Peter Crawleyreviews La Dispute at Dublin's Peacock Theatre and Sara Keatinggives her opinion of Macbecks at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin.
La Dispute
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
If four young people – two females and two males – are brought up in complete isolaton, kept ignorant of the outside world, society and each other, then brought together in an artificial Eden, how long will it take them to lose their innocence? Pierre de Marivaux’s 18th-century comedy, in Neil Bartlett’s brisk translation, is part diverting fantasy, part grubby social experiment.
Making his directorial debut at the Abbey, Wayne Jordan finds a balance between the thrumming play of the unblemished and the cruel hand of manipulation when a haughty Prince reveals the elaborate scheme of “a most original entertainment“: a simulation of Genesis in order to discover whether man or woman was the first to prove unfaithful.
The conceit is at once airily cute and steadily unsettling, something that designer Naomi Wilkinson encapsulates with a forest scene stretched across imprisoning walls. Not even a giant bunny sculpture, sitting happily at the rear of the stage, distracts from the sense of a laboratory maze viewed through the frame of a two-way mirror, as though the audience are co-conspirators in placing love under a microscope.
Neither Marivaux nor Bartlett treat human nature with much sentimentality. Kate Nic Chonaonaigh’s Eglé goes from untainted naïf to vain manipulator in the blink of an eye, her affections early divided between her suitor, Barry Ward’s wooing Azor, and her own newly discovered reflection.
Under the advice of two black servants, Carise (Aïcha Kossoko) and Mesrou (Nicholas Beveney), wardens in this nursery of creation, Eglé and Azor spend some time apart, allowing Elaine Fox’s Adine and Simon Boyle’s Mesrin to come into their orbit.
Paradise is quickly lost.
Marivaux’s insights into love and psychology seem brittle within this set-up: the girls bristle into instant rivalry, while the boys cavort with uncomplicated tactile friendship. Sexuality flares with the intensity of unfettered ids, and unschooled hearts seem understandably fickle.
Jordan compensates for any schematic sterility with a pacy production that resembles a discrete, supple dance. Every narcissistic moment is served with a pose and every entrance requires a leap, the men chest-bumping like paradisiacal frat boys while their growing sense of confinement is expressed with resounding thumps against the walls.
Despite such limber performances, wide-eyed innocents are not easy characters to love. Although the play spares them from harsh judgment, it finally stresses the cruelty of its own conceit: the jaded indifference, subjugation and coercion of the experiment itself. Prefiguring everything from Big Brother to experiments at Auschwitz, it's that chilling note the production leaves us with: not that we have been witnessing the quick corrosion of the innocence of these cavorting kids, but that, unwittingly, we have been made to acknowledge the steady loss of our own. Until Feb 7
PETER CRAWLEY
Macbecks
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Where to begin with the strange beast, Macbecks, the latest football musical to hit the Dublin stage? Written by Gary Cooke and Malachy McKenna, it follows a traditional pantomime formula, yoking together impressions of popular public figures with original contemporary musical numbers, some of them culled on this occasion from the back catalogue of Spice Girls number ones by composer Jody Trehy.
The plot follows the trajectory of David Beckham’s career, from his meteoric rise as Manchester United’s golden boy to more recent ridicule as he forsakes football glory for a career as a pin-up. Cooke and McKenna relocate the action to Elizabethan England, where Beckham becomes the fictional Macbecks, the Frankensteinian creation of a domineering Lear-like father, Sir Alex, and a spicy witch called Poshoria, who will soon become his wife. The Shakespearean setting lends Macbecks a lot of easy humour, with familiar Shakespeare lines being reinterpreted to ridiculous effect.
The rest of the comedy comes from recent football debacles, and the in-jokes begin to wear thin on audience members who lack minute knowledge of the professional and leisure activities of the football figures involved. Moreover, in the musical template for this production, I, Keano, the real-life sporting crisis was also a political event; in Macbecks, there is no similar urgency to the dissection of contemporary culture. The superficial insights we are offered are overly familiar from the rash of TV shows that regularly parody celebrity brands such as the Beckhams, as in, most recently, Channel 4’s Star Stories.
Where Macbecks transcends all expectations, however, is in David Bolger’s brilliant production. The Coiscéim choreographer brings a stunning coherence to all aspects of the show, but especially to the football sequences. A replay of the infamous England/Argentina World Cup game in 1998 is ingenious in its staging, Bolger cleverly integrating the vivid costumes of Sinead Cuthbert-O’Connor and Therese McKeone into his singular vision.
The fine ensemble, meanwhile, meets every physical challenge that Bolger sets, the fluidity of fleet-footed moments reaching their apex in Paul Reid's balletic performance as Macbecks, the dim hero whose brain lies in his boots. The vocal performances are also uniformly excellent, especially from Séainín Brennan, Ruth McGill and Mary Murray who bring an operatic quality to the more dramatic moments as the Three Spices. Ultimately, this Long Road production is a genre piece, which, without substantial editing, will probably only appeal to football fans. However, it should be seen by anyone interested in the untapped potential for home-grown musical theatre in Ireland. Until Jan 31
SARA KEATING
