Irish Times writers review The Public at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin and Waiting at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire.
The Public
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Sara Keating
Written late in his career, and never performed in his lifetime, Lorca's play The Public is a self-conscious exercise of avant-garde surrealism; in his own words, "it is a poem to be booed at." Yet his invitation to the audience's dissent - a dissent played out in the meta-theatrical, self-referential "plot" - is defeated in this performance of the piece by Randolf SD The Company. By providing a concrete material setting and a rich aesthetic to the play's symbolist character, Randolf SD manage to wrest something beautiful from Lorca's fragmentary text, which, while no more coherent as an entire whole, provides key codes for penetrating its obscurity.
The 80-minute performance is composed of a series of stage pictures and narrative impressions that attack the artifice of the theatre and break down the difference between illusion and reality. The production's use of empty picture frames and mirrors hollowed out of reflective capacity enables actors to slip in and out of the various scenes, while allowing their "characters" to slip in and out of their roles and their public identities.
Despite the company's obvious faith in the text, director Wayne Jordan injects a wicked irreverence into the ensemble's performance of it. The young cast of four display a full understanding of this playful intent, giving performances that are both emotionally convincing and highly theatrical. The impossible horses, which have lent the play its notoriety and its reputation as unstageable, provide the key to this mischievous engagement. They are both embodied on stage through subtle physical gestures entrenched with the sexuality that is so important to Lorca's work, and are used to poke fun at the passé tendencies in avant-garde art.
By embracing the central thesis of Lorca's impenetrable work so wholeheartedly - that destroying the theatre is what makes it real - Randolf SD manage to defeat it, reinventing The Public as a provocative, and even entertaining, piece of theatre.
Until Apr 22
Waiting
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
Peter Crawley
A pleasantly chatty woman in her late 50s strikes up a conversation in a hospital waiting room. She is there, she tells you, to see her husband. She does not tell you why he is there. And though her patter occasionally twists into an elegant turn of phrase worthy of Jennifer Johnston, there is nothing exceptional about Eithne (Mary McEvoy); her words simply eddy and flow with the caution and candour of a perfect stranger.
That Eithne is indeed a character in a Jennifer Johnston play - the writer's first in almost six years - suggests there's more to her than meets the eye.
That this is a monologue, alas, leaves the ear less satisfied. Still, McEvoy utilises her warm familiarity as a performer to lead us into slightly unusual places, and Johnston has a similar, wry intent. The rug may not exactly be pulled out from under your feet, but it does shift a little.
Eithne, apparently a minor player in her own story, gives a brisk history of the death of her father, her mother's eerie fastidiousness, the taciturn courtship of her timid husband-to-be, and her quick disappointment with his ensuing years of alcoholism and emotional vacancy. "Men have their little ways," explains her mother, "and you have to put up with them," - which seems reasonable enough. But if Eithne's life resembles a composite of a thousand relationship cliches, the picture is subtly ruptured.
The death of Eithne's mother, for instance - undiscovered for two days - is described with the same breeziness as her seasick emigration to England. Her casual, ex-pat dismay with contemporary Dublin is as understated as her feelings about the "Indians" who take over her husband's grocery shop.
Eithne's darkest secret, however, is such an obvious plot twist it could hit the stage with a thud - and nothing in Caroline FitzGerald's unfussy production suggests that this story wouldn't be more comfortable as a radio play - but McEvoy does allow it to slip out almost unconsciously. That it will stun only those with a near-prelapsarian innocence is beside the point. Waiting may seem like an open-and-shut case, but Eithne is ultimately more interesting for all the unanswered questions she leaves in her wake, the secrets a stranger never reveals.
Ends today; 1.05pm
