Irish Timeswriters review the latest performances from the Dublin Theatre Festival:
Ivanov
O'Reilly Theatre
Social decline, spiritual malaise, soul-destroying tedium, cultural inertia, the allure of suicide - given the ingredients of Chekhov's first completed full-length play, is it any wonder that Katona József's production of Ivanovplays out with such hilarity? That hardly violates the spirit of Chekhov's original, its own manic-depressive tone conspicuous across his two versions: the first, written in two weeks, was subtitled "a comedy"; the second, completed two years later, "a tragedy". The real tone of Ivanov, as director Tamás Ascher adroitly recognises and still more impressively realises, is somewhere between the two.
The Hungarian ensemble, which last year brought us the anarchic absurdum of Rattledanddisappeared, this time pursues a piece of fluorescent naturalism, Chekhov's late 19th-century rural ennui transplanted to the drab and stripped interior of a Hungarian factory in the 1960s. It is not, one feels, an arbitrary transfer. Chekhov, a doctor turned writer, was prone to making diagnoses of his characters and his country, suggesting that the melancholy which subsumes Nikolai Ivanov was a Russian disease.
"While in western Europe people die because it is too cramped and suffocating to live, here they die because it is too wide to live," he wrote.
Designer Zsolt Khell certainly evokes agoraphobia - even when all 22 performers fill this draughty hall, it feels cavernous - but the allusions to a Hungary anaesthetised by the violent suppression of the 1956 revolution makes the atmosphere more heavy with stasis.
Here we discover Ernö Fekete as Ivanov, the inert intellectual mired in self-absorption and cruel indifference who, without prospects, achievements or motivation, proclaims himself dead at 30. If he is a naggingly familiar character, it is because Chekhov stresses that he is "a spineless Hamlet" (but throw in a tracker mortgage and he's most of the people I know). Loved by his consumptive, self-sacrificing wife (Ildikó Tóth), chided by her doctor, the unswervingly upright (and therefore oddly contemptible) Lvov, egged on by the gadabout Borkin (Ervin Nagy in a high-energy comic turn), and object of the young Sasha's misplaced desire (a striking Adél Jordán), Ivanov is the indulged centre of a play whose peripheries are always more intriguing.
That's why the production, which moves with a perfectly judged dizzy momentum, is at its best in the ensemble scenes. Here a rare sort of theatrical alchemy takes place: tedium becomes riveting. "God I'm bored! I'll die of it," exclaims Ági Szirtes in a fit of laughter during a birthday party so listless Ascher nudges it into almost hallucinogenic moments of absurdity.
It may err on the side of comedy - almost right up to the climax, pathos will always bow to bathos - yet the real achievement of this beautifully conceived Ivanovis to confront us with rootless souls, adrift and endlessly complaining, without apologising for their excesses, excusing their behaviour or dictating our response. Chekhov would be pleased with the results. You don't know whether to laugh or to cry. - Peter Crawley
On the Case
George's Dock, IFSC
With its blend of digital technology and drama, On the Caseis a wonderful example of how contemporary theatre can engage with a mass audience. Performed against an animated backdrop by four aerial acrobats, it trades on visual spectacle and physical skill for its effect, rather than storytelling. However, like all of the best drama - from the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to the work of Peter Brook - its coup de théâtreis its reliance, its insistence, on illusion. As the performers bounce off the digital backdrop, real life and virtual reality momentarily coalesce.
Carl Polke's original score and Dave Jones's animation combine to give a biff-bam Batmaneffect ( Batmanthe comic strip, not the film franchise), while the random PLAY conceit at the heart of the unfolding story makes the concept seem fresh, almost improvised, even on second viewing. At just 25 minutes long, it is also perfectly measured for an outdoor audience's attention span, not to mention engaging enough for those in the audience who would not be caught dead in a theatre.
As Ulster Bank's gift to the people of the city for Dublin Theatre Festival's 50th anniversary, this Legs on the Wall production works particularly well. However, ticketing the event seemed both unnecessary (you could see perfectly well from outside the arena area) and exclusionary (why ticket it at all if it is meant to be a piece of public art?). Evaluating numbers was most likely the logic behind the formalities. But, really, there's no way of measuring the delight on the faces of the pedestrians, the residents, the random revellers at George's Dock, who looked skyward and found themselves thrust into a thrilling fantasy, a virtual world of pure theatre. - Sara Keating
Homeland
Olympia Theatre
Laurie Anderson's Homeland, a spoken-word and musical performance largely involved with addressing the supposedly changed landscape of American society and politics after 9/11, should be considered essential viewing for anyone who has spent the last six years in a coma.
Whether Anderson's floating poem, told in her trademark tone of aloof and arch tranquillity, which will forever resemble a slightly chattier version of HAL from 2001, actually adds anything to the understanding of even lightly informed members of the human race is another matter.
Given that layers of cynicism have coated our sensibilities, so that terms such as security, freedom, terror and fear can be deployed only with hollow irony, Anderson's challenge is to find something new to say about the US, or at least to address these ideas with a fresh and bold perspective. Sadly, for all the beautiful, bare aesthetic of her stage, where lightbulbs hang so low they graze the ground and nightlights form flickering constellations upon the floor, the design of her performance never seems quite so considered.
"Let me blow up your churches," she growls over a pulse of burbling electronica, which alternately surges and subsides. "Let me blow up your mosques . . . Let me blow them all to hell as I'm ringing freedom's bell."
It's hardly Byzantine in its subtlety. By the time we have heard similarly caustic but depthless remarks about rigged elections and weapons inspectors (and who mentions them any more?), there is a weary sensation that Anderson, once so challengingly opaque, is simply leading the choir and leaving nothing to our imaginations.
Does the music redeem the exhausted sentiments? There is certainly a compelling groove to a lot of these compositions. Only an Expert, a rather facile assembly of sub-Chomsky media criticism, has a bracing restlessness and stop-start rhythm, but when Anderson leads her quartet into more pleasingly mystifying pieces rooted in the personal rather than the political, the violin, cello, saxophone and keyboards become more dangerous and unrestrained; still blowing things to hell, but actually ringing freedom's bell. - Peter Crawley
Kebab
Project Cube
A man and a woman sit suspended in mid-air, their legs dangling in the freefall vacuum of black space around them. In this opening image of Kebab, her Irish debut, Gianina Carbunariu deliberately sets her characters adrift. Kebabis about rootlessness, the quest for a new life, and the fluidity of identity. It is that familiar story of the homelessness of home, and inescapable tribal relationships. But this is a play about a new generation of emigrants.
The opening scene, of course, takes place on an aircraft, that short-hand signifier for globalisation. Maddy is travelling to Ireland to meet her boyfriend, Voicu, who has "actually been Irish for over a year". She is moving there to a better life, a life where if "you work hard and stuff, they really appreciate you". Maddy is willing to work hard. In fact, she's willing to put up with anything as long as she doesn't have to go home: be that working in a kebab shop, prostituting herself, being beaten by her boyfriend and her new lover, or having it filmed for a porn site that specialises in sexploitation.
Unfolding on Simon Daw's tiny constructed stage space, Orla O'Loughlin's production is all overlapping limbs and intermingling bodies, forcing the characters, sandwiched together on a tiny couch, into an uncomfortable, inescapable intimacy. Philip Gladwell's stripped lighting design gives a seedy air to the atmosphere, which darkens and darkens as the play moves along.
Carbunariu's use of bite-sized scenes lends an immediacy to the fast-paced unfolding of events. Yet while this flash-form might be an appropriate structure for the fast-food generation, it allows little room for the characters to develop, or for the actors (Sam Crane, Matti Houghton and Laurence Spellman) to develop their characters.
Kebab'sreal problem, however, is its sexual politics, which pit the teenage Maddy against two domineering men who routinely abuse her. Perhaps Maddy's casual acceptance of this hierarchy is supposed to draw our attention to the exploitation of women, but instead the audience is asked to be complicit in it; to accept, like the half-naked Maddy on stage, that the power games are all part of what a woman (though she's still a girl, really, isn't she?) has to put up with in order to get on in life. - Sara Keating
• Runs until Saturday
Reggie Watts
The New Theatre
What connects the tamed chaos of jazz, the nerve-fraying uncertainty of the extemporary speaker and the enthralling speed of a lightning wit? The answer is, surely, Reggie Watts.
A gentle bear of a man with sympathetic features, the comedian and musician operates from somewhere beneath an enormous afro that resembles an explosion in freeze-frame. Combined with the extraordinary freefall of his imagination, it reminds you of that line about hair being our antennae to the cosmos - although Watts is so off the wall you imagine he's hooked up to the thing by Ethernet.
Anyone born in Germany to a French mother and brought up, peripatetically, through jazz programmes and various musical groups across the US, knows the potential and pitfalls of language. The consequence is that Watts has become fluent in both music and nonsense."I'd like to begin," he says, in a seductive voice of smooth authority, "by starting . . ."
Presenting this night as though it were a college lecture, a poetry recital or a product launch, he will improvise ceaselessly under the comic gambit that everything is going according to plan. It isn't. There are few things funnier or fizzier than someone pretending to be in control while everything around collapses, but the old cliche - "you had to be there" - has never been so apt. Watts's comedy is borne of the moment. It dies on record or in print.
What is most troubling about him, though, is his music. Created a cappellaon a looping station, with which he layers beatbox, soulful warbles, raps, ragas or, in one inspired moment, the sounds of hard-shoe tap dancing, Watts's instant compositions are throwaway gags - as dispensable as his surreal, capricious riffs on the Dublin Theatre Festival or the menu of a video projector. The thing is, they also happen to be great.
I've paid good money to TV on The Radio, The Roots and even Prince for similar pleasures, although none of the above ever sent me spinning into the night singing the oddly consoling chorus of Pterodactyl of Dublin, a song as special and unrepeatable as the show, warping in memory, never to be heard again. - Peter Crawley
• Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival runs until Oct 14. 01-6778899; www.dublintheatrefestival.com
