impassioned poetry with every inch of their bodies.
Aware of Lorca's own assassination at the hands of his political opponents in his native Granada and with thousands of similar victims notched up in our own community, no audience will fail to respond to the play's railing against the narrow- mindedness, superficial moral correctness and suppressed emotions of bourgeois life.
May's stark, minimal, black- box production combines the lyricism of the spoken word with the company's distinctive brand of physical theatre. The six actors - Rory Casey, Niki Doherty, Laura Hughes, Sharon Morwood, Sean Paul O'Rawe and Pepe Roche - never leave the stage, becoming, in turn, a protective mother and her eager son, a nervous bride, a proud father, a young couple trapped in a loveless marriage, as well as the tight-knit, disapproving society that embraces and imprisons them. They watch helplessly as the blood pulse quickens and the wedding day unravels into a horrible but inevitable conclusion, the fine skein of life slit, in a trice, by the glinting blade of a lethal little knife. Lorca would have loved it.
Blood Wedding is at the Old Museum Arts Centre (048-90233332) until tomorrow, then tours to the Playhouse, Derry (October 9th), Share Centre, Lisnaskea (13th, 14th), Glen Centre, Manorhamilton (16th), Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick (17th), Clotworthy Arts Centre, Antrim (23rd) and Island Arts Centre, Lisburn (25th).
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the far side of the moon
O'Reilly Theatre
By Helen Meany
Is there anybody out there? In his cramped apartment, at the gym, in empty conference rooms, bars and airport lounges, Philippe, a man in his 40s, grieves for his dead mother and wrestles with his solitude. Whether he's recording a video message to outer space or talking to his brother on the phone, in this solo performance by Yves Jacques, he is essentially talking to himself.
The latest work from Ex Machina, the company led by Quebecois writer-director-designer-film-maker-actor, Robert Lepage, develops his characteristic adventures in time and space but keeps them anchored to the minutiae of everyday life. The space race of the 1960s and 1970s provides an almost mythical backdrop to a story that is age-old and simple: of two brothers who are mirror-images of each other and can't get on.
Philippe's life-long obsession with outer space and man's place in the universe has culminated in a PhD thesis proposing the creation of a "space elevator" on the far side of the moon. While he is trying to find a foothold in the world, he also yearns to defy gravity, to soar. His brother Andre has more literal ideas about space, and Jacques's remarkable performance portrays both men with sympathy and wit.
A set composed of a curved, tilting mirror and a sliding black screen, a series of film projections of cosmonauts, a score by Laurie Anderson, puppets, a glass porthole that becomes a lens, a washing machine, a fishbowl, the moon, the globe - these are some of the means by which Lepage and his collaborators have created a theatrical world of light and shadow, where past and present, exteriors and interiors, Earth and cosmos converge.
Concerns that Lepage's technical inventiveness was in danger of becoming an end in itself are allayed by this work, where clever sleight of hand has given way to what Lepage calls "the intelligence of the heart" - intuition.
Its great achievement is to present an inner and outer journey simultaneously, to create dazzling images of transformation that fully serve the drama, and the vulnerable human figure at its core.
Runs until Oct 9th
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Duck
Peacock Theatre
By Gerry Colgan
Stella Feehily's first play has been on tour in Britain since last July, including a three-week stint at the Edinburgh Festival, where it garnered some golden opinions and a nomination for Best Actress. It is set in Dublin, and centres on a beautiful teenage girl named Catherine, re-christened by her boyfriend Mark as Duck because of her big feet. She is a hostess in the nightclub that he manages.
It opens with Duck (Ruth Negga) and her friend Sophie (Elaine Symons) staggering along drunk, and Duck confessing that she has set fire to Mark's jeep because of his cavalier attitude towards her. They are molested by two youths who are put to flight by street fighter Sophie with the aid of a broken bottle. A scene has been set of young lives in disarray.
The play is structured in a succession of staccato scenes that focus mainly on Duck's personality and attitudes to family, sex and life in general. She has left home and lives with Mark (Karl Shiels) who maltreats her, always the arrogant, dominant male. But along to the nightclub comes Jack (Tony Rohr), a middle-aged writer and sophisticate who easily brings her to bed.
Parallel with this we get to know the parents of the two girls, portraits that readily explain why they dislike living at home. Beady-eyed morality and censure do not make for loving families. But Duck is deeper into life on the edge, and Mark, learning the truth about his jeep and of her liaison with Jack, adds some violence to the mix. Escape is indicated, and the two girls pack their bags and set off for a new life.
It is a hope that the play as written hardly supports, but the conviction of the acting - including that of Gina Moxley and Aidan O'Hare - and the verve of Max Stafford Clark's direction give it a momentum that persists to the ending. The author writes in a charged dialogue that may conceal a hollow centre in the plot, a sense of contrivance; but she and her play have certainly arrived.
Runs to Nov 1st.
