From the Wilde to the wonderful

A round-up of Dublin Theatre Festival reviews

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abbey Theatre ****

MOST PEOPLE will already be familiar with the dark, mysterious details. No matter how many years go by, or how debauched and insincere the actions become, the outward display remains handsomely unchanged. That, too frequently, is our experience of Oscar Wilde in revival, whose comedies are routinely embalmed in period frocks and crystal-cut epigrams while their souls seem to wither somewhere out of view.

The writer and director Neil Bartlett, whose first contemporary reappraisal of Wilde was his celebrated 1994 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Lyric, Hammersmith, has long been aware of the challenge. Lean too heavily on Wilde’s surface and you dishonour the subtext; make his subtext explicit and you lose its subversion.

Bartlett’s new adaptation for the Abbey may be less radical than his first, in which certain former acquaintances of Wilde’s gather to read the novel and are subsumed into its fiction, but it is refreshingly and illuminatingly unconventional.

Leaving the characters, story and language recognisably intact, it is, to some extent, a faithful dramatisation of the novel. Frank McCusker’s fabulously understated Basil has bared his soul (and his obsession) in a portrait of the beautiful, young Dorian (Tom Canton, making a persuasive professional debut), whom Jasper Britton’s brilliantly Mephistophelean Lord Henry seems to corrupt with just the offer of a cigarette. Soon Dorian has traded his soul for eternal youth, a libertine in a world without consequence, his sins borne only by his deteriorating portrait.

The frame that Bartlett constructs, similar to the approach of his 2008 Abbey production of An Ideal Husband, is rivetingly theatrical.

Designer Kandis Cook exposes the stage, emphasising the artifice of Gray’s society, against a corresponding glow of footlights and the recorded burble of audience laughter (“Dreadfully superficial,” the socialites say of the theatre, not entirely disapprovingly). Onstage microphones take some of the affected trill out of Wilde’s witticisms to reveal a compellingly dark sense. While, lining around an unadorned playing space, the ensemble become both chorus and onstage audience: here, everything is a pose or a performance. Everybody is watching.

“You are what the age is searching for,” Henry tells Dorian, “and what it is afraid it has found.” Bartlett is neither coy nor sensational about the covertly gay text – when Britton’s silken corrupter roughly kisses Canton’s dandy, it comes as a relief. Instead he plumbs the story for more resonant depths, the shiver of its prurience for youth and the subordination of morality to a pleasing surface. “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” wrote Wilde in the novel’s introduction, and although Bartlett makes one late, cheesy concession to gothic shock, the bigger surprise is how frequently he lets us see the ravages of Dorian’s enchanted portrait. It is as astonishing and horrifying as you can imagine.

Until November 17th PETER CRAWLEY

Politik

Samuel Beckett Theatre ****

WHAT CAN an individual do to effect political change? This is the question posed by The Company in Politik, an improvisational theatre game in which the audience is invited to participate. The performance begins with a manifesto about civic engagement in a modern democracy and political processes that are “alien to our daily lives”. In their quest for greater agency, the performers tell us, they tried and failed to join several political parties. So instead they decided to make a show in which the audience, as citizens, are allowed to take control of what happens on stage.

Under the supervising eye of director José Miguel Jiménez, Brian Bennett, Robert McDermott, Nyree Yergainharsian and Tanya Wilson enact a skeletal bank-heist scenario before handing directorial responsibility to us.

Ciarán O’Melia provides a suggestive design – four defined but empty spaces where the action takes place – and the audience are encouraged to provide props and extra characters with chalk. They have free rein on content, but there is an inherent semiotic significance in the sites of action, which makes certain details easy to predict.

Elsewhere, there are key decisions to be made: where exactly are the characters these actors play and what is their motivation for the crime? Thus begins a Whose Line is it Anyway-style exercise in which the actors become our puppets for an hour and justice (or silliness) will ensue.

To remind us of the more serious intent at stake in the interactive evening, two large screens at either end of the theatre display a series of changing quotes (from anarchist Emma Goldman to The Company themselves), which remind us of the broader political impetus behind this project. The performers see theatre as a site for social change and as their fictional scenario unfolds for a second and third time, the audience is made aware of their complicity in events.

It may be a bit of a cop-out to say that the measure of Politik’s success will depend on your willingness to join The Company in its experimental endeavour, but it does. On opening night, the audience was a fairly well-behaved bunch, but we eventually warmed to the challenge, as our passivity as observers became an unspoken parable of our passivity as citizens – although the broader political significance could be easily overlooked amid all the fun. So, yes, your enjoyment will depend on what you are prepared to bring to the table. Remember, your country, and The Company, need you.

Until Saturday SARA KEATING 

The House That Jack Filled

Project Arts Centre – Cube  ***

MCNALLY’S HOTEL by the Sea is the setting for Finegan Kruckemeyer’s latest collaboration with Theatre Lovett. It is a “cosy, poky, falling-downy” type of place, but its owner Jack wouldn’t have it any other way. Built by his parents beside a “river as big as the sea”, it is his home, as well as his livelihood: or, as his father put it before he passed away, the hotel is in Jack’s blood.

But when the river dries up, so does the trickle of visitors who keep McNally’s going, and Jack is forced to reinvent himself as well as his hotel. What Kruckemeyer sets up as a Fawlty Towers-style farce is slowly revealed to have something more serious at stake.

Kruckemeyer’s script is joyfully barmy, full of Edward Lear-like nonsenses that follow language and logic down rabbit holes, which may or may not connect coherently to the greater whole. Indeed, the chaos of McNally’s and Jack’s invaded mind is occasionally difficult to follow. A more structured use of voiceover (provided by the ice-creamy voice of Andrea Ainsworth) would have made the narrative divergences and cul-de-sacs less misleading.

Niamh Lunny’s set is an oasis of dilapidated charm: a cornucopia of surprise and wonder, where hidey-holes reveal new characters, lampshades have emotional reactions, and doorways can thwart you again and again.

Director Muireann Ahern capitalises on the physical images evoked in Kruckemeyer’s script, although the irrepressible Louis Lovett brings much more than slapstick clowning to his performance. He even produces his own sound effects (with the help of sound designer Carl Kennedy).

Lovett plays the eponymous hero, hotelier and host, but he also stars as all the guests, no mean feat considering the tics and freakish traits that define them. There are the Lionel O’Brienses, Senior and Junior; Norma and Dorma, Italian opera-singer twins; a moustachioed Spaniard and his two Irish children; and the ghastly, ghoulish Mrs Chelsea, who is all teeth and no manners. Jack’s greedy evil brother Jake makes an appearance too, although he proves to be more Southpark than South-End-On-Sea; an unwelcome visitor in an otherwise hilarious family show.

Until Sunday, then tours SARA KEATING

Seen and heard: what's on and what we said

The Last Summer, The Gate ***

“Director Toby Frow’s production … seems unsure how to respond to Declan Hughes’s strange mode of urban pastoralism.”

The 14th Tale, Project Arts Centre - Cube ****

“An age-old story then, of fathers and children, of reconciliation, of the confused search for love, but one that is expressed in new-minted language and with a winning simplicity.”

Talk of the Town, Project Arts Centre ***

“Like Maeve Brennan it has two sides that cannot easily reconcile, tugged between locations, between truth and fiction.”

Everyone is King Lear in His Own Home, Smock Alley Theatre ***

“Anyone looking for a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s tragedy will be frustrated by Pan Pan’s deliberately oblique approach.”

Tristan und Isolde, Bord Gáis Energy Theatre *****

“Fergus Sheil conducted as to the manor born, paced the music with sensitive care, secured near-perfect balances between voices and orchestra.”

REVIEWED

The strand of previously produced plays this year features:

Eternal Rising of the Sun (The Lir)

We described Amy Conroy’s performance as “powerful and lingering” after its run in 2011’s Absolut Fringe Festival.

Pineapple (The Lir)

This production has had cast and creative changes since its May debut. Back then, we positively reviewed Philip McMahon’s play – set in a tower block – as “compassionate but unsentimental, hopeful but worldly wise”.

Bird with Boy (12 Henrietta Street)

The dance installation was given five stars when it ran in the 2011 Fringe, at Kilmainham Jail, and was described as “a finely produced dance theatre work; unsettling, raw and even beautiful”.