Specky Clark
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Words can speak untruths, Oona Doherty believes, but the body never lies. That’s certainly the case in Specky Clark, which the choreographer has based on the story of Edward James Doherty, her great-great-grandfather.
He was sent from Glasgow to Belfast at the age of 10, after the death of his mother – an event that she depicts within seconds of the show’s opening, ominous, primal drones drowning out Edwards’s anguished cries of “Mum!”
When he arrives in Belfast, the overbearing Clark sisters give him new clothes and a new name, Specky Clark. They also set Specky (played by Faith Prendergast) up with a job at the local abattoir, where he faces the initiation of shooting a pig (Gerard Headley). As he hesitates, gun in hand, the pig rises up and hugs Specky – who still fires.
Later that evening, Halloween night, he returns to the abattoir, where he dances alone, surrounded by the hanging carcasses. Then the pig comes back to life, and encourages Specky to find the gateway that will help other dead beings do the same, culminating in a wild dance.
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Just as Halloween is a liminal space where the living and the dead can coexist, the performance constantly slips between reality and the imagined, such as how the Clark sisters were fairies and one of the abattoir workers’ fathers disappeared after riding a giant pig. These accounts are introduced with the words “Let me tell ya a story”, a phrase that instantly suggests tall tales.
Most of the show’s dialogue is recorded – the dancers mime it – but when the pig comes back to life it speaks to Specky directly: as well as having physically comforted him, with the hug, the pig understands the boy. “Only you know where the openings to the other world are,” it tells him. “You just need to think, Specky. Think about the way ya feel when you’re dancing.”
It is through dancing that Specky finds liberation and consolation, a physical antidote to the trauma of his mother’s death. Stuck between his home in Glasgow and an uncertain future in Belfast, his whole body convulses with grief as he stands alone in a foggy blackness with a suitcase in his hand.
Multiple sources of inspiration emerge: the psychosis of Francie Brady from The Butcher Boy, the liberating act of dancing alone from Billy Elliot and more general myths of supernatural nights of revelry broken by the dawn. Even a reference to George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears when the pig shouts “Four legs good, two legs bad!” in a full-throated impersonation of Ian Paisley.
Generations of Doherty’s family have worked in abattoirs and butcher’s shops. In Specky Clark, she and her formidable creative team have created a story that, just as fantastical as those about fairies and giant pigs, will be woven into her family’s already rich oral history.
Specky Clark is at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Dance Festival, until Saturday, May 17th
