HERE, from the Pigsback Company, is a substantial and serious new Irish play and production with which to open the second week of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Gavin Kostick has delved into the English pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and has come up with a novel exploration of the tortuous and often torturing relationships between the artist, art and the other people and problems that attend upon the creative existence. This reviewer is in no position to comment upon the historic or other accuracy of the events or people portrayed, but in purely theatrical terms can attest that the exploration tantalises the intellect while it leaves the emotions untouched. The situation and the issues are fascinating (apart from a lapse into dullness in the middle of the first act) but it is difficult to care overmuch about what eventually happens to the main protagonists.
These are (as drawn here) the rapaciously self regarding Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the almost self effacingly realistic William "Topsy" Morris, and their two women Lizzie Siddal and Janey Burden to whom each artist, in their very different ways, seems devoted. Rosetti's sister Christina drifts in and out of the action as a kind of disregarded moral imperative, and William Holman Hunt does likewise as an uninvolved artistic enthusiast. It may be significant that Siobhan Miley and Jonathan Shankey, as these two and several other subsidiary characters, make the most effectively theatrical impressions in their cameo performances.
The tour main characters, played with energy and style by Robert Price (Rosetti), Ronan Leahy (Morris), Clodagh O'Donoghue (Lizzie) and Siobhan Walsh (Janey) are too burdened by a script which insists on their making statements about how they feel to make so theatrical an impact. But they have, nonetheless, some very effective moments when their emotions are allowed to run.
Barbara Bradshaw's setting is simply effective, notwithstanding a number of distractingly swinging picture frames while Stephen McManus's lighting illuminates the action well and Andrew Synnott's incidental music enhances the various moods of the piece. But there is ultimately a lack of a coherent or consistent dramatic focus in the pay which discourages the involvement of one's feelings, even as it demands the attention of one's thoughts.
