Man Of Aran Re-imagined

Druid Lane Theatre, Galway Dec 10-12 8pm (Sun mat 3pm) 18-22 0818-205205 druidtheatre.com

If the makers of DVD extras ever get really imaginative, they might come up with something like this. Inspired by the practice of benshi (Japanese performers who narrate silent movies or interpret western films for unfamiliar audiences), Paul Keogan has taken one of the most beautiful and notoriously unreliable documentaries about life on the rugged Aran Islands and given it an illuminating new artistic commentary.

Man of Aran, which will be screened in full, was made in 1932 by controversial ethnographer Robert Flaherty. It was always somewhere between fact and fiction. Following a family on Inis Mór, it cast photogenic locals in the roles, amplified their hardships and presented anachronistic routines, such as hunting basking shark with their bare hands (I exaggerate slightly).

Drawing equally from documentary revelations and sympathetic artifice, this reimagining presents the mellifluous Liam Ó Maonlaí as live narrator of Síle Nic Chonaonaigh’s new Irish text (there are English surtitles).

Once-Off Productions is not so much engaged with setting the record straight, then, as reclaiming and broadening the film’s wonder. Composer Mel Mercier and sound designer Christopher Shutt have developed a new soundtrack, and Keogan – best known as a theatre designer in demand – is seeking to match Flaherty’s still-entrancing aesthetic with the deeper, no less affecting echoes of truth.

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