MICHAEL DERVANreviews Shipwrecked, which is showing in the IMMA in Dublin

Shipwrecked

IMMA, Dublin

Francisco de Cuellar was the captain of the 24-gun galleon San Pedro, which set sail as part of the Spanish Armada in 1588. His bad luck saw him lose command of his ship (an incident in which he also survived an order to be hanged), and he later found himself shipwrecked in a storm off the west coast of Ireland.

He made land in Co Sligo, and was engaged in the kind of hair-raising adventures that Hollywood would find much mileage in. Among his “great misfortunes” he found himself “naked and shoeless all the winter”, and passed “more than seven months among mountains and woods with savages, which they all are in those parts of Ireland where we were shipwrecked”.

He detailed his travails in Ireland and Scotland in a letter he wrote after he had finally reached the safe haven of Antwerp, and this made it into print in an English translation as Captain Cuellar's Adventuresin Connacht and Ulster in 1897.

Eric Fraad, Caitríona O’Leary and Jocelyn Clarke have adapted the story for the stage, and the early music ensemble eX presented it at Imma, with costumes by Alessio Rosati and stage direction by Fraad.

The black-clad captain was triply presented, by an actor (a grandly rhetorical Keith Dunphy, speaking and cavorting in costume from a script), a singer (Juan Sancho), and a dancer (a guitar-wielding Steve Player).

The narrative was freely glossed with period-flavoured instrumental and vocal music, some improvised, some traditional (the line-up included Emer Mayock on whistles), the largest vocal contributions coming from the contrasted voices of Caitríona O’Leary and Clara Sanabras, O’Leary sounding almost artless by comparison with the quicksilver stylistic manoeuvrability of Sanabras.

It was a nice touch to introduce the quarrelling presences of Elizabeth I and Philip II in miniature, through children (Abby Phillips and Robert Donnelly), the two presiding over the evening’s action from thrones on either side of the centrally placed musical ensemble.

The publicity promised “a Spectacular Renaissance Cabaret Oratorio”, a description that suggests rather more in the way of spectacle and singing than was actually delivered. Caitríona O’Leary’s programme note gave a different orientation when she referred to the music as a “soundtrack”. That soundtrack offered some first-class music-making as a background to a story that, for all its sense of overstatement, is well worth anyone’s attention.

MICHAEL DERVAN