De Profundis, Kilkenny Arts FestivalIn these times, when the Christian Churches are riven by homophobia, it is no harm to be reminded that arguably the most powerful Christian text of the past 150 years is the work of a man serving a sentence for "gross indecency".
Oscar Wilde's De Profundis is a long love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written in Reading jail in 1897. Yet were it not for the circumstances of its creation and the notoriety of the writer, it would have earned its author if not canonisation then, at least, beatification. For its shape is determined almost entirely by Wilde's attempt to understand himself and the world through the contemplation of Christ's suffering.
What makes Joe O'Byrne's stage adaptation of the text at Friary Hall so fine is that it takes this religious dimension so seriously. O'Byrne has already given a good name to the sometimes dubious practice of adapting novels for the stage with his versions of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy and Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. He also staged Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray in New York last year. But De Profundis presents a very different challenge. Although the plot of a novel provides at least the basics of a dramatic structure, De Profundis is a letter written from the abyss to a man who has no interest in reading it.
O'Byrne finds drama in two ways. One is the simple representation of the act of writing. Philip Judge's Oscar is composing the letter in his cell. His pen and paper are taken from him every night and his words are read by the authorities. The device of showing us this context might seem clunky, but the reminder of the humiliations of imprisonment and the careful use of Wilde's textual emendations create a dramatic pressure. This and Alexis Nealon's effective soundtrack of prison noises generate an ambience in which the text becomes a live event.
More profoundly, O'Byrne and Judge bring out the dramatic tensions within the text. De Profundis is stretched into tautness by the way Wilde's language negotiates competing necessities. On the one hand De Profundis is an exercise in bitter recrimination and an indictment of Douglas's crass behaviour in making Wilde the medium for his own feud with his father and then abandoning him to the horrible consequences. On the other Douglas's unworthiness makes Wilde's love all the purer, for it is given in exchange for nothing but catastrophe. The drama lies in our gradual realisation that the strength of Wilde's denunciation is the strength of his love, that the abyss of the title is also the unfathomable depth of his attachment.
What O'Byrne and Judge, in their dignified, carefully modulated unfolding of this drama, catch so well is that the essence of this mystery is indeed religious and that the text can therefore be shaped as a spiritual journey. O'Byrne's editing of the text highlights Wilde's meditations on Christ. Picking up on this, Judge gives the classical cadences of Wilde's rhetoric a biblical resonance, playing up the painful search for acceptance and transcendence. His Wilde, tortured above all by the death of his mother and his banishment from the fatherhood of his son, Cyril, is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, drawn between protest at the extent of his suffering and recognition of his destiny.
Judge is especially impressive because of what seem at first to be the unreasonable demands of O'Byrne's design. Wilde is in his cell, of course, but instead of viewing him through the missing fourth wall we see him through a rectangular hole cut at waist height in that wall. This seems perverse. It is hard enough for a single actor to hold our attention for 95 minutes with a text not written for the theatre without cutting him off at the waist.
But gradually, with its resonances of a prison visiting room and of a confession box, the device becomes crucial to the dramatic texture of the piece. It is Judge who makes it work with his ability to focus a range of emotions on his face and the beautifully crafted restraint that makes this cry in the wilderness all the more moving. - Fintan O'Toole
Soiled, Kilkenny Arts Festival
If you can imagine Wallace & Gromit written by Samuel Beckett, you might get some idea of Soiled, an extraordinary puppet show at the Watergate Theatre by the English company Faulty Optic.
Or you might think of one of those lonely kids who plays elaborate
games with superhero figures, train
sets and plastic soldiers, except that
the kid never grows up, is vaguely disturbed and has infinite skill,
lots of resources and a wild
imagination.
Such exercises in evocation are necessary because Soiled is extraordinarily difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't seen it. It seems to have a narrative but not a coherent plot. It draws on an extraordinarily wide range of traditions and ideas, among them the Japanese kabuki and bunraku styles, Grand Guignol, the symbolist dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, silent movies, surrealist spectacle and performance art.
It has one foot in English whimsy and the other in modernist experimentalism. Its head is in the theatre of the absurd and its heart is at the end of the pier. Like a seaside Punch and Judy show, it has elements of knockabout farce.
Like Tadeusz Kantor's creations
of the 1970s, it brings together
puppetry, visual art and machines that move like automata. Sometimes it
makes you think of the Muppets, sometimes of Dante's Inferno or Blake's To Nobodaddy.
I can't pretend to know what it's all about, except that the continual images are of soil, excavation, burial, death and the underworld.
The set has three main areas, which seem to belong to three "characters": a man-like creature who emerges from a box in the centre, a sinister looking but jokey and apparently benign humanoid who inhabits a small tower to the left and a sweet-looking but sinister and apparently malign tweetie bird who lives in a dangling nest to the right. The central figure experiences, partly in a filmed sequence, love, loss and death. He goes to hell and back.
The performers and devisers of the piece, Liz Walker and Gavin Glover, manipulate the glove puppets dressed in kabuki-style black costumes, making them ghostly but insistent presences and giving the show, for all its interplay of objects and machines, a strong human element.
It feels not like the shadow world of traditional puppetry but like a projection of human fears and desires, as though it is a pleasant game haunted and threatened by monsters.
This nightmarish quality is the show's great strength, and the most compelling sequence is a vision of hell. In a culminating gesture, Walker and Glover manipulate a camera around a machine that is arrayed with tiny images of a strange landscape that might be a mine or a moon.
The satanic figures and trapped souls are projected onto a screen, creating a creepy but vividly compelling evocation of a bad dream. Few people in the audience are likely to have seen anything quite like it, and that's not something you can say about many shows. - Fintan O'Toole
Scott Hamilton & John Bunch, Bank of Ireland, Dublin
Dublin Jazz Society's presentation of the tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton and the pianist John Bunch was a pleasant ramble along the familiar highways of the Great American Song Book. Enjoyable enough, but there was also a curiously detached feel to Hamilton's playing; accomplished though it was, it carried an impression that he could turn it on and off as required, like a tap.
Nevertheless, make no mistake; Hamilton is probably the finest living exponent of mainstream tenor saxophone. But decades of touring, picking up local rhythm sections of variable quality - here he was capably backed by bassist Dave Fleming and, especially, drummer Myles Drennan - must have taught him to find inspiration within rather than without, to shut out the possibility of distraction to deliver consistently to a high level.
He's abundantly equipped to do so; a big tone, admirable technique, plenty of melodic ideas, a rich harmonic vocabulary and an ear unfazed by anything around him.
But there is also a price to pay: the sense persisted, particularly on the quicker tempos, such as Just You, Just Me and the encore, Sweet Georgia Brown, of a master musician going through a well-stocked bag of tricks. The ballads fared better; I Wonder Why and Blues In My Heart were lovely examples of the genre.
By contrast, the veteran Bunch always seemed to come up with something fresh, so much so that his work was more interesting and rewarding. The trio version of the old ballad I Can't Get Started was a masterclass in this kind of piano playing. And it was scarcely a surprise that Hamilton sounded at his most engaged when he and Bunch embarked on a slow, sensuous duo exploration of For All We Know that was probably the highlight of the night. - Ray Comiskey
