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.

Waiting For Godot - Smock Alley

A country road. A tree.

Evening.

"Nothing to be done"

Beckett's absurdist masterpiece is resurrected by Smock Alley for a limited run before touring Brazil. With a very sparse set; consisting of a box, two suspended stretches of cloth: one bearing an abstract expressionistic background, and the other bearing the tree. Patrick o' Donnell (Estragon) and Charlie Hughes (Vladimir) are manic, charging around the space showing a great command of emotional extremes: sporadic joy, terror, confusion; emotional switches come at the drop of the hat making for an uneasy watch (paradoxically a good thing).

Best described as a very "in your face" performance, Didi and Gogo have no trepidation about getting right up into people's faces. The madness of this production reaches even higher realms of absurdity with the introduction of Lucky (Simon Stewart) and Pozzo (Ronan Dempsey). Dempsey's Pozzo is an absolute tyrant, completely overpowering the tramps as the cower from him, and Stewart's convulsing , drooling, zombified Lucky is a particularly chilling counterpoint to Pozzo's barking.

Waiting for Godot remains a very poignant play over sixty years since its initial performance, though what this production demonstrates in its emotional jumping about is that any form of meaning or consistency to this poignancy remains elusive. Much like the play's abstract background, the content of the painting may be guessed at by a viewer, but it will ultimately fail as a summary of the painting's content; the best description of it is simply layers of paint which encourage imagination. This method is apparent in the play: every moment, every dialogue exchange operates as a theatrical brushstroke which rings with some allegorical truth, but any attempt to pin down these truths ultimately fails. It is in this elusiveness that this play mirrors our lives. It is a monument to human futility. This is best emphasised in this production by Didi's excitement over the tree showing signs of life; when in actuality, it is only a single leaf on a very unhealthy tree, which is really just a piece of canvas anyway. The play shows our inability to interpret our world, and the distractions we give ourselves and each other as we wait for our own Godot.

But this again is another mere interpretation. Godot remains monolithic. Impossible to pin down but  eternally fascinating.

The Lonesome West - Everyman

Martin McDonagh's tale of warring brothers takes to the Everyman's stage in Cork in a new production by Blood in the Alley. The last of McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, The Lonesome West begins on the day of a funeral; the father of two brothers, Colman and Valene, who was shot in the head by Colman in what he describes as a pure accident, triggering a downward spiral in Colman and Valene's relationship. Well... it would have triggered their falling out if they hadn't despised one another from the time they were children.

Martin Lucey (Colman) and Denis Foley (Valene) complement each other perfectly in the brothers petty battles. Lucey's laid back taunting and Foley's tightly wound fussiness make their interactions immediately attention grabbing. For all their pettiness and violence, the brothers almost appear to enjoy this: the taunting over poitín, the statue smashing; it's as if they simply wait for opportunities like this to appear and explode at one another. Rowan Finken (Father Welsh) and Féadha ní Chaoimhe (Girleen) also give solid performances, though, ní Chaoimhe fairs better with Girleen's sensitive side more so than her filthy mouthed, poitín slinging side.

Beyond the performances the play suffers from crippling issues. Scenes are broken up by dimmed lights and music which make the scenes feel very disconnected. It doesn't help that during these breaks stage hands appear to make very minor changes. This coupled with the semi-constructed set makes it seem as if director Geoff Gould was attempting some Brechtian style illusion shattering, though what benefit that would be to this play is highly questionable. This issue is most likely brought on by a failure to overcome a  difficulty in the script, this difficulty being the small number of characters and locations which means for very limited options when it comes to transitions.

The script is something of a double edged sword for this production. While it made for pacing issues, it's also incredibly funny; the relentless quips, slapstick and bottom-of-the-well darkness of this script will leave you breathless from laughter, as long as you're not overly fond of religious icons and dogs.  While it's a mixed bag of a production, the performances and sharpness of the script overcome its unevenness.

The Importance of Being Earnest - Smock Alley

Smock Alley presents Oscar Wilde's 'trivial comedy for serious people': The Importance of Being Earnest. Directed by Kate Canning, this production takes Earnest from the lavish period sets viewers of The Gate's productions of Wilde's works would associate with his works, and places it in an expressionistic garden; other than that, everything is as expected. Period dress, Wilde's paradoxes and epigrams, cucumber sandwiches etc. If you have seen a production of Earnest before you will not have many surprises here. That being said, the plays (mostly young) cast deal competently with the material with a good sense of timing and emoting which is benefited by the intimacy of Smock Alley's main stage. Aislinn O' Byrne brings the most notable performance here with her squeaky Cecily, who, at times, appears on the verge of bursting into a psychotic rage.

I was partly disappointed by such a straight-forward adaptation, taking the set prior to the actors arrival as something of a promise for the unexpected, but really, this is more of an issue with the source material rather than anything else. Oscar Wilde's showcases of shallowness aren't especially flexible. They don't say much more than 'these are very very shallow people' thus they don't really provide much opportunity to experiment;  they're shallow and deeply rooted in the time in which they were written.  The quality of Wilde's  plays that maintains its popularity, and is maintained here, is the humour. The quickness of the wit. It may not matter from which mouth the epigrams come from because, simply, they're very funny. Wilde's charm simply oozes through The Importance of Being Earnest, to the point that it negates reinterpretation or revaluation. Being able to witness that witty shadow of Wilde that looms over performances of his plays become the reason to see them, rather than to see if anything new will be brought to the table.

 That being said, this is a perfectly competent performance; despite that irrepressible shadow of Wilde.