Actors are walking the line alone, writes PETER CRAWLEY
THE GOOD news about Cillian Murphy in Landmark's production of Mistermanis that he delivers nothing short of a virtuoso performance. The more sobering fact is that the ravenous demands of the huge-scale solo show mean that anything less would be considered a failure.
Murphy has to negotiate Enda Walsh’s tumultuous text, thick with verbiage and voices. He has to fill a cavernous space, starkly designed as an industrial wasteland scattered with battered props, using his presence and hyperkinetic physicality alone. And he has to hold an audience in a perfect suspension of empathy and revulsion for a deeply troubled character. There is strength in numbers, but here nobody will do it for him.
In one respect, at least, Murphy is not alone. A single file of solo performances is quickly coming to define the current moment in Irish theatre.
Also at the Galway Arts Festival, the mesmerising Eileen Walsh performs in Corcadorca's Request Programme, an entirely silent show in which the audience follow Walsh through her flat, watching mutely as she performs her post-work rituals. We piece together her story from scant but detailed clues (obsessively cleanly, she leaves behind few existential fingerprints).
Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1970s play has been transplanted from the disenfranchised German working class to a materially
and spiritually bankrupt contemporary Ireland, there is something more cruel in Walsh’s lack of support. We watch her hopes flicker and her distress grow in obedient silence, and even as we empathise we do nothing to intervene. We leave feeling complicit and exposed.
Elsewhere Pat Kinevane performs his one-man show, Silent, for Fishamble, in which a homeless man tells an artfully fragmented story of silent movies and splintering mental health. Barabbas's similarly themed City of Clowns finds Raymond Keane struggling with his solitude, while the action-movie bustle of Corn Exchange's Man of Valourincreases the attention that it's a solo run for Paul Reid.
Fleet-footed and easily revived, the solo show is, for better or worse, the epitome of theatrical individualism. Nothing distracts you from the performer’s self- reliance or bravura resilience, a condition that can appear either brave, vain or downright lonely. But even as you applaud the achievement of these actors, the dramas themselves don’t portray their characters’ isolation as anything other than calamitous.
The irony of these solo performances is that they exist to be shared. Products of our divisive recent history, they are both created by and reflective of the polarising effects of greed and fear, the limitations of straitened times. But in the communal space of the theatre, they also offer an antidote: an arena of empathy, different perspectives, debates and collaboration. In short, a model society.
We enter the world alone, we leave it alone, but, paradoxically, the solo show reminds us that we’re in it together.
