Irish Times critics review some of the acts at the Dublin Theatre and Fringe Festivals
THEATRE FESTIVAL
Othello
Tivoli Theatre
Othello is a long play that has to seem very short. Though it takes the best part of three hours to perform, even in Declan Donnellan's brisk production for his Cheek By Jowl company, we have to feel that events unfold at a breathless pace. Otherwise, Othello's decision to kill his wife on the basis of flimsy evidence of her unfaithfulness is simply inexplicable. If we have time to think, we can see that the action must unfold over a period of months, incorporating as it does the preparation of an army and a fleet, the completion of a long voyage and the collapse of a planned invasion. In that context Othello's vicious act would result from the simple stupidity of a gullible dupe. For the whole thing to seem genuinely tragic it has to feel as if everything happens almost overnight, as if Othello and we are caught in a whirlwind of succeeding events in which there can be no pause for reflection.
This is one test of a production of the play: does time seem to speed up? Donnellan's supremely efficient staging passes this test with distinction. Physically assured, fast on its feet and driven forward with fierce energy, it has the velocity to sweep the story relentlessly towards the abyss. The insistent rhythms of the verse are beaten out by a cast well schooled in the language, creating a hypnotic rhythm that ceases only with Desdemona's dying fall.
There is, though, another, subtler test. Othello is fascinating in part for its element of theatrical self-loathing. The great villain Iago is essentially a dramatist. He conceives and directs a play that is a lie. He conjures up for Othello an imaginary scenario in which his wife and his lieutenant Cassio are at it hammer and tongs behind his back. Yet he also involves us in his plot. He has two audiences: Othello and us. He takes us into his confidence. He makes us feel good because we're in on the scheme and Othello isn't. He appeals to our sense of superiority. And he leaves us in a mire of moral ambiguity. His malign magic is still magical, and even as we are repelled by the malevolence we are entranced by his fabulous invention.
This, then, is the other question about any production of the play: are we simultaneously sucked in and repelled, and left with the queasy feeling of complicity in the tragedy? And here the answer is no. Jonny Phillips's Iago is a potent presence, but it is all malignity and little magic. The strangulated voice and wheedling tone he adopts from the start announce him simply as a very bad man.
Donnellan has not, moreover, created any great sense of mystery around the play's movements. He fills the Tivoli spaces with a macho energy and the roar of a clamorous rhetoric. Often characters speak at each other across vast distances or circle around each other like wrestlers preparing to engage. This generates a constant vigour, and his actors have, for the most part, the vocal power to pull it off. But it's hard not to feel that something vital is missing.
Othello, after all, is unique among Shakespeare's major tragedies, in that the fate of world does not revolve around the protagonist. The Moor is not a ruler but a servant of the state. Even his public mission - to save Venice from the Turkish invasion - evaporates at the start of the second act and is dismissed in half a line: "Our wars are done." As the public story is dismissed it is replaced by one of extraordinary intimacy, the war that Iago has started inside Othello's head. The brilliant bustle of Donnellan's direction of the opening act needs to give way to something intimate, even claustrophobic. It doesn't.
For all that, this production does have its virtues. Not the least of them is that its inexorable drive allows both Nonso Anozie's man mountain of an Othello and Caroline Martin's bright, tough Desdemona to appear as real agents in their own destinies. Anozie's combination of a tremendous physical presence and a big but supple voice suggest that he will one day make a truly great Othello. This production is worth seeing if only for the cachet of saying you saw him while he was still emerging.
• Ends today
Fintan O'Toole
I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell
Abbey Theatre
So much of Bernard Farrell's drama of tensions between, and within, individuals should have dated sorely since its première, in 1979. At the time, the psychiatric fad that he uses as the setting for his play, the intensive communal sessions known as encounter groups, had reached its height, soon afterwards to decline. Also hitting an apparent peak internationally was the practice of taking hostages, of high emotions and dangerous instability behind locked doors. In dramatic terms, meanwhile, the comedic portrayal of neurotic characters, and of the relationship between shrink and patient, was still fresh territory; since then it has become the fodder of countless writers on stage and screen.
Only the latter consideration creates any real problem in Martin Drury's spirited treatment of Farrell's first play, lending a weary typicality to the characters Farrell brought together for a night of charged analysis; now that fear and distrust amid gathered strangers has become a global syndrome, the other themes dovetail neatly to make it seem very much a work of our time.
When Aaron Monaghan's young stammerer Joe begins to prey terror on the minds of the other patients and the icily insincere analyst Dr Bernstein (Tara Flynn), the audience finds itself empathising with the hurt that has driven him here, even as it shares the growing dread of his companions - and Monaghan is superb as he walks the wire between victim and villain. He is touching and he is unnerving, but above all he is entertaining: both Joe's innocence and his malice are defused with the lively comedy that is the mark of Drury's approach, the lightness of touch that a play such as I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, however suddenly relevant, will always demand.
Drury's production is not momentous, but it is confident, stylish and fun - which, on this stage, will do just as well. For this he owes much to a cast with superb comic timing, from Flynn's self-centred Bernstein to Mark O'Regan's jealous husband Peter, a cacophony of Corkonian eruptions that forms a hilarious soundtrack to Joe's increasing strangeness and a wry foil to David Parnell's pompous session veteran Roger. The characters of Peter's giddy wife, Maureen, and the pill-popping widow Rita are those most laden with cliché, but Jasmine Russell and Bernadette McKenna make them their own, unveiling surprising complexities to these women with care and grace. Though a fleeting presence, Vincent McCabe's caretaker is also accomplished, blurring the line between sanity and madness as he moves between two artificial worlds. Over the deliciously mounting hysteria of their incarceration, Tim Reed's effectively grim set looms like a bad feeling.
• Runs until November 6th
Belinda McKeon
FRINGE FESTIVAL
192 & Blushing *
Arthouse
This is the kind of show that makes you wonder what possessed its creators. We didn't find out until the end, when Scarlet Letter Performance Company finally allowed us to see its unusually attractive, handmade programmes, on which more thought and effort seemed to have been lavished than on the performance. It explained that the shame of punishment for an illicit sexual act, for example in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, can be rendered beautiful in an act of defiance. Instead, the audience arrived, sadly unbriefed, to deafening music, a roomful of bald, nude female mannequins scrawled with self-important phrases and poems and two performers exercising in puddles of pins. They proceeded to interact with the dummies and each other, then walked out, leaving the audience to wonder if the ordeal was over or not.
• Runs until Sunday
Christine Madden
Fathom ****
Project Cube
The Canadian SaBooge Theatre has brought a good one to the fringe in Fathom, a strange story set in colonial Tasmania, where there are two kinds of humans: the king's people and convicts. Among the latter are a London woman sentenced for theft, now paroled as a servant to an aristocrat, and her retarded son. A young doctor researching shellfish employs the son as an assistant and discovers an extraordinary ability in him: he can breathe under water. This stimulates Darwinian theories, offends society and religion, and leads to disaster. A cast of five, with two musicians, bring this to strange and vivid life. Apart from a few barrels and boxes, the only set is a kind of sail that can be raised or lowered to shape rooms and spaces and, when lit, becomes an underwater sea. A haunting experience.
• Runs until Sunday
Gerry Colgan
Idol ***
International Bar
Laura-Ashley Rock (Sinéad Beary), a Dublin hairdresser living with her traumatised ma, is destined, she is sure, to be a celebrity. Joe Camel, puppet and chain-smoking crooner, has been there, done that and now spends his days reminiscing with his lonely owner, psychologist Dr Bob (Fergus J. Walsh). The hairdresser and the camel are soon firm friends, but where does that leave Dr Bob and his plan to wean Laura- Ashley off her addiction to the idea of fame? To begin with, Beary's play for Spotlight Theatre deftly mixes fantasy, music and a simple story with some good jokes, while Walsh's gifts for caricature and impersonation are showcased - especially good is his impression of Gay Byrne, making a comeback to interview Laura-Ashley about her imaginary wedding to Justin Timberlake. It goes on too long, though, and the more self-indulgent second half takes the gloss off what has gone before.
• Runs until Sunday
Giles Newington
Spellbound (Faoi Gheasa) **
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
The latest show from the usually reliable BDNC theatre company concerns itself with the geis, a mythological edict that promises misfortune to those who defy its prohibitions. This information, impossible to discern without consulting the programme, does not much illuminate a puzzling evening that combines decent physical theatre with, let's be polite here, very broadly performed narrative vignettes. The story concerns a builder whose assistant takes up with a girl who lives in his house but is not quite his daughter. Oedipal mayhem ensues. Broken up by interludes in which the actors run around waving furniture above their heads while a buzzing noise crudely foreshadows a final catastrophe, the increasingly confusing, deadeningly mirthless action - a routine about depilatory creams is particularly pointless - caused me to silently issue my own geis against rampant theatrical indulgence.
• Ends tomorrow
Donald Clarke
The Seagull After Anton Chekhov **
SS Michael & John
This is a young production by a young company of one of Russia's classics. And there are some things youth should not do. Attempting to turn Chekhov's sublime play into a musical comedy is one. Rhyming "heart" with "fart" in a lyric does not help. Nor does cramming the production, by the Wonderland company, into a small space with a cast of "thousands" - even if generously extended over more than two hours, without an interval. Yes, there is enthusiasm, exuberance and talent here, but still. . . . Only inexperience would attempt to turn great tragedy into farce; it achieves its aim, but by default.
• Runs until Sunday
Patsy McGarry
Suddenly Last Summer *
Focus Theatre
Tennessee Williams's 1958 play is demented enough to do without the boost given to it by Light/Switch Theatre. The tale of the events surrounding the death of Sebastian Venables includes the Williams favourite of shrouded homosexuality, with the addition of a suspiciously close mother-son relationship. Did all this need a barrage of silly sound effects and a matriarch done up like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? ? The company failed to supply a programme, so the culpable shall go nameless. Unfortunately, so shall the actress who played Catherine, who was the still centre of the production. Catherine is, of course, the figurative still centre of the piece, but we could have figured that out without the absurd storm around her.
• Runs until Sunday
Susan Conley
Tmesis ****
SS Michael & John
Two intertwined bodies represent the two-headed, eight-limbed creature referred to by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium; a woman in white depicts God. You fear that things are going to be very obvious from the outset of Momentum's exploration of love, but the three performers constantly pull rugs from under your feet. In a story told through a slowly articulated soft movement language, the God figure controls the creature, until challenged. It then separates the bodies, which now relate differently and unexpectedly. Tmesis seduces us into its slow-moving world thanks in particular to Yorgos Karamalegos and Elinor Randle's skilled partnership as the creature and their beautiful sensitivity as the lovers.
• Runs until Sunday
Michael Seaver
Why Is Comedy? **
T36
It's a good question, but does it really need an answer? The efforts of the Dublin company Handsome Pants to get to grips with what makes us laugh are well-intentioned. Through explicatory sketches and lengthy monologues they deconstruct ideas from "comedy greases the wheels of relationships" to "comedy mustn't hurt", mentioning Aristotle and parodying Al Pacino and Colin Farrell in their pursuit of answers. The actors doing their best in this muddle of a production are Mary McCarthy and co-writer Mark Cantan, flailing about like busy memories of Not The Nine O'Clock News and other sketch-based television shows. It's almost worth waiting for the rare flashes of inspiration, but at 90 minutes Why Is Comedy? far outstays its welcome.
• Runs until Sunday
Tony Clayton-Lea
The Young War ****
Project Cube
Wonderfully theatrical, superbly performed, at times hilarious, erotic, physical and very funny, this is a challenging and very entertaining production by Banana, Bag and Bodice, a US company. It takes imaginative liberties with form and content, delves deliciously into gender issues and sex, and delights with a crackling, sometimes punning humour - all the while staying precise and avoiding cliché. It is what fringe theatre should be about: challenging conventions, including theatrical ones. One simple but very effective example is a sparkling use of the stage whisper in one vignette. A must-see for anyone who loves theatre.
• Runs until Sunday
Patsy McGarry
Don't miss . . .
Rough Magic is staging readings of Australian plays at Project arts centre this weekend, followed by Q&As with the writers: Tear From A Glass Eye by Matt Cameron (Sat, 2.30 p.m.), Salt by Peta Murray (Sat, 4.30 p.m.) and Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America by Stephen Sewell (Sun, 2.30pm). The panel debate is on Sunday at 5 p.m. Call 1850-374643
