Resisting, through the ages

Thirteen: Resilience

14 Henrietta Street, Dublin

***

Appearances can be deceptive. The clean, flayed walls and barren brightness of 14 Henrietta Street have a crumbling elegance, but this Georgian building contains complex, painful histories. Built for nobility, occupied by government officials, then Famine-era courts that sold indebted properties, it was finally designated a tenement building, housing up to 17 families at once. If these walls could talk . . .

Anu concentrates on just two emblematic voices, though; the bitter confrontation of a divided couple, in 1913, whose home is disintegrating in impossible circumstances. "I'd have rather let them die in my arms than give them away," says a quietly ferocious Thomas Reilly. Though the idea of suffering and stolen children is over-iterated through music, a modified retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale and a final inspection from the present, nothing communicates the tragedy of sundered generations better than a menacing confrontation with Zara Starr, which erupts, finally, into a passionate and violent dance.

We don’t get a sense of tenement life, but rather loss: the lingering effect of a storied building where nobody is at home.

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