Newcastlewest - Smock Alley

Dublin Theatre Festival 2015 is underway with Conor McPherson's much anticipated The Night Alive opening in the Gaiety; but this is not the only participating production debuting this week as Pan Pan Theatre snuck their latest production into Smock Alley's black box. Newcastlewest, written by (also starring) Dick Walsh and directed by Pan Pan's resident director Gavin Quinn.

Marya, a twenty-something stuck at home with her gruff elderly father Angus  wants to move on; but a lack of education, direction and a bad leg has left her wallowing. That is until her housemate Katy (also living with Angus) sets up a meeting with an old schoolmate currently working in Brussels who may be able to find her something. Summing up the play this way makes it seem incredibly trite and dull... and in many ways, it is, but the banality of the plot is accompanied by fascinating staging. 

The entire play can be described as a battle and interplay between banality and experimentation. Its realistic dialogue (full of "like"s and you know"s) is as close to pedestrian you're going to find on the stage, but beyond this, this production relishes defamiliarisation with  a very sparse  and ever expanding set, uncomfortable silences accompanied with staring at the audience and the female characters having what are essentially puppeteers. The play's content consists mostly of trite realism that will be familiar to everyone watching, while at the same time, formally, it is deconstructing the idea of reality as something that can be presented on the stage. In every moment and movement it calls attention to its artifice, going beyond even Dead Centre's Lippy in its efforts to dismantle drama. Vincent Doherty's sound is also fantastic: lush synths, electronica, drum beats, the music perfectly complements the oddness of the play's imagery. 

While Newcastlewest's aesthetics are fantastic, it is an absolute slog. These are the longest seventy minutes of something you will sit through due to the crawling pace, pedestrian plot and the (intentional) flatness of language - but it is this unremarkableness that allows for the interesting clash between banality and creativity. This makes for an interesting dramatic and artistic experiment, but not exactly a night of great entertainment, though it never promised it would be anyway.

By the Bog of Cats - Abbey Theatre

It appears to be something of a Greek season for the Abbey with Wayne Jordan's incoming adaptation of Oedipus and the Abbey's current production: By the Bog of Cats, a retelling of Euripides' ancient Greek classic, Medea. Hester Swain is a woman scorned. Betrayed by her lover, Carthage Kilbride, for a new bride, Hester has found herself being run off by Carthage and her usurper's father, the severe patriarch Xavier Cassidy. Having been abandoned by her mother as a child, Hester isn't quick to let things go, especially her bog and her daughter, Josie, Hester's mother's namesake. The resulting spiral of anger and bitterness in which shows that no character is as they seem, drives Hester to commit the unspeakable.

Monica Frawley's set is a wonderful reflection of the plays desolate content. A misty frozen over bog with a partially visible caravan sticking out of the ground: though this particular feature is absent for the majority of the play, it has a significant role in the stunning opening in which the interior of the sunk caravan is explored with an iphone wielding adventurer. His phone recordings displayed on a large screen at the back of the stage, found footage style. Unfortunately, it is not long after this intriguing opening that the cracks show. Hester engages in many long-drawn static dialogue exchanges which are so quiet and gives the language so much emphasis you would think it was as poetic as Shakespeare. Now, I haven't gotten personal in any of these reviews so far, but this is one instance that I feel very inclined to do so. The language of this play frustrated me. Being a bogger myself, it was incredibly irritating hearing so much bogger cadence and colloquialisms with very little infused poetic creativity, voiced with so much stressed syllables, and given so much time and attention when the result is like a monotonous, poetically unconscious Seamus Heaney.  

However, much like The Abbey's Midsummer Night's Dream, the older cast members are a comedic saving grace. Marion O' Dwyer is excellent as Mrs. Kilbride, a rage-fuelled, eye popping sneering bully. Bríd ní Neachtain also gives a good performance as the idiosyncratic, soothsaying Catwoman and Des Nealon is also great as the inept priest Father Willow. Due to these performances, the play reaches a comedic high at the mid-way wedding scene, but unfortunately, we must return to Hester Swain's tragedy following this. Herein lies probably the play's greatest fault: its inconsistency of tone. There's tragi-comic, then there's expecting an audience to have the emotional capacity of a light switch. This is especially apparent with Hester Swain's dance with the cowboy Ghost Fancier after we have just witnessed something disturbing in the plays final scene. This incongruence doesn't offer anything.

It is also a shame that such a finely designed set goes to waste. The sinking caravan, the half buried fridge, the secret compartments, everything is used minimally. This is especially true for the screen which is barely used and not to much good effect beyond the opening. All and all it's a very confused production with some good performances.

Language of the Mute - New Theatre

An old teacher sits at his desk, apathetically grading copy books. A poster of Patrick Pearse, that side profile photo as Pearse was ashamed of his being cross-eyed, hangs on the wall behind him. The quiet, "daily-routine" atmosphere is smashed as two gunmen burst in the door, the teacher, confused, calls out a catchphrase of Pearse's: "Cad é seo? Cad é seo?" before being bound, gagged and a sack put over his head.  What seems like an undeserved act of cruelty is shown to be something quite different, as the gunmen's kangaroo court expose our innocent teacher as a violent monster.

Directed by Liam Halligan and written by debuting playwright Jack Harte, Language of the Mute is a brutal  look at the dangers of idolatry and unflinchingly approaches the subject of child abuse, a linguistic softening of the pain and suffering victims experience the lead gunman, Kathy (Aoife Moore) rejects. She instead uses brutal words to match the deed: Buggery. Rape. The play takes place in two time periods: the kangaroo court and years before, when these former students turned executioners were under the merciless thumb of their teacher called Donie. These flashback sequences are the strongest moments of the play, the amiable surface of Donie (played by Michael O' Sullivan) cloaks the menace we are made aware of through the court scenes. Whenever this menace appears, Donie is a terrifying, oppressive figure; one that is unfortunately too real. These moments are, unfortunately, propped up by much emotional exposition in the court scenes, as it is, for the most part, characters standing about detailing all the horrible things Donie has done. These scenes can feel further stilted by stiffness of dialogue: "This is a kangaroo court, duly and properly convened according to the principles that Donie holds most dear." This line may be serviceable in prose, (Jack Harte's more familiar form) but it's awkward and clunky in the verisimilitude of the play. There can also be moments that are awkward for any form, like the emotionally charged Alan (Matthew O'Brien) confronting a horrible event in his past gets caught up in an odd "diseased rock" metaphor.

Despite this, the play is thematically strong, displaying the power of language and authority, most daringly in its many attacks on Patrick Pearse. National heritage in Ireland can be difficult to criticise, especially when it comes to any figures associates with 1916 and the following Free State era (other than Éamon De Valera who is cast as something of a Judas) who are essentially worshiped. The play doesn't exactly damn Pearse, rather he's the focal point of what the play discusses: what is unsaid about our idols. Much like Pearse hiding his unpleasant eye in his photo, we ignore any idea of the dark side of our idols, choosing, rather, the simplified, beautified heroic vision and silencing criticism. Meanwhile: the victims speak the language of the mute.