SLIGO'S adventurous Bluc Raincoat company launched this week a new play called Once Time by one of its founder members, Malcolm Hamilton. It left me meditating on the point at which introspection of writing and performance may turn into the kind of obscurity which frustrates an audience's willing desire to engage with a performance.
As directed by Corinne Soum, this production attempts to communicate its story and meaning through stylised narrative and movement. The words come across as a kind of lyrical blank verse with an eclectic content, the random memories and thoughts of a man who is certainly Irish. Names are dropped; De Valera, Collins, T.S. Eliot, Dante and others. One has a sense of movement in time and space.
Stitched into all this is the essence of a life: youth, love, marriage, loss and death. As the man speaks and moves, a chorus of three men and three women elaborate, as it were, on his musings. They add to his words, and move in a graceful orchestration somewhere between mime and ballet. A surreal atmosphere is generated as they roll and glide, use a large bed as a multi purpose prop and freeze into occasional charades. One must admire all of this for the sheer professionalism and confidence with which it is executed.
The extent to which it communicates with an audience as theatre is another matter. Since Eliot is mentioned, it is clear that The Waste Land, say, needs to be read and reread studied over time, to mine its riches. Mr Hamilton has written something very personal and opaque, and it does not yield easily to aural or visual representation. The choreography here is finally meaningful only to the extent to which it embellishes and makes lucid the play's content. From this perspective, I found it arbitrary.
Brendan Ellis, John Carty, Ciaran McCauley, Kevin Quinn, Jenni Ledwell, Fiona McGeown and Ciara O'Callaghan do all that is required of them by writer and with impressive skills. I wish I did not feel that they were operating in a theatrical cul de sac, with the audience cast as distant observers; but I do.
