Aurora: A Modern Myth
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
In the transition from childhood to adulthood, when the sensible morals of children’s books recede to reveal a complicated world exploited for profit, an obvious question might be: who wouldn’t grow up angry?
Someone who’s irate is Cass, the woman at the centre of Aurora, Prime Cut’s new production, who at one point describes the end of her childhood, a period when the events of her favourite storybooks had seemed to come to life while she was playing carefree in village fields. “It was our turn in the world … at a time when we thought we had a turn,” she says (jaded with age, in Meghan Tyler’s performance).
One of the beloved children’s books Cass believed were real was The Lonely Tree, a fable about a tree that learns how to use its root system to connect with a larger forest. She tries to hold on to its reassuring moral – “When you ask for help, it always comes” – as the real-life tree becomes endangered, standing in the path of a new gold mine outside the village.
Cass may have grown up, but playwright Dominic Montague and director Emma Jordan insist on the fancies of children’s fantasy, like a fairy-tale that has grown into dubious adulthood. The tree, in the video design of animation students from Ulster University’s school of art, glows unnaturally between snow-white and neon purple, as if viewed through an acid trip. There’s also a talking badger with an attitude (“What’s with yer man calling me shifty?”).
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The plot jumps back and forth in time, between scenes in a police interrogation room, where Cass pluckily resists questioning about the disappearance of gold worth a king’s ransom, and her preceding camp-out at the tree, where she’s determined to stay day and night, protecting it from destruction. “This journey is not about activism, about protest. It’s about friendship,” she says. “It’s not about you having a breakdown?” asks her assistant, Drew (nicely played by Thomas Finnegan).
Such sass papers over a lot of cracks. Drew’s role is as barely more than a messenger, bringing back reports from the village to explain how the demonstration is finding supporters. Similarly, Cass’s brother, Conn (a man indifferent to the town, who escaped to the United States, played by Connor O’Donnell), arrives, ultimately, as an expositional device, eliciting her personal history: her grief about losing their parents; and her hopelessness as a young person with no future in a country where she can’t get a mortgage.
As Cass grows in confidence as a folk hero, Montague’s script becomes an uneven mix of capitalist critique and environmental philosophy, turning to astronomical observations for solace: everything’s just atoms on the same journey through the universe.
The intended impact doesn’t land, but Montague has an almost admirable disregard for playwriting rules. “Do you know what they call what you’re doing?” Conn tells his sister. “Hubris.” “Do you know what they call what you’re doing?” Cass replies. “Eating a bag of d*cks!”
Seeing Aurora is certainly not a boring way to spend time on this planet.
Aurora is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, February 8th
