Irish Times critics review Epic at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, First Love at the Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin and Ur te Brute (Hot off the Press) at Theatre Space @ The Mint, Dublin.
EPIC, OLD MUSEUM ARTS CENTRE, BELFAST
For thousands of years, there have been dark deeds and mysterious, unearthly happenings at large in the blue hills of the Cooley Peninsula. Curses and cattle raids, violent deaths, punishment beatings, smuggling, illicit trading, dealing and feuding . . . these deceptively peaceful borderlands, overlooking the waters of Carlingford Lough, have witnessed them all. The first serious threat to their prosperity and tranquillity was placed by Macha, who flung her curse upon the men of Ulster after being forced to run a race with the horses of King Conor. She gave birth to twins and died in the place they now call Eamhain Mhacha, calling destruction upon the land and its people.
Countless generations later, in the year 2001 AD, a great plague did, indeed, descend, robbing farmers of their stock and their livelihoods, laying waste their futures and leaving the fields silent and eerie. Nowhere in Ireland suffered the effects of the foot-and-mouth crisis more acutely than this rural community north-west of Drogheda, the town where Declan Gorman's prolific Upstate Live company is based.
In similar style to his award-winning Hades of three years ago, Gorman has fashioned an affecting, thickly-textured epic tale of events ancient and modern, real and mythical. Paul O'Mahony's atmospheric set design tees things up nicely - a moveable structure of bog wood, hung with sheep's skulls, becomes a burial chamber, a cattle truck, a disco platform, a couple of park benches, the Liffey embankment, an affluent private residence, a church. Around and through it, the excellent cast - John Ruddy, Dave Nolan, Sinead Douglas and Kieran Hurely - moves seamlessly, between them creating a gallery of 26 characters, whose stories combine headline news with human interest features, local gossip and tittle tattle, in an almanac of the year (and years) gone by. But over it all hovers the great, unseen enemy, which came as though in revenge, devastating the natural cycle of birth and death and fracturing the unspoken deal between man and nature, painstakingly built up and suddenly shattered for years to come.
This is a fine, immediate piece of ensemble theatre, where whispers of the past resound deafeningly on events of our own time.
Jane Coyle
Run concluded
FIRST LOVE, CRYPT ARTS CENTRE, DUBLIN
There is literally no end to Samuel Beckett's bleak world, physical and spiritual, and theatre continues to thrive, not just on his plays, but also on his novels and stories. Some actors have explored his prose terrain with remarkable success. It does not follow that all of his work can be staged with profit, or that any good actor can dramatise it successfully. The proof, as always, is in the pudding
From the story "First Love", Kevin Malone offers what he terms a recital, for which one definition is a long account of a series of events. His character is a typical Beckett creation, obsessed with graveyards and the dead.
He checks his father's headstone against dates important to himself, and broods over his dubious legacy, unable to understand his fellow men, women or even beasts.
All he really knows is his own unremitting pain, which he habitually traces from his head to his toes, stopping at every aching body-part on the way. A canal bench with a garbage hillock behind is one of his resting places, and there one day he meets a woman of indeterminate age with whom he goes to live. She becomes pregnant, and he leaves her as she is giving birth to his child. Either you love or you don't.
As a recital, an animated - well, to a degree - reading of the text, Kevin Malone delivers a word-perfect 75-minute performance, looking and sounding right for the task.
But it remains somehow an external view, rather than an illumination from within. I cannot say if that is because this particular material is inherently undramatic, but one consequence was that my concentration frequently slipped, despite my efforts. Best, I think, for Beckett readers, of whom there is properly an ample supply.
Gerry Colgan
Runs until tomorrow
UR TE BRUTE (HOT OFF THE PRESS), THEATRE SPACE @ THE MINT, DUBLIN
Belfast’s Aisling Ghéar theatre company produces plays in Irish, and its latest production, a new work written by Eoghan O Neill, has already been seen in Derry and Belfast. It is a curiously old-fashioned melodrama, redolent of venerable Hollywood B-movies, tarted up mildly in vain pursuit of some contact with the present.
The action is set in a newspaper office, where editor Padraig and his staff of two, Bronach and Seamus, are racing to complete the next day's edition. The paper is supporting the election hopes of one Conor, who aspires to be Belfast's next Lord Mayor. He is a republican, and talks a good fight for equality and justice. Bronach has, however, just discovered that he has been on the take from big business, and is determined to expose this hypocrisy.
But Conor has some nasty material with which to blackmail Padraig who, it seems, sexually abused boys 20-odd years before. In the best tradition of the press, the editor gives Bronach carte blanche to print and be damned, then shoots himself. If that lot has any meaningful relevance to today, it escaped me, as did a musical number by the four actors early on: they just break into harmonised song without a discernable reason.
In fact, the only excuse for the whole enterprise seems to be that it is conducted in fluent Irish, well spoken by the competent quartet of Niall Ciosog, Nollaig Mag Aoidh, Dearbhla Hannigan and Pol Mac Peanrois.
Aisling Ghéar can do better than this, and will need to.
Gerry Colgan
Runs until tomorrow
