Reviews of Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Dayin Kilkenny and Loversin Cork

Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day

Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny

Portmanteau words, the result of cramming two words into a single, somehow-sensible meaning, are one of the defining traits of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. To judge from Sharon Fogarty's short, media-emblazoned play about Lucia Joyce, such stirring compounds spilled out from the author's daughter while he sat there, carefully collecting them. He's there again, as a strikingly familiar silhouette, long and crooked, behind a screen of Jim Clayburgh's set, while Ruth Maleczech's sedentary Lucia speaks to us from an English mental asylum. In this well-intended but ultimately misguided production from Mabou Mines, Lucia is exploited to the end, forever unable to escape from her father's shadow.

There are two obvious methods with which to construct this biodrama: a naturalistic play mingling historical fact and imaginative speculation, or a more experimental performance informed by Lucia’s mental disarray and the jagged dance of modernist literature. In keeping with the avant garde agenda and technological playfulness of Mabou Mines, writer and director Sharon Fogarty chooses the latter, enveloping Maleczech’s monologue in a delicate swirl of moving lights and video projections, placing Lucia on a chair that floats free from the ground at her more weightless intervals.

Our access to the private world of the 75-year-old Lucia is sadly more restrained. Fogarty, perhaps reluctant to explore Lucia’s schizophrenia and its harrowingly crude treatment, cleaves instead to the image of a geriatric child. Here Maleczech, warm-featured and endearingly expressive, gently commands attention by intermingling Lucia’s infantile reminiscences with catty remarks about fellow patients, or the lightly inscribed marginalia of literary gossip: chair-throwing family fights; Beckett’s disinterested courtship; Pound’s more determined advances – a modernist soap-opera.

This creates the impression of an imprisoned soul where even the monologue form, like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, thickens the impression of Lucia as a Joycean character, rather than a Joyce. It is reinforced by the design: the Mabou Mines aesthetic is seductive but not always thought-through, where the blanket illumination makes Maleczech seem a slight presence, even on a small stage, and a frail dance sequence or a wandering Irish accent don’t alleviate her physical confinement.

Where Lucia's Chaptersis strongest is in the more rigorous reaches of its dramaturgy. Late in the show, a thicket of projected text includes one insight of Carl Jung's, who wrote of Lucia and James "swimming in the same water – one is diving, one drowning".

That probing insight into the relationship between imaginative creativity and mental disorder seems the basis of a much more compelling drama. As it is, this Lucia is certainly submerged in troubled waters yet still seems only half-formed: we may be told that portmanteau words trickle out of her, but we hear very few of them.

We know that Lucia carries heavy baggage, but ultimately we are left to guess at its contents. Until August 11 PETER CRAWLEY

Lovers

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

Mary Curtin's direction of Loversfor Proscenium Productions is a reminder that the discovery of happiness is the transcendental moment in much of Brian Friel's drama. In these paired one-act plays this theme connects two otherwise disparate stories, one entitled Winnersand the other Losers. That the winners die and the losers live is Friel's way of pointing up his particular view of human nature. The hero and heroine of Winners are too young to replace happiness with philosophy, which is what happens in Losers, but they are not too young to convince us that, despite the sparkle of their exchanges or their exaggerated fantasies of adult life, their business is to catch the joy as it flies: this is a couple whose affection is unlikely to withstand the notable differences in their characters and aspirations. Friel frames this story with two sideline voices detailing the location (with Jim Queally's design responsive to the narrative simplicity), the year, the day, the very climate in which their meeting takes place, a forensic record of a small-town event important only to its participants. Yet the engaged performances by Colum Dennehy and Irene Kelleher, with Ian McGuirk and Ann Dorgan as the recorders, ensure those participants achieve their implied allegorical significance. Losershas little psychological depth. Its rant against the tyranny of the Holy Rosary – and Irish piety – is worked out here with the broadest comic strokes. But this crisp presentation keeps a firm shape in which, despite the hilarity, nothing is overdone by the cast led by Michael Murphy and Cora Fenton. Until August 22nd. MARY LELAND