Irish Times writers review Dublin Theatre Festival events.
Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme, Abbey Theatre
The key to what makes Frank McGuinness's 1985 masterpiece such a rare bird in Irish theatre is the first word of its title: observe. It is not a word you associate with the vast bulk of Irish plays. The staple diet of our theatre is passionate engagement with the vivid details of a shared reality. Observation, with its connotations of cool, objective appraisal, is not our thing. And yet Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme is an appropriate play to kick off the Abbey and Ireland centenary season, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, for it does, in a way, take up where John Synge left off, with the sensibility of a sympathetic, open-minded outsider looking in on a strange and unfamiliar culture. To make this play, McGuinness, a Co Donegal Catholic by origin, put his ear to the cracks in the ceiling of Ulster loyalism and listened without prejudice.
In that special sense this is quite a cold play. It resists the familiar pleasures of an audience identifying with the characters on stage, not least because those characters aggressively defy any attempt to identify them as belonging to the Irish Catholic mainstream. The men to whom we are introduced one by one in the first act are Ulster Protestants who have volunteered for the British army in 1916. They come from different places and different classes; what binds them is their fear of Catholics and their willingness to kill and die for their embattled tribe. If they were real people the last thing they would want would be the sympathy of a Dublin audience.
If it keeps its emotional distance the play also preserves a remarkable political objectivity. It does not attempt to judge. The loyalist culture it describes is neither praised nor condemned. It pushes us into a world of war, the horrible, apocalyptic experience of the Somme, where right and wrong, good and bad have ceased to exist and any kind of meaning is being squeezed out of existence. The play's dominant mood is the fatalistic one of Greek tragedy, where people have to play out a script written by careless gods.
With neither emotional identification nor a political message on offer, what's left to make this play so powerful? The simple answer, and the one that Robin Lefevre's production grasps so firmly, is the almost ritual unfolding of the action.
McGuinness, with help from Rudyard Kipling, puts into the mouth of a hard Belfast Orangeman the great line "We're not making a sacrifice; we are the sacrifice." That's what the play is: the observation of a ritual sacrifice. Lefevre and his cast, helped enormously by Tim Reed's eloquently minimal sets, drag us to the altar and hold us there in mesmerised fascination.
As a drama of observation the play pivots around the figure of Pyper, whose older self is remembering its action and whose younger self has the clearest view of what's going on. He is the oddball - an upper-class decadent, a failed sculptor with a death wish - yet it is he who will survive the war and own the story. He is the Virgil who takes us into this inferno. Lefevre's production works so well in large measure because of two immense performances from John Kavanagh as the older Pyper and Risteárd Cooper as his younger self.
Kavanagh is on stage for no more than a few minutes at the beginning and the end of the play, but he uses his time to stunning effect. He creates not so much a man haunted by ghosts as a living ghost, a man who never really emerged from hell and who feels its fires every moment. Cooper picks up brilliantly on Kavanagh's strange persona, a mix of the languidly effete and the painfully tormented, giving us a character who seems to flit from second to second between Dorian Gray and his picture.
The force of these performances allows the rest of the cast, in which David Pearse is outstanding, to concentrate on a precise, unadorned presentation of McGuinness's complex but utterly compelling narrative. The efficiency of the scene changes, the decision to play without an interval and the meticulous pacing of the action all make for a hypnotic momentum that sweeps us relentlessly towards the abyss. As a richly resonant picture of a culture that is, in Keats's term, half in love with easeful death, this production echoes beyond the time of its creation and the time in which it is set and gives life to a laconic line in Paula McFetridge's programme note: "Ulster boys are still in Iraq."
Runs until November 13th
Fintan O'Toole
Improbable Frequency, O'Reilly Theatre
We have come to expect to be surprised by Rough Magic productions. With Lynne Parker as director, astonishing vistas are bound to leap from the stage and actors to pull out startling characters, like rabbits from magicians' hats. Parker matches her intellectual dexterity for a play's workings with a thundering, visceral sense of fun - and when these two collide with a musical satire about the Emergency, Myles na Gopaleen and MI5, no ordinary piece of theatre can ensue.
And Improbable Frequency is nothing if not wilfully, gleefully, dynamically different. At first it looks as if it might merely be terrifically clever: Arthur Riordan's script of poetry and pun, as he pokes questions at the sacred cow of Irish neutrality, seems itself a coded language, secrets laced through its bouncing rhymes. As Faraday, the young English codebreaker dispatched to Dublin to determine Ireland's true wartime colours, Peter Hanly is immediately convincing, seeming made for these strait-laced clothes and plummy tones. So when he joins with the rest of the cast in the first musical number of the evening, the wickedly apposite Be Careful Not To Patronise The Irish, nothing jars, nothing seems incongruous: these are Irish actors, singing in a musical, and, incredibly, it works. And - save for moments of frustrating inaudibility, the result both of poor acoustics and untrained singing voices - it continues to work, buoyed along by the rich, spiky melodies of Bell Helicopter's Conor Kelly and Sam Park.
Riordan's script is clever, incorporating historical fact with imaginative fantasy to create a probing journey through the white smoke of neutral Ireland; the presence in 1940s Dublin of John Betjeman and Erwin Schrödinger, along with the openness of D'Olier Street's Red Bank restaurant to Nazi sympathisers here, provided him with a priceless template to start from. And priceless themselves, as the poet and the physicist respectively, are Rory Nolan and Declan Conlon, while Darragh Kelly is a marvellous Myles - chipping in too as a comically bloodthirsty IRA chief. Cathy White and Lisa Lambe, meanwhile, cast an enigmatic and decidedly erotic spell as the secret agent and the sweet Irish girl in the thick of it all.
And just as Riordan's script seems to be settling for cleverness and hilarity, an unnerving sense of truth, or something like it, invades the stage in a memorable final scene, as the meanings of the world, of identity, go astray. This is true satire: you're as likely to shudder as to laugh.
Runs until October 9th
Belinda McKeon
Frankie & Johnny In The Clair De Lune, Olympia Theatre
Johnny is a cook, or hash-slinger, and Frankie a waitress in a cheap restaurant. They have just been on their first date and are in bed, doing what comes naturally, at the play's start. The getting-to-know-you phase then takes over and, for the next 90 minutes or so, constitutes the main action.
They are both in their 40s and have not so far been lucky in love or life. He married once and had two children, only to see his family taken over by a wealthy man. She has had affairs, the last one seven years previously, when her lover committed the cliché of falling for her best friend. And now the dreary
present seems to reflect their destined future.
But Johnny keeps faith with that future, believing that he can still find sufficient happiness, and seeing that prospect in Frankie. He is an incurable romantic, and telephones a radio station to request music to celebrate their union, such as it is at this stage. The response is Clair De Lune, and the piano strains of Debussy fill the room.
Neither of them is a classical-music lover, but the piece becomes their theme, the most beautiful music in the world. Thereafter they bicker, quarrel and always make up, he the stronger and she the more fearful. But, and it is really inevitable in a fairytale such as this, they settle for each other. Improbable love conquers the grimy past and the unprofitable present, making the future shiny bright - all in one night.
Terrence McNally's play was written 17 years ago and has not worn well. It is cleverly written, witty and wise to a degree. But its excessive sentimentality is not persuasive; nor is the naivety that drives its characters to cling to each other until the unavoidably happy ending.
The play is, however, almost elevated to serious psychodrama by the powerful performances of Laurie Metcalf and Yasen Peyankov, from Chicago's Steppenwolf company, as directed by Austin Pendleton.
Runs until Saturday
Gerry Colgan
Dublin Fringe Festival, Hongongalongalo, O'Reilly Theatre
Composed, directed and produced by George Higgs, this show has a title that is also its centrepiece lyric. Combinations of choral and orchestral virtuosity, Higgs's compositions tiptoe along a razor's edge of atonality and harmony, with an added fillip of verbal ambiguity. The atmospheric presentation meets the challenge of its chapel venue - hardly riggable for a complex light show - by exaggerating rather than trying to fight the darkness. The piece is slightly hampered by Higgs himself, in a series of ambiguous scenes that start out like a medieval mystery play and end up with Higgs, topless but for squiggles of body paint, jamming on a banjo.
Runs until Saturday
Susan Conley
The Miracle Of Love, International Bar
Although this play only lasts 13 minutes, it still feels padded. A husband delivers a monologue at his wife's coffin, claiming to be glad she's dead. This results, "miraculously", in her resurrection. Mourners and priest return to the stage. Then everyone sings Amazing Grace. As a shorter sketch, or the introduction to a longer work, it might have succeeded, but here the joke is stretched too far. When the husband tells us how his wife sought to lose weight by exercising and, worse still, how she appeared to enjoy sex, the production seems unsure which of them we should laugh at. Author Delta O'Hara clearly has something to say, and her morbid sense of humour appeals. But this lacks shape and purpose.
Runs until October 9th
Patrick Lonergan
Serial Paradise, Project
There's not nearly enough irony in dance. Perhaps it's just not in the psyche, verbal deception being easier than physical, but DCM's performance seeps sarcasm as they throw knowing gestures and images at the audience, eyeballing us but with a grin. The three characters - white collar, blue collar and turned-up collar - try to find paradise in the mun- dane, whether miming a goal-scoring shot in a business suit, being Mr Popular in blue overalls or singing soppy songs in shades and leather trousers. Mingling dance with song and mime, they hang on to their coolness while reflecting our foolishness. Yet at key moments they choose easier options, such as coyness about nudity, leaving Serial Paradise just a few bad moments from brilliance.
Run concluded
Michael Seaver
Taylor's Dummies, The Helix
The energy of this very physical, almost scriptless show is clear the moment the four performers from the British company Gecko tumble onto the stage in a tangle of limbs - not all of them their own: dummies, dolls and virtual people also populate this show. The bare storyline is that a boy meets a girl, is rendered as motionless as a dummy, then regrets his inaction. There's plenty of spectacle: a woman's leg emerges from a table like a lost eel; a man is seduced by shoes and a cigarette; a bald doll sings Sinatra and flies to the moon. The shiniest star is the brilliant trilocating drummer. There is no doubting Gecko's talents, but they often seem unable to focus them.
Ends today
Rosita Boland
