Project Arts Centre/ Fishamble Street
FISHAMBLE'S The End of the Roadis an intensely personal piece of social history.
The life of a real Dublin man, Bill Lalor, is used as a template for exploring 70 years of Dublin life. Director Louise Lowe makes this very clear in the video installation that provides the opening section of the performance piece, as the changing statistics of city life – death and birth rates, housing stock, education prospects – are juxtaposed against personal images from Bill’s life: the grounds of Home Farm football club, where he almost turned professional; his many journeys across the city.
The rest of the promenade performance takes the audience on a journey around Temple Bar, visiting sites which, while not directly connected to Bill’s own experiences, evoke particular memories of significant moments in his life: the day he proposed to his wife, the day Charlie Haughey’s wife signed a letter that secured them a flat in Ballymun, the wedding day of his eldest son.
The events themselves are not remarkable, but as the actors disappear amidst the crowds of tourists and teenagers in Temple Bar, Bill’s life story takes on an Everyman significance. What is history after all but a composite portrait of individual lives.
This is the sort of territory that director Louise Lowe has been carving out for herself for some years, but The End of the Road presents a new challenge in scale which she rises to admirably, despite the various environmental factors that cannot be controlled – namely the behaviour of passers-by. And yet the city’s unpredictability echoes that of Bill’s story, which, as he confesses, might have turned on a dime.
Bill himself serves as the audience’s guide. Or, rather, a version of Bill does; in the case of our group it is Bill in his later 30s, played by actor Ronan Leahy with natural ease. The final section, in which he sits with writer Gavin Kostick, whose script for The End of the Road is based on a series of interviews conducted with the real Bill, is particularly moving. As Leahy’s voice mingles with the real Bill’s recorded testimony and a young Bill appears to escort us home, we are made profoundly aware that history is being made all around us.
Run finished.
