Belinda McKeon reviews David Hare's play Skylight at the Project, Dublin, while Peter Crawley finds Hamlet at the SFX to be a brisk, lucid and uncluttered affair.
Skylight
Project, Dublin
Simple pleasures sketch the landscape inhabited by the characters of David Hare's 1995 play: the plain meal that Kyra (Cathy Belton), a London teacher, returns to her small flat to prepare; the glow of her two-bar heater; the promises held by the bundle of copybooks she has taken home to mark; the snow on the looming skylight as she rises from the bed in which she has been reconciled with the brash Tom (Owen Roe), the older, married lover of her youth. But deeper pleasures, and the grief wrought by the loss of them, force their way back into these lives.
Hare's exploration of the bruising encounter of the couple is at times breathtakingly well-drawn and skilfully judged; the moment of remembered love, and that of returning disillusion, come just when they should, and Michael Caven, the director, does well to steer Roe and Belton, for the most part, away from sentimental excess and overstatement.
Such is the breadth of ground covered in the long, hard night of their reunion, however - from the rawness of their desire to the guilt of their betrayal of the now-dead wife, from Tom's religious despair to Kyra's fervent social conscience - that a sense of strain, of interpretative exhaustion on the part of the actors, is inevitable.
This happens particularly at the climax of the action, when Hare writes his characters into such a frenzy of mutual personality analysis that there seems little left for the actors, or the audience, to do, little meaning to strive towards. Like the huge white skylight that looms, like a computer monitor, over the deceptive simplicity of Joe Vanek's set, the window through which Hare throws light on his narrative is, in places, too wide open.
But Belton and Roe handle this problem admirably, achieving a compelling dynamic, with Roe in particular turning in one of the most accomplished performances seen on the Project stage. Michael Fitzgerald is heartening as Tom's teenage son Edward, whose well-meaning visit opens the play and whose wonderful gesture at its close, in a scene enchantingly lit by Rupert Murray, signals at once hope for the future and the inexorable turning of the cycles, as the new generation, despite itself, takes on the ways and the weaknesses of that which went before.
Runs until February 7th
Hamlet
SFX, Dublin
When the most reliable audience for Shakespeare's complex and compelling revenge tragedy must also sit an exam
on it, a daring deconstruction of Hamlet will win few plaudits from the classroom. Second Age's solid production will doubtless serve as a useful study aid for any Leaving Cert students left bewildered by Calixto Bieito's radical reworking for Dublin Theatre Festival. Under Alan Stanford's direction, this Hamlet is efficient, dutiful and precise - a textbook production.
With the austere court of an art-deco Elsinore still in the grip of regime change, Rory Keenan's thoughtful, sullen prince slips uneasily into the role of regicidal maniac. Gleefully feigning madness and privately berating himself for inaction with an effortless command of verse, he edges comically and tragically towards his destiny.
Something may be rotten in the state of Denmark, but 1920s military costumes trace that decay to the Irish Free State, pitching Simon Coury's awkward Claudius and the murdered king as opponents in the Civil War. Such political and historical parallels appear arbitrary, though, providing set dressing rather than insight. More striking is Fiona Cunningham's angular Elsinore, where Eamon Fox's gently shifting lights play across a panelled backdrop. In this castle deception lurks in shadows and around every corner.
Rigidity becomes the production's defining characteristic, however, curtailing a fluid command of space (and sometimes language) in several key performances. Against such a starched court Rory Keenan's engaging and enlivening Hamlet can seem dangerously transgressive simply by leaning against a chair, but such swagger compromises his vulnerability.
The geometry of design and character relationships makes it a brisk, lucid and uncluttered affair but denies the tragic disarray that moves an audience.
When the leads start to drop, they do so with the inevitability and emotional impact of falling dominoes.
Runs until February 13th
