Review: Frequency 783

Frequency 783

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

***

It may be a folly to try to predict the future, but it’s a tragedy if you can’t imagine it. This elegiac and slender new piece from Brokentalkers recognises that, in either case, our expectations for the future are actually a present-tense concern. Featuring two non-professional performers – the 17-year-old Neimhin Robinson and Clodagh O’Reilly, a little shy of retirement age – it presents something like a generational contradiction: the older performer expresses optimism for what lies ahead, while the younger, whom we first meet toying, horrifically, with the idea of suicide, can’t see any promise.

Death shadows the concept: despite the touching retro-futurism of Ciarán O’Melia’s set, recalling a recording studio as much as a low-rent spaceship, our attention is continually drawn to an urn, a stark memento mori. Likewise, a series of songs by Seán Millar draws from the nostalgic genre of synth pop, but recasts its brighter characteristics as something closer to a threnody.

Directors and creators Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan work to produce deliberately affectless performances here, making Robinson and O’Reilly seem less like individuals than emblems; real people who seem oddly generalised. Instead, we hear ruminations about the future second hand, repeated from interviews via earphones: an elderly woman’s thoughts that endless organ replacements may result in eternal life, or speculation that robot carers are better equipped (and more patient) to tend to the elderly.

That resembles a dialogue between positions, then, rather than people: O’Reilly and Robinson connect most vividly through action, choreographed by Jessica Kennedy through corresponding dance movements or abstracted physical confrontation, or accompanying each other on bass or synth. (Nothing is quite as directly affecting as seeing them relax during a curtain call.)

If the content feels a little one-note, there are some bracing sequences. One song, Michael, is both a floating hymn to a supportive robot and a sad rebuke to an absent husband; O'Reilly's stories of space travel are fables of dislocation and loss, augmented by enveloping video projections from Killian Waters; a flailing, agitated dance from Robinson in a realistic, wrinkled mask rails against the prison sentence of senescence.

This may be a difficult theme to individualise – the title, a reference to the tone produced by the earth, underscores its universality – but, whether our expectations are positive or dark, it’s all ahead of us.

Until Oct 5