We need convincing

Thirteen: Suasion

Liberty Hall, Dublin

****

There’s a spellbinding moment in this chapter of Anu’s 13 project, when we are persuaded to see the company’s co-artistic director and visual artist, Owen Boss, as his great grandfather, PT Daly. In the wrong hands the insistence would feel forced – Boss (not a natural performer) is wearing an early 20th-century costume. But the transition is achieved gently as he moves from third-person reports of Jim Larkin’s right-hand man, who steered hundreds of women and children out of the path of Bloody Sunday, to inhabit the character. We feel closer to the event.

Liberty Hall once played host to agit prop theatre for the unions, so the performance is deliberately unsubtle yet admirably free of irony and self-deprecation. In nerveless performances, we encounter Larkin himself, Daly, Rosie Hackett and Dora Montefiore spelling out personal politics on public stages, sometimes in ritualised rhythmic movement, sometimes through unguarded banter, sometimes in intimate addresses delivered eye-to-eye. Graceful allusions to children, and more pointedly to generational inheritance, become the production’s keenest note, yet it ends with a blast of polemic, straight from recent news stories. Some will see this as overcooking, but the point couldn’t be more sober. Here, again, is ample source for agitation. What are we doing in this refuge?