Fintan O'Toole reviews Paris, Texas in the Town Hall Studio, Galway
Festivals should have pleasant surprises as well as predictable star attractions. At the Galway Arts Festival, there is a splendid surprise from the locally-based POC Productions in the unlikely shape of a 40-minute theatrical version of the great Wim Wenders/Sam Shepard film Paris, Texas, performed separately in English and Irish. What sounds at worst an impertinence turns out to be an extraordinarily moving and intimately haunting piece.
The audience for Paris, Texas is confined to 10 people for each performance. It is gathered in the foyer of the Town Hall and told to wait for and then follow a man in a red hat. Diarmuid De Faoite enters from the street wearing a red baseball cap.
He is playing Travis (Harry Dean Stanton in the film), the shattered loner who emerges from the desert with a mission to re-unite his young son with his mother. He begins to record a message for that son on a tape recorder. Lara Ní Chathmhaoil, playing Jane, the long-lost wife and mother (Natassja Kinski in the film), enters and turns out of the foyer, up the stairs. He follows her and we follow him.
We are led into a room, where a circular series of individual booths has been arranged around an enclosed playing area. Each of us is now alone in a sleazy peep-show, looking through a perspex screen. The inner area is lit up. De Faoite, on one side of a similar but larger screen, is joined by, but separated from, Ní Chathmhaoil on the other. The stage revolves, so we see them from constantly shifting perspectives. He tells the story of their love and descent into bitter madness. She tells her story.
He sacrifices the son he loves by restoring him to her. When the peep-show ends the boy is there, playing with his toys. His father's tape recorder, explaining what has happened, is beside him. His mother enters, and they are re-united.
Essentially, this is a re-enactment of the climactic scene of Wenders's movie, but it is also much more. De Faoite, Ní Chathmhaoil and director Paul Brennan have created a superbly subtle meditation on presence and absence, memory and narrative, connection and distance. This version of Paris, Texas is really a way of giving substance to a word that critics use too promiscuously about works of art: "Haunting." Everything is geared to making a piece that hovers on borderlines. Both De Faoite and Ní Chathmhaoil are and are not playing out the movie. They move and dress like Stanton and Kinski but they do not imitate them. In the English-language version, which I saw, the west of Ireland accents create their own sense of location. In Irish, this distance from America would be even more strongly emphasised.
The viewers, meanwhile, both are and are not an audience. We begin as a group, but each of us is then isolated. The revolving stage makes us aware that no one shares precisely the same angle-of-vision, and we feel that we both are and are not inside a movie. The perspex screen and the up-front voyeurism makes us feel that we are, but the physical presence of the actors and the hyper-realism of the set-up work in the opposite direction. Yet instead of creating confusion, Brennan's superb production holds these contradictory impulses in such perfect tension that the whole thing seems to shimmer, like an alluring mirage.
The experience is in fact extremely vivid, but it is the vividness of a dream or a ghost story. Both actors manage a restraint that keeps all the emotions in check, so that they build towards a genuine sense of redemption. They have the kind of precision of purpose that comes from knowing exactly what they want to achieve. While the deliberately small audience means that Paris, Texas is never going to be a box office hit, its beauty, intelligence and emotional integrity deserve to have an impact far beyond the weight of numbers.
