Absurdism has taken more than one direction in the last century and a bit. Arguably, there is a variety which is Anglophone, exemplified by Lewis Carroll's Alice books in which the subversion of the language itself leads the drama. Arguably, you can lump Beckett and Fawlty Towers in with him.
In France, from the turn of the last century, a different form of absurdism grew up around the work of Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco and Alfred Jarry, a form based more on our physical absurdity, and from that, on our cruelty and our ability to oppress and be oppressed.
In Alice Underground, Mauricio Calendon, the Chilean director of the Frenchbased Teatro del Silencio, has translated Carroll's Alice into the tradition of Jarry. The fact that there are seven Alices - one a genuine little girl - moves the play right away from the romance of Carroll's aesthetic. Here is absurdism on a mass scale, and Celendon didn't have to look at 20th-century history too closely before he found resonances there. He replays the failure of the French Revolution over and over in the perversion of recent revolutionary movements, as the Alices swarm in their Resistance-style pit in the ground, French accordion music or grinding chansons driving them on.
This is not the Alice of dreams, but the Alice of reality where nothing is as it seems. A young woman wakes to find her baby has turned into a pig, and you wonder what experiment has been conducted on him or her, or what nuclear disaster has changed him/her? A revolutionary leader, encrusted with medals but with no legs or arms, is wheeled on stage, his voice weak against the music.
Members of the cast are superb aerialists, but circus skills are not used here as frills as they usually are. Celendon choreographs breathtaking moments in the air, as some Alices soar while others flap their long, yellow wigs like moths caught in curtains, and an Alice whose innocence has doubtless been abused takes a terrifying dive towards the ground. The mask of an Alice is raised towards the ceiling, but her neck keeps extending; the mask takes on its own grotesque role, like the severed head of Charlotte Corday after the guillotine.
There is no point in mentioning individual actors - there were none. They all faced the same great god of absurdism with the same hopelessness, a god whose workings Celendon has brilliantly mimicked, in the hope, of course, of defeating him.
Runs until tomorrow at 8 p.m. To book phone 091566577 or visit the festival website: www.galwayartsfestival.ie
