Irish Timeswriters take in The View at the Ambassador and go on a bumpy journey to Sofia.
The View, Ambassador, Dublin
So this is what the kids are listening to these days. At a half-full Ambassador, the drum tech is checking the bass kick for levels, and the crowd are already clapping in time. A hoard of excitable teenagers has crushed its way to the front of the cavernous room, and is screaming: "The View are on fire." It takes most bands a good hour to whip a crowd into this sort of fever pitch, but the View have managed it without stepping on stage. Ah, the vagaries of youth.
It's easy to see why The View are the current favourites of the discerning teenage music fan. They tick all the requisite boxes to claim their place in the current wave of British guitar bands: they have jangly, radio-friendly tunes with anthemic lyrics about living in a grubby part of Britain (or Dundee in Scotland, to be more specific here); they bounce around on stage with all the effervescence of their counterparts in the audience; and they even have that elusive direct link to the leaders of the Brit guitar pack, Babyshambles.
The band tear through the tracks from their debut album, Hats Off to the Buskers, at breakneck speed, only pausing to take a swig from a can or to swap instruments. Who cares that the sound is atrocious, and the lyrics barely discernable? What matter that the guitar solos are lost in the thrum of the bass and punch of the drums? And who needs edgy emotion in the vocals, when screaming into the microphone causes members of the crowd to run around the room looking for the best part of the pack to fling themselves into?
A rapid, ragged performance from an animated bunch of baby shamblers, then, that gave the teenage fans their kicks, and left most other people feeling very old indeed.
- Laurence Mackin
Cargo Sofia, George's Dock, Dublin
This truck, we are informed, is 15 years old, 12ft long and has seen much better days. Before it began hauling cargo across the hellish borders of Eastern Europe it was credited with 540 horsepower. "Thirty to 40 of them are already dead," says Ventzislav Borissov, a charismatically weary Bulgarian trucker who will be one of our guides for a simulated trip from Sofia to Dublin.
Actually, the truck for Rimini Protokoll's intriguing show about the rise and consequence of globalisation is in pretty good nick, equipped to be both a mobile performance venue and a rolling observatory. Through the container's glass walls the city streets roll by in an endless panorama while, periodically, video screens roll down to accommodate superimposed vistas of the former Soviet Bloc. This is the form and blurred reality of writer/director Stefan Haegi's production: a road trip and a double exposure.
It is certainly revealing. We learn, by means of bullet-point text, about the extraordinary history of Willi Betz, a German trucking company which established a monopoly within Eastern Europe, and, more recently, was the subject of border-crossing bribery allegations. The testimony of the drivers in the cab is more prosaic: the Serbian border costs either €5 or two packs of cigarettes; in Kuwait a copy of Playboy is worth one tank of gas.
If Haegi has no truck with how a corporation thrives in corrupted states (until 1999, Germany made foreign bribes tax-deductible), he suggests that the working conditions of these Bulgarian truckers are grossly unfair. As Borissov and Nedyalko Nedyalkov show us their family photos, explain their shifts and their cabin-fever living conditions, comment on the price of diesel or the two-day queue for the Kalotina crossing, they do so with numb good humour.
Can a documentary performance on the tedium of long-distance hauliers avoid becoming a tedious experience itself? For the main part, it can. As each new city is announced, we get the giddy bounce of local FM radio, while a striking Bulgarian singer materialises in Dublin's most unlikely places. We also get an astonishing glimpse of Dublin itself, such as a hypnotically slow cruise through the labyrinthine container stacks of Dublin Ferry Port.
As the novelty of freight-specific performance begins to wear off, the show loses horsepower, but seeing how Dublin fits into this global picture is both awesome and discomfiting. As for the unsuspecting Dublin public, many of whom are local lorry drivers, they glance in our direction completely unfazed. Only later do we realise that the audience has been concealed by a one-way mirror. A voyeuristic cop-out, perhaps, or the last validation of a slow dawning truth: that truckers have seen it all.
Runs until Friday
- Peter Crawley
