Fintan O'Toole reviews From These Green Heights at the Axis in Ballymun
From These Green Heights
Axis, Ballymun
Ballymun, these days, represents the triumph of hope over experience. Most of the 1966 tower blocks that once made up the largest single housing project in Europe are still standing on Dublin's northside like monuments to a fallen regime. Alongside are the beautiful new houses, shops and public buildings that are gradually replacing them. The place seems thus poised between the broken promises of a previous generation and the still-fresh promises of a new one.
The optimism of the new is haunted by the memory that the now-decrepit towers themselves once represented what was supposed to be a bright, shiny modern future. One of the characters in Dermot Bolger's theatrical history of Ballymun worries that "they'll probably make a balls of it the second time too".
From These Green Heights is itself a perfect expression of the chastened, watchful kind of hope that is appropriate to people who have been let down so badly, so often. It was commissioned by, and is staged in, the new Axis arts centre, attached to the Dublin City Council offices that are part of the redevelopment.
The very fact that there is such a place and that it can stage a play about the experiences of the local community is some kind of tacit official apology for the way Ballymun became, as another of Bolger's characters puts it, "a holding camp for awkward cases". A place that has tended to feature on the arts pages only through outraged complaints about misrepresentation and stigmatisation now has some purchase on its own story.
For a professional writer like Bolger, a commission to tell the story of a community to that community is nevertheless a tricky assignment. Stigmatisation makes people sensitive, and local pride has often been the only resource left for people battered by unemployment, poverty and a heroin epidemic. A mere wallowing in misery would miss the point that Ballymun did fight back and that, against all odds, it is winning its fight, but an avoidance of the degradation would be a lie. Bolger has to sail between the monster of sentimental uplift on the one hand and the whirlpool of despair on the other. By tapping into the spirit of the place now - that simultaneous sense of past betrayals and present hopes - Bolger charts a course of real integrity.
This is not to say that From These Green Hills is an unalloyed triumph. Ideally, the story of almost 40 years would be told in a series of plays. As there's just one, it is inevitable that leaps are made and that some moments move too rapidly to be properly realised. Even though the form relies heavily on first-person narrative by the actors, there are still times when the dialogue has to bear a burden of clunky exposition. The need to keep the audience abreast of the times leads to some heavy-handed signalling of the if-it's-punk-rock-it-must-be-the-late-1970s variety. The flow of the narrative isn't helped, moreover, by the strange decision to have a 30-minute interval after 50 minutes of the performance.
That the play overcomes these handicaps is a tribute to Bolger's ability to give a metaphysical edge to social realism. As he has done in his previous Dublin plays, he lifts an acutely observed reality into another dimension by playing quite subtly on larger spiritual concepts. Here, the interlocking stories of two families are tinged with broader colours. Ballymun is imagined in part as a version of the old Catholic realm of limbo. And the struggles to make a life there are framed within the search for what the heroes of all folk tales seek: home.
Ray Yeates's simple, unadorned production picks up intelligently on Bolger's sense that, in this case at least, less is more. Marie Tierney's angular design, conceived in association with Robert Ballagh, does a superb job of both capturing the geometry of Ballymun and allowing the actors to move cleanly and confidently in an imaginary space.
The cast, headed by the magisterial Vincent McCabe, mixes high-grade professional performances with débuts by local actors Catherine Barry and Karen Brady to great effect. While McCabe, Melanie Grace, Anne Kent, Alan King and Ann O'Neill bring clarity and deftness to the unfolding story, Barry and Brady provide a touchstone that maintains the balance between telling the truth and trying to transcend it. At its best, From These Green Heights movingly offers the hope for a new beginning in the relationship between theatre and a working-class community that mirrors the hope for Ballymun itself.
Runs until December 11th
