Stories used and unused

Irish Timeswriters review the Dublin Theatre Festival

Tales of Ballycumber

Abbey Theatre

Sebastian Barry's new play, Tales of Ballycumber, is a curious blend of romance and devastation; an evocation of Wicklow's Protestant heritage and an exorcism of a family's recent past. Set by the fireside in the ubiquitous Irish country cottage, the play evokes an Ireland of old, with its traditions of storytelling and oral history. This is echoed in the play's form, as its minimal dialogue sets off long confessions and personal recollections by each of the characters.

For Nicholas Farquhar (Stephen Rea), these are idealised versions of his family history and the past’s grandeur; for his sister, Tania (Derbhle Crotty), it is the equally mythologised savagery of their childhood; for his young friend, Evans (Aaron Monaghan), it is a fable of impossible love; for Evans’s father, Andrew (Liam Carney), it is the significance of what bringing a child into the world means.

Stories in Tales of Ballycumberare the binding ties of friendship, the chains of connection between people and place. Words provide ways of shaping a fallen world when sadness is too much to bear.

The slow quietude of David Leveaux’s production is inevitable: in Ballycumber, delusion is a better option than defeat; praying by the fireside is preferable to abandoning hope; resignation is more likely than rage. However, combined with the storytelling structure, this results in a static rather than a vital stage world. There is a plot, but there is little action and no conflict, so the 90-minute show struggles to be dramatic.

Mike Britton’s sweeping set, a Wordsworthian vision of daffodils, juxtaposes the romance of Farqhuar’s bucolic blindness with the spartan spiritual poverty of his isolated existence. While the drifting ghost of Lisa Hogg’s Girl breaches the gap between both worlds – suggesting that Farqhuar himself may merely be a myth, a legend, of Ballycumber – this meta-theatrical possibility is not followed through. Indistinct animal projections also echo the irreconcilability of the two worlds – nature, whether bestial or human, is survival of the fittest.

Rea brings an intense melancholy to Nicholas, the master-storyteller of the townland, while Monaghan, Crotty and Carney bring concern, compassion and grief, respectively, to their stories.

However, there is little in the way of psychology for them to draw on; there are merely the stories, true or untrue, often told or never spoken. Barry's luminous metaphoric language suffuses the texture of the tales they tell and the imagined world of Ballycumber, but words, like stories, are not always enough. SARA KEATING

Until Nov 7

The Blue Dragon

O’Reilly Theatre

It is perilous to represent a nation, in all its cultural contradictions and thorny politics, with glib stereotypes. Indeed, if anyone is alive to the lessons of orientalism, it must be Robert Lepage. A theatrical visionary in the age of globalisation, he critiqued the practice in 1985 with The Dragon Trilogy, a six-hour spectacle that depicted China through Canadian eyes. Nearly a quarter of a century later, and dealing with a very different China, the surprise here is that, initially, the orientalised nation is Canada.

As maple syrup, a toy moose and maple-leaf-embroidered clothing emerge from a suitcase, freshly delivered from Montreal to Shanghai, the gesture seems both sly comment and guilty admission. How can you engage with complex ideas – such as the West’s near-prurient fascination with China’s clamped-fist communism and voracious capitalism, its rich culture and the ripe trading opportunities it represents – without reducing China to reassuring preconceptions? Sadly, in a show of striking imagery and great technical accomplishment, the plot is similarly travel-sized, with characters whittled down to figurines and no emotional or political content exceeding its limited baggage allowance.

This is not to say that that Ex Machina’s production, staged with the assistance of 16 international co-producers, is not visually sumptuous. Lepage is an artist who dreams of images never before staged, asking “why not?” as nearby accountants gulp and begin soliciting more international co-producers.

The opening sequence of The Blue Dragonunites his gift for spectacle with a purpose. Pierre Lamontagne (Henri Chassé), Montreal artist turned Shanghai museum curator, talks us through Chinese calligraphy. "The first thing you have to trace," he says, as a seemless video image mirrors his brush strikes, "is a single direct line." Disappointingly, the story makes this terribly easy to do, as though a narrative rendered in thin strokes is subsidiary to the greater demands of the mise-en-scène.

Lamontagne has secretly taken up with a young artist, Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo), a superficial character who has forged a career as a self-portrait artist with a camera phone, a Nokia Narcissus. Lamontagne’s boozy old flame, Claire, arrives (played by an engaging Marie Michaud, who co-wrote) to adopt a baby, if not purchase one outright. Their interests collide over a pregnancy test. And although it neatly emulates a Chinese legend, the story’s arch resolutions (we get more than one) recognise that no single ending can be satisfactory. The personal story is intended to refract a political context, yet what we see of Chinese culture – the etiquette of tipping, the ease of abortions, state oppression, revolutionary pageantry, dizzy advertisements – could have come from any guidebook.

It is hugely impressive to see scenes skip from a Shanghai loft to an airplane cabin, or from a club to a subway station, in a heartbeat, but, unusually for Lepage, such restless frames emulate cinema rather than enrich the theatre. Like the symbol of the blue dragon ("that devastating force that hides in all things") tattooed endlessly on Lamontagne's back, the metaphors are carefully, meticulously inscribed, but they never run deep enough under the skin. Until Sunday PETER CRAWLEY

Freefall

Project Arts Centre

The latest production from the Corn Exchange marks a departure from the company's usual commedia dell'arte-inspired style. No masks. No direct address to the audience. All in all, the dramaturgy is closer to something like the memory play, as practiced by the great Americans, such as Arthur Miller.

In a series of flashbacks, we are brought through the biography of our mild-mannered, middle-aged, principal male character. He is a quintessential Irish father of 2009, a man who finds himself reviewing his life as he lies trapped in a paralysed body, his survival threatened by a stroke.

Played perfectly by Andrew Bennett, this character is a man that life happens to. From losing his parents in childhood, through being shepherded to university by a mentoring priest, to the crumbling of his marriage, this is a man who observes passively as things cave in. And, in that, how representative he is of his nation.

Employing scene after transitional scene, writer Michael West and director Annie Ryan achieve something worthy of our attention with this exceptional cast. Without assaulting us with obvious metaphors, we are offered a picture of our own society in freefall, as everything unravels and an attempt is made at understanding.

The only reservations relate to the Freudian motivation of the lead character. Having lost his sister in childhood, he harbours a sense of guilt over what became of her.

When this manifests itself in fantasies that his wife is indeed his sister, it is at the expense of the very placid normality that makes the lead character what he is. Also, the metaphor of dry rot – that there is something wrong with the foundations, threatening to bring down the entire structure – is itself a little creaky. This fine play would be finer without these elements.

That said, this is a technically brilliant production which excellently uses the sparse, metallic space provided by set designer Kris Stone. Conor Linehan’s composition provides a delicate atmosphere and Matt Frey’s lighting is imaginative and well-realised.

But it is the cast that excel here. Damian Kearney, Ruth McGill and Louis Lovett are all pitch-perfect. As for the two leads, the stroke-struck, pyjama-clad Bennett excels, as does Janet Moran as his wife – particularly in the moving scene where she finally speaks to her husband in hospital, her emotion-filled eyes projected large on the backdrop as she addresses a live camera.

Theatre audiences have come to expect a high standard from Corn Exchange. In Freefall, the company delivers on that standard again. Until Sunday IAN KILROY