Irish Timesjournalists look at what is being staged in the Dublin Theatre Festival.
The Seagull
Project Cube
Rules were made to be broken, but what if they were already kaput to begin with? "I am writing it with some pleasure," Chekhov confessed of his most nakedly autobiographical work, "although I do awful things to the laws of the stage." Árpád Schilling's shockingly - and uncharacteristically - bare production of The Seagull, then, may seem unconventional, performed in plain clothes with no set, while a harsh light illuminates both the actors and audience, obliterating the distance between us. But if this is deconstruction, Chekhov is the deconstructionist. His play is as much a portrait of lives and loves unfulfilled as it is a mordant comment on the theatre, where new forms are constantly demanded, while old forms continue to crush them.
It would be nice to report that Krétakör's bold approach had thus brought The Seagullback to itself. But for all the bracing intensity and intimacy of the experience, and for all the dividends that its rigorous ensemble work yields in the evocation of characters, it comes off as a triumph of dramaturgy over drama.
When the characters convene for the ill-fated staging of the experimental play of young writer Trepliov (Zsolt Nagy), for instance - which here literally goes up in smoke - the isolation of a rural estate is supplanted by the airlessness of an actors' studio. The seagull, always a rather clunky symbol, now becomes an unapologetic prop, flung around in feathery eruptions. But although the actors sit among us, regarding and responding to each other's performances, their private tragedies are still more affecting for their minute details. Emotions are registered with a dart of the eye or a sideways glance, as though this was more like camera acting than a meta-theatrical device.
As Masha, who we first meet "in mourning" for her life, Lilla Sárosdi is all the more tragic for her tamped-down delivery. Eszter Csákányi is balanced on the edge of hysteria as her monstrous prima donna, Arkadina, slowly unravels. And though each character essentially operates in their own little bubble, Annamária Láng's Nina is particularly striking in her transition from ingenue to fallen woman.
A neurotic, self-critical look at the act of artistic creation, the play can make a production seem bleakly fretful, particularly when Schilling forfeits the counter-balance of absurd comedy. "Never a single living character," scoffs one character about another's writing, but that sums up everyone in the play. The pistol shot of Chekhov's ending may never come, but, wearing as it can be, the production recognises that it never needs to. - Peter Crawley
• Finishes Sun.
Fragments
Tivoli Theatre
The coming together of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett brings to mind the meeting of the immovable force and the irresistible object. Though they share much - Brook's famous "empty space" is that inhabited by Beckett's characters - they also represent in some respects opposite ends of a spectrum of late 20th-century theatre. Beckett's is the ultimate writer's theatre - his texts make meticulous demands for performance, lighting, design, tone, mood, pace. Brook, on the other hand, is the great figurehead of the actor's and director's theatre, in which everything must emerge from the rehearsal process. Yet, as so often in the theatre, friction generates electricity.
Brook works here with three of the key figures from the great London-based physical theatre company Complicite: Jos Houben, Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni. They perform five short Beckett pieces: Rough for Theatre I; Rockaby; the mime play Act Without Words II; the very short text Neither, handwritten by Beckett on the back of a postcard; and the "dramaticule" Come and Go. All, significantly, are plays of movement and gesture, allowing Brook and the actors to explore the physical hinterland of the texts.
Even so, these are not faithful renditions of the master's intentions. The texts are followed, but the accompanying actions are changed, sometimes radically. In Act Without Words II, Brook adds jokes that are not in Beckett's text (each of the waking men spits into the sack in which the other man sleeps, for example) and plays up the contrast between the first man's miserable nature and the second's sunny disposition.
In Rough for Theatre I, Brook's interventions are as much about subtraction as addition. The suggestion in the stage directions that the set is "ruins" is pretty much ignored. The crippled man's wheelchair is suggested rather than clearly visible.
But there are also more jokes: the blind man's feeling of the crippled man's "torso" is much more explicitly directed towards his genitals. And there is more stage business: the blind man's wanderings take him off the stage at one point. The final image is much more explicit, and more violent, than Beckett's text seems to suggest.
Yet each of these versions crackles with theatrical life. Houben and Magni are wonderfully forceful and witty performers, and Brook's open approach allows them to fully inhabit the texts. Neither's status as a non-theatrical text allows Brook to imagine it virtually from scratch, which he, Hunter, and the brilliant lighting of Philippe Vialatte achieve with utter conviction.
The other two plays, however, give us the extremes of success and failure in Brook's approach to Beckett. His version of Come and Go, with Magni and Houben dressed as women, completely loses the hypnotic rhythm and strange beauty of the piece.
On the other hand, Hunter's mesmerising Rockabyis, in its way, no less radically interventionist, but is searingly effective. Brook completely changes the look and movement of the piece. There is no old lady in anachronistic evening gown and head-dress. There is, astonishingly, no rocker, just an ordinary kitchen chair. There is no recorded voice. Hunter stands and walks, playing out what is merely spoken in the text. It is all wrong, and all utterly, intensely moving. It is like Glenn Gould deciding that Mozart got his tempo wrong in some pieces, and playing it his own way instead. You have to be a genius to get away with it. As anyone lucky enough to see this show will be reminded, Brook is. - Fintan O'Toole
• Finishes Sun
The History Boys
Olympia Theatre
Alan Bennett's The History Boyscomes to Dublin saturated in international tributes and awards, and it is easy to see why. It entertains and absorbs on many levels. On one it is a challenging analysis of the crudities and limitations of the conventional educational system; on another it is a sparkling collection of intellectual witticisms and duels. Its dialogue celebrates the colour and diversity of language; and there's much more.
The eight eponymous boys have just passed their A-levels in a public school, and are seeking admission to Oxford or Cambridge. To prepare for this they have three teachers: Hector, who teaches them to think and to hell with the syllabus; Mrs Lintott, a pragmatic, low-lying feminist; and Irwin, versed in the thought processes of their next examiners, which he teaches them to subvert. Above these there reigns a conservative, self-serving headmaster, who just wants results.
The surprising (to Irish ears and minds) sophistication of the boys leads them into witty and brash confrontation with their mentors. A current of homosexuality runs through it all, between the boys themselves and with their teachers. This often leads to deplorably hilarious exchanges and situations, a kind of leaven in the mix.
Hector, who makes routine passes at the boys, is discovered by the headmaster, who tries to use the situation to get rid of him. Irwin is drawn into a similar situation with one of his pupils, but is saved by the bell, or rather by a motorcycle accident. All the boys make it to Oxbridge, and a kind of coda tells how little difference it makes to their future lives. It is a credible note on which to close this brilliant, effervescent comedy, an exploration of a closed world prised open, and a metaphor for the larger world of which it is a subset.
Although the play's ambience and characters are quintessentially British, its multiple themes pass effortlessly across national borders to entertain and challenge. Brilliance such as this carries its own passport. - Gerry Colgan
• Ends Sat
Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival runs until Sun. 01-6778899; www.dublintheatrefestival.com
