Somnium review: Dark story of sexual violence becomes a stunning dream show

Somnium

Bank of Ireland Theatre, University of Galway

★★★★★

What is Somnium? That woozy gap between wake and sleep is the setting for Brú Theatre’s absorbing, beautiful, disturbing, totally enveloping new show, which premiered at Galway International Arts Festival. Like the state of somnium – or dreaming – itself, this show exists in borderlands, of awake sleep, but also in how it’s created, skirting theatre, light and projections, music, dance and movement, voice spoken and sung, to create a stunning, ritualistic, immersive, multisensory experience. Bru’s shows, from the emigration mood piece Ar Ais Arís to last year’s Not a Word, about an Irish navvy, are skilful and striking, drawing on technology and human artistry but taking quite distinct approaches.

This starts with Philomela, a lesser-known figure from Greek mythology. Her sister Procne’s husband, Tereus, raped her, then cut out her tongue to stop her telling others, but she ultimately has her revenge, via a nightingale and Furies. It is “a tale as old as time and for some sleep does not come,” Philippa Hambly’s voiceover tells us. Sexual violence and the use of power to suppress are horribly timeless, but somehow here the treatment of this dark story transcends pain, and the dream experience becomes a renewal.

Galway International Arts Festival 2024: Somnium, by Brú Theatre. Photograph: Pato Cassinoni

Galway International Arts Festival 2024: Somnium, by Brú Theatre. Photograph: Pato Cassinoni

Hambly is onstage, too, two layers of gauze curtain creating a dreamlike setting and screens for the fluttering, shifting images; the composer and musician Julianna Bloodgood sings from the darkness, then into the light, and she conducts layered sounds, using her live voice and her recorded voice in harmonies, and singing bowl, harmonium and Mediterranean frame drum to create an original score: ethereal, sorrowful, mythic, eastern. The languages – Ukrainian, Croatian, ancient Greek, Bloodgood’s own created language (as well as Irish and English) – are mostly unfamiliar, so their sounds become instruments too.

Jane Cassidy’s layered, evocative audiovisual design is intrinsic to this gorgeous, unsettling performance, along with Sarah Jane Shiels’s lighting and Andrew Clancy’s set. As well as creating a three-dimensional world for the mythic action on stage, the images and effects literally leave the stage and envelop the audience, so we’re wrapped into Philomela’s story and wake-sleep state. Layers of projections of leaves dance and we are in the forest; Philomela seeks her sister to tell her but walls of moving creatures block her path; clouds burst from the horizon and carry us away.