Reviews looks at shows from the Dublin Theatre Festival including Deliriumat the Peacock, Hedda Gablerat the Gate and The Year of Magical Thinkingat the Gaiety
Delirium
Peacock Theatre
It may be the most magnificent book ever written (according to Sigmund Freud), but while Enda Walsh funnels much of the philosophy, psychology and spirituality of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazovinto his manic free adaptation, Theatre O's splenetic staging suggests another reading: that the story is a barking mess.
It's a daring approach to take with a literary classic, and, following Elevator Repair Service's seven-and-a-half-hour staging of the much slimmer The Great Gatsby, we should be thankful that this version manages to bundle its plot into a running time shorter than a working week. But even if the stylistic slips and altering techniques of Dostoevsky encourage a corresponding degree of dramatic anarchy, it's hard to know what to make of Delirium's mad lurches between reverence and outright parody, matching fractious family histories with obscene puppet shows and religious debate with karaoke.
The core of the story remains: three brothers are reunited around their lustful, boorish father Fyodor (Denis Quilligan), whose sins taint them to varying degrees. Nick Lee's strapping Mitya is consumed by similar lust, engaged to Katerina (Carolina Valdés) but hungering, like his father, for local sexpot Grushenka (Julie Bower). His half-brothers, Dominic Burdess's intellectual sceptic Ivan and Joseph Alford's saintly Alyosha, complete a human trinity: body, mind and spirit.
Fyodor's fate is here presented as the play's climax, a revelation Dostoevsky himself delayed, teasingly, until midway through his opening sentence. Until that climax, director Joseph Alford presents a violent accumulation of unchecked masculinity, stridently alluding to Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, but using pounding music and choreographed choke-holds that smother its effect.
There is a similar tension over whether to play straight or to over-egg, as though the company is worried that all this intellectual and spiritual significance would become boring without the periodic interjection of something madcap. Alyosha's spiritual mentor, Father Zosima, is thus presented as either a godlike voiceover or a demonic sock puppet, while tragic events are squeezed into the capes and gorilla costumes of a hellish fancy-dress party.
"If there is no God," Ivan says, "everything is permitted." But this postmodern free-for-all feels forced and awkward, only drawing attention to its creator. When Walsh's text is allowed to settle down, it matches Ivan's lofty dismissal of religious worship and eternal harmony with appropriately sardonic updates, all dutifully recorded and parroted by Smerdyakov (Lucien MacDougall), the dim-witted servant stewing in secrets.
More often, though, the production loses its nerve, doling out perfunctory songs, dance sequences and animations as though desperately trying to revive a flagging party. It ends with a simple and unadorned exhortation that in this world of sin and suffering we must find the moral compass within. At that point, compass needles swivelling towards the exit, Zosima's opening words carried the more redemptive lesson: we all must learn to forgive. Until Oct 25 PETER CRAWLEY
Hedda Gabler
Gate Theatre
Hedda Gabler is, literally, haunting her own house. In the opening moments of Anna Mackmin's ethereal production, she pads silently through her home, pressing her face against the glass of the music room's windows in an image of ghostly anguish and caged despair. Denis Clohessy's ominous original composition imposes discordant notes against gorgeous rising harmonies: a further harbinger of the eerie unease.
Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gableris a problematic classic. While radical in its time for its unflinching representation of late 19th-century gender roles, more than 100 years later Hedda's hysteria indeed belongs to another age, an age where madness and melodrama were interchangeable and easily confused.
However, Brian Friel's new version - taking liberties that only a master playwright might - invests Ibsen's social realist original with psychological realism, presenting the harridan's gradual mental breakdown as a physiological consequence of an entirely inflexible social milieu. Friel finds wry humour in historical hindsight; however, while the dated attitudes of Hedda's husband, lovers and lady companions provoke laughter from a contemporary audience, Hedda's final actions become an almost logical defence against a world that refuses her agency. Crucially, they still have the capacity to shock.
The silver shadows of Oliver Fenwick's lighting design complement Lez Brotherston's steely-grey set, presenting a cold and airless house for the cold and suffocating anti-heroine, whom Justine Mitchell plays with restrained, repressed emotion, childlike impetuosity and, finally, disturbing grace. For Mitchell's controlled Hedda, "practising cruelties" is not merely a game for a bored bourgeois housewife but a blind stab at self-determination. That Andrea Irvine's emotional Thea Elvsted should find freedom in the domesticity that Hedda herself shuns is the singular act against which she finally decides to rebel. Ironically, Peter Hanly's reverent husband, George Tesman, is too caught up in his historical domestic research to see what is going on under his own roof, while the callous Judge Brack, played with louche arrogance by Andrew Woodall, seems excited by Hedda's dedication to her independent ideal.
In Hedda's final speech she reminds us that she is Hedda Gabler, not Hedda Tesman, that she is her own woman - just as Ibsen's title ensures that we remember that this is her play. A century ago, suicide might indeed have been her only option; however, as George and Judge Brack attend to Hedda's lifeless body, Thea Elvsted composes herself and holds centre-stage, reminding us of Hedda's legacy too. Until Nov 15 SARA KEATING
The Year of Magical Thinking
Gaiety Theatre
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's 2005 memoir, is a moving consideration of her response to the sudden death of her husband. This adaptation represents that event, but is also marked by a tragedy that occurred after the memoir was completed: the death of her adult daughter. In describing the impact of both losses, Didion has one overarching aim: to bear witness to the way in which our lives can change in an instant.
Her response to her husband's death was the "magical thinking" referred to in the title; her barely understood but compelling belief that if she did things in a particular way, she might be able to bring him back. Irrational as it was, that belief provided Didion with the space and time she needed to begin the process of accepting her loss.
As directed by David Hare, Vanessa Redgrave combines a sympathetic understanding of Didion's script with an unusually subtle use of movement. A shift in the narrative's direction is achieved with a tilt of her head; the barely perceptible swaying of her arms echoes the rhythm of Didion's prose; the loosening and tying up of her hair reveals her character's tension and need for control.
Most impressive, however, is Redgrave's ability to maintain a rapport with the audience, to create the illusion of spontaneous interaction. Indeed, she was forced towards the end of this performance to improvise a line reminding the audience to switch off their mobile phones (her work was disrupted several times on the opening night), but she did so in a way that seemed entirely in keeping with her character's personality.
Ultimately, the play reminds us that, at its best, theatre itself can offer audiences an opportunity to engage in magical thinking, and in this case to imagine (or re-imagine) our own responses to the death of our loved ones. Didion asks audiences to invest both intellectually and emotionally in what we are seeing, but the reward for doing so is that we leave the Gaiety understanding something about ourselves that we hadn't known before the performance began. Until Sat PATRICK LONERGAN
