Contemporary theatre engaging with the past features twice in today's reviews.
Tearmann
Civic Theatre, Tallaght
For 40 years Siamsa Tíre has provided its own tearmann for the steps and rhythms of north Kerry, the traditional forms preserved by infusion with contemporary practices. It's almost paradoxical - sanctuary usually comes within the museum's glass case - but Siamsa is confident in the robustness of the tradition and has no qualms about its ability to converse with modern dance, music and theatre in order to re-imagine itself.
In Tearmann, playwright Michael Harding and choreographer Cindy Cummings have created a ritualistic tale of memory and dreams. As an old man starves within a dystopian Famine workhouse, he remembers happier times of abundance. A bustling market scene with heaped vegetables and tearaway dance sets melts back to the reality of joyless scrubbing and chiselling in one seamless movement transformation. This banging gathers a momentum, spawning a rhythm that is taken up by the musicians and clattering hard shoes. Each mini-scene is an archetypal Siamsa moment: effectively simple, fluent and multi-disciplinary.
Later, a group of six children sit on the floor in a line, beating and passing brushes and shoes to each other in a half-game half-dance. Reminiscent of the classroom scene in the company's Oileán, it is a perfect combination of rhythm, movement and play that shines out from the bleakness that surrounds it.
The gestural language embodies both the literal mimed action of markets or funerals with the abstract reflections of contemporary dance. Music transitions are less subtle, with little grey area between dour drones and joyous jigs, while the lighting provides little more than broad washes of colours rather than more nuanced shading. The drama, however, is perfectly pitched and the emotional arc finds a perfect ending as a young boy and woman perform a slow, silent step dance in a homage to another dead dancer.
Tearmann's theme, the Famine, has itself been recently re-assessed but, however innovative its artistic language, Siamsa's treatment of the subject is disappointingly consensual. But, viewed at its most universal, it shows how human suffering can be transcended and how a dim spiritual light will always glow from under a locked door of hopelessness.
Until Sat, then Cork Opera House on Nov 4
Michael Seaver
Danti-Dan
Mill Theatre, Dundrum
Everyone has their own frontier, an expanse of waiting discoveries at the furthest limit of their knowledge. For most of the young characters in Gina Moxley's 1995 play, who whittle away the agitated summer of 1970 on a stretch of road that is 10 miles outside Cork city and, less precisely, somewhere in the borderland between childhood and adulthood, that frontier is sexuality.
Originally produced by Rough Magic as a dark and unsentimental depiction of teenagers coming of age, Danti-Dan moves with as much enjoyably scabrous comedy as dawning tragedy. Dan - described in the text as a 14-year-old with a functioning age of eight - is a naïf with chaste fantasies of the Wild West. That he may encounter more prickly dangers is signalled early with Moxley's most interesting creation, Cactus, a girl impatient to advance her own functioning age, and whose sexual awakening, interestingly, is ultimately the play's most dangerous.
The challenge faced by David Horan's handsomely staged revival for Galloglass is to find the right blend of the halcyon and the disturbing. Moxley is not prone to nostalgia, yet there is a misty quality to some of her scenes, as though memory had edited out all but the most important details. Horan responds to this with a similarly distended reality; if any of the excellent cast are called upon, they appear on the instant.
The tone of the production, though, can sometimes be distractingly sepia - Laura Howe's set, economically realised for a national tour, looks quite lovely beneath the endless summer of Eamon Fox's lights, while over-used music cues from the tail end of the 1960s are pleasant but distancing.
Kids today may be sexualised and savvy much earlier, and if that feeling ever makes the central characters seem removed and less relevant, it doesn't help that they are played by actors firmly in their 20s. (At times the production recalls Dennis Potter's adults-playing-children drama Blue Remembered Hills.) As Cactus, though, the brilliantly versatile Sarah Greene maintains a precise balance between self-consciousness and sexual cockiness, while Ian Lloyd Anderson, though a terrific performer, is too big for the part of Dan, a character whose vulnerability - and transformation - needs to be as physical as it is mental.
Like many a Bildungsroman, growing up here takes place away from adult supervision - any indication of state or church-influenced repression is quite marginal - and if Moxley pushes the play towards tragedy, those consequences seem less a worried social comment than a plot necessity.
Teenage sexuality and development may seem quite altered in a vastly transformed Ireland, but Moxley's play reminds you that the rushing desire for independence, maturity and discovery never changes.
Until Sat, then tours nationally
Peter Crawley
