Reviewed today are The Designated Mourner at the Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin Castle and David Byrne at the Ambassador, Dublin
The Designated Mourner
Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin Castle
In the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing theatre was faced with the problem that its audience was made up for the most part not of the suffering proletariat, but of the liberal middle-class. The solution was to attack either the audience's senses or its sensibilities, to punish it or to shock it. These tactics produced some interesting theatre but were, in the end, politically useless. Bourgeois audiences didn't mind a bit of punishment and positively adored being shocked. Sensation was always better than bored
The remarkable American playwright Wallace Shawn, himself a scion of the New York liberal elite, tried most of these tactics and was very good at them. He also, however, had the intelligence and integrity to admit defeat, at least implicitly. He changed course and, in the process, has created a small number of brilliant plays. The most recent, The Designated Mourner, which was premièred in 1996, is now being staged by Iomha Ildanach at the Crypt in Dublin Castle.
Shawn's new tactic, first adopted with Aunt Dan and Lemon in 1985, was built on a refusal to pretend that he, as a writer, stands outside the nice bourgeois world whose comfort depends on the destitution and exploitation of the global majority. His tone of voice now is that of a confidential chat among friends. There is no assault, just an insidious, collusive voice that lures us into disconcerting agreement with what we only gradually realise is barbarism.
In formal terms, this makes Shawn the great master of the theatrical monologue. Monologue has become, not least in the recent Irish theatre, a deeply apolitical form, a way of avoiding conflict. Shawn restores its power by using it as a political weapon. He makes us enter into the confidence of the storyteller, a reasonable person like us, who leads us slowly to the brink of the abyss.
In The Designated Mourner the storyteller is Jack, a man who engages us above all by his self-deprecating honesty. Though his wife Judy and her father, the famous writer Howard, also speak, Jack's is the controlling presence. He tells us things about himself that make us like him: that he pretends to like the books he is supposed to like, that he is a useless lover, grateful that Judy is so inexperienced with other men that she doesn't know how bad he is. That, above all, he hates and envies the widely-revered Howard. By the time we realise how contemptible Jack really is, we are already swept up in the drive of his narrative.
Shawn's other tactic is just as disconcertingly insidious. Jack, Judy and Howard are People Like Us. Their world is unmistakably that of what is loosely called The West. They might be American or English or Irish. But it is also a world of orange groves and shanty towns, of death squads and all-powerful presidents.
The Designated Mourner, like the best science fiction, is a slightly distorted projection of where we are now into a world whose strangeness gives us the distance to see its outlines more clearly. And in this world what is slowly unfolding is the complete annihilation of high culture. It is a world of what used to be called repressive tolerance, where there are pornography magazines, tabloid newspapers and endless TV, but no poets.
These tactics are the drama. What we actually see on stage are three people sitting on chairs, one (Jack) doing most of the talking. What might be melodramatic and over-the-top if it were actually enacted is vividly present in this simple style of recollection.
The key to the play is, indeed, not to do too much. The actors have to be restrained enough to leave things to our imaginations but with sufficient presence to get those imaginations working.
For the most part, John O'Brien's production gets this balance right. Antoinette Walsh's Judy and Seán Colgan's Howard are very well-judged - precise, contained and yet vivid. The biggest burden, though, falls on Niall Ó Sioradain's Jack, and he bears it well. There are times, especially in the early part of the play, when he might be more intimate and less declamatory, more confidential and less rhetorical. He takes a while to establish the charm that is so vital to the play's cruelly seductive method. But he gets stronger as he goes on and his intelligent alertness to the play's gathering ironies becomes increasingly effective.
By then, this mesmerising cobra of a play is ready to sink its fangs into the mind.
Fintan O'Toole
David Byrne
Ambassador, Dublin
The Ambassador was a cinema, now it's a rock music venue. The last time David Byrne performed here, he was a giant shape on celluloid, the star of the Talking Heads concert movie, Stop Making Sense.
David Byrne came onstage in brown workman's gear and cream loafers, looking like he was about to fix your exhaust. Instead, he gave us a witty summary of the show to come. The syncopated salsa of Nothing But Flowers was followed by Byrne's first curveball of the evening: a cover version of a song by the late Tejano singer, Selena. He was backed only by bassist Paul Frasier, drummer David Hilliard and percussionist Mauro Refusco, but Byrne's personality more than compensated for the sparse instrumentation. Broken Things, from his current album, Look Into The Eyeball, was followed by a double-whammy of Talking Heads classics, And She Was and Once In A Lifetime.
Curveball two came with the arrival of a young six-piece string section, who made short, sharp work of The Great Intoxication, The Revolution and Talking Heads' Sax & Violins. This Must Be The Place hit a spectacular home run. After that, the boy Byrne could do no wrong, swooping towards the finale with Like Humans Do, U.B. Jesus and the eerily appropriate Life During Wartime.
Lazy, his recent Top Ten collaboration with techno duo X-Press 2, made for an upbeat encore, followed by curveball three, a cover of Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. By that time, everybody was dancing with somebody, and it all made perfect sense.
Kevin Courtney
