Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events
Playground and End-Time, Gaiety School of Acting
What is happening to the creative and emotionally uninhibited young individuals in Lisa Harding's short work Playground? A disparate group placed under constant surveillance, they vie with each other for attention while their emotions are manipulated and studied, their spirits trampled underfoot in the name of "the experience". Have they been co-opted into some insidious, futuristic reality TV show? Or have they simply enrolled in an acting school? The Gaiety School of Acting graduation show is always a strange beast, featuring two specially commissioned new plays designed - essentially - to showcase the talents of the year's graduating class. If Harding's play is thus rife with self-reference, its Stepford Wives/Clockwork Orange set-up allowing the cast to ably demonstrate mime and movement skills, their articulation abilities and special talents, it never quite allows them to inhabit more nuanced characters: if someone produces a guitar, for instance, or essays an accent, it's not easy to decide whether this is a crucial plot point or a casual CV item.
Directed by Patrick Sutton, whose programme note addresses us as "agent, casting director, friend or supporter", Harding's play may extol the irrepressible spirit of individuality versus the system, but, as a showcase, it is geared towards serving industry demands.
Sean McLoughlin's End-Time, on the other hand, serves the theatre. Set in a Dublin where spirituality expresses itself either through drug-addled epiphanies or fantastically trashy miracles (the face of Christ appears on the wall of a home in Harold's Cross), the play presents a recognisably agnostic and confused world. Directed with great brio by John Delaney, End-Time maintains a teasingly vague position on religion. Here, a Mormon may slurp from a beer bottle, frequently-occurring raptures are indistinguishable from LSD trips, and the antichrist, in a brilliantly lysergic conceit, appears to us as a fallen children's TV icon.
If that imaginative scope reminds anyone of Alex Johnston's What The Dead Want, a high-water mark in the history of the GSA showcase, it is similarly encouraging to see McLoughlin write so capably for a large cast, his imagination sprawling over a wide canvas. True, his play really seems to require just five of the nine roles, but for the most part such showcase staples as duologues, comic roles and uninterrupted speeches are there to serve the narrative rather than the cast.
What a casting director is looking for, I cannot say, but that untailored approach seems to better exalt an actor's craft, providing a talented group with an inventive and sturdy platform with which to launch a performing career. Peter Crawley
Until June 23
Woyzeck, Haulbowline Naval Base, Cork Harbour
Symmetry might not be synonymous with the Corcadorca presentation style, but the fluency linking the location and the theme of this production of Woyzeck suggests an imaginative compatibility. Staged at the naval base at Haulbowline in Cork Harbour, Georg Buchner's unfinished play of 1836, pitting its anti-hero against the changing circumstances of his time and the unchanging and hopeless circumstances of his life, stretches through a series of old or half-ruined or sternly functional buildings.
Episode by episode, it focuses briefly on a particular site until at last the action swings back again to the grassy islanded jetty where it began. The play itself, which Buchner left unfinished at his death in 1837, has a peripatetic structure, and Pat Kiernan's direction expresses this through almost self-contained scenes in brothel or field clinic or carnival. The progression, from the navy oil wharf to the disused fever hospital built for the British South Atlantic fleet in the early 19th century, catches Woyzeck's own despairing observation that it's all one thing after another, even though this succession of venues is interrupted now and again with sudden, almost visionary glimpses of other possibilities. Inevitably, in as ambitious a production as this, technology and mechanics get the limelight, and quite literally; many of the scenes seem to work by remote control and the lighting design (Paul Keogan), music (Mel Mercier), sound design (Matthew Padden) and costumes by Joan Hickson combine as elements commenting on as well as illustrating events. David Pearse in the title role offers an angry innocence which is everywhere contradicted by the venality of his world, from his lover Marie (Lucienne McEvoy) to the ambitious doctor (Malcolm Adams) whose devotion to human experiment keeps Woyzeck on a three-month-long diet of peas. Weakened and bewildered, Woyzeck is no match for the cynicism of his Captain (Frank O'Sullivan) or for the brutal masculinity of Rory Nolan's Drum Major.
In this translation by Gregory Motton, life is a circus in which the small man is one of the performing animals. Corcadorca never offers just a play: it offers an experience. In this case it has to be questioned whether or not the play survives the experience and some might even wonder if the audiences survives as well. Stamina plus rain-and-wind-proof garments are essential equipment for two hours of promenade attention, as in walking over pathways and through puddles guided by the beacon-like white hats of the naval stewards at a speed dictated by the company's marshals. It could be argued that Kiernan has taken a little too much advantage of the licence offered by Buchner's own lack of determination (he was only 23 when he died), yet the imagery he has brought to the play by transforming it into a spectacle is potent enough to inspire admiration and to provoke debate. Even though the first-night audience was perhaps too big for viewing accessibility, the mood was predictably receptive given the buffet supper on offer at the naval Mess under Chief Petty Officer Pascal Luby, the ferry trip across the harbour from Cobh and the windy night-time clouds across the crescent moon. Not just a play: an experience. Mary Leland
Until July 1, except June 25 and 26
The Aliens, Crawdaddy, Dublin
"We are The Aliens . . . we are The Aliens . . ." The chant wafts from the back of the venue, as the faithful await the arrival of rock's latest starmen, preparing to land a few months behind their original touchdown date. This is the rescheduled Irish leg of The Aliens' tour. The psychedelic Scotsmen are eager to make up for lost time and deliver the goodies from their debut album, Astronomy for Dogs.
All three Aliens, guitarist and singer Gordon Anderson, keyboard player John McLean and drummer Robin Jones, used to be in The Beta Band, although Anderson left the band very early on due to illness. When the Betas split, McLean and Jones reunited with a recovered Anderson and the trio began their quest for planetary domination. On the strength of tonight's stop-start performance, the only thing these Aliens need to conquer is their singer's irritating penchant for disjointed between-song banter. "Momentum!" barks one fan while Anderson faffs around with his harmonica holder. "You're no Billy Connolly!" quips another.
When the Aliens finally get going, though, they take off with rocket-fuelled enthusiasm, Anderson shaking his curly mop like a mad emcee and bending the strings like a true 1960s throwback. After a stuttering opening song, Setting Sun, a sort of pastiche of All Along the Watchtower, the band starts to find its bearings and gain control of the mad sonic whirl of Only Waiting. The trio is augmented by a bassist and second guitarist, and when the sound comes together on the Kinks-y clatter of Glover, it suddenly seems possible for these starship troupers to achieve lift-off.
It's during the phantasmagorical Caravan, though, that The Aliens destroy all resistance, and seize the advantage by going straight into the manic, electro-charged Robot Man, and delivering a dose of instant karma via The Happy Song. As we wait for them to return for a blast of Rox, that chant has gotten a little louder. Kevin Courtney
