Irish Timesreviewers give their verdicts on the first night performances of the 50th Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival
The Pride of Parnell Street
The Tivoli
If pride comes before a fall, Sebastian Barry's new play asks whether it can ever again be regained. A drama that is as much about Dublin as it is about Janet and Joe, the inner-city husband and wife torn apart by the death of a child and domestic violence, it traces the moment where the rot set in to Italia '90. The Irish World Cup campaign may have accompanied the dawn of prosperity and national optimism, but, the extraordinary Mary Murray asks, "did we ever score a goal?"
That's an unsettling idea to extend to the confidence and wealth of the nation in the years to follow, as though the country's success is another series of flukes which will prove just as vulnerable. Not that Janet and Joe have shared in that fortune. Joe is a "midday man", a petty thief who rises late and steals from cars. If the World Cup was a bread and circus distraction, its end unleashes a violence in the frustrated male and sets the narrative of Fishamble's considered production in motion.
That Joe and Janet separate early, their paths barely crossing in the 10 years the play traces (the characters speak to us, in interweaving monologues, on the cusp of the millennium), in some way justifies the rather stale monologue format. Barry uses the form, rather than enhances or subverts it, and although director Jim Culleton can't disguise a distracting similarity to Eugene O'Brien's Eden, for instance, a more sinking idea may be that the monologue - the dramatic form of isolation or solipsism - is now the natural method to discuss our country and our time.
Joe's isolation - in prison, in drug-abuse, in hospital - is marvellously evoked by Karl Shiels, who spits out the irony of the term "inner-city" as a man who feels perennially on the outside. If Murray is fantastic for the worry in her words and her guarded good spirit, Shiels is compelling for his earthy humour and deep self-loathing. Yet the role of the audience is less considered. The fundamental question of every monologue play is never answered: what - or who - compels these characters to speak?
If that compounds the feeling that this is a well-told story
with nothing particularly new to say, there are consequences too
for the dark nostalgia of a memory play. Janet's late recollections
of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, after a catalogue of traumas,
feel more tacked on than a repressed memory. And, without budging
beyond 2000, the play takes no pride inthe culturally transformed
Parnell Street of today. There is, nonetheless, a moving history of
heartbreak and Sabine Dargent's rusted set and watery details
underline the corrosion and possible redemption of a love, and a
city, torn asunder.
Until Sat, Oct 6
Peter Crawley
Hibiki
Gaiety Theatre
Butoh is a Japanese performance art that emerged in the wake of the atomic bombs that laid waste to the civilian landscape in the second World War. In Hibiki, Japan's foremost Butoh group, Sankai Juku, present a post-apocalyptic vision that evokes the devastation of the post-war world, both in its dusty, spare aesthetic and its strange other-worldly tone.
The ensemble of six, each stripped to the waist and whitened from head to toe, perform their "dance of darkness" on an expanse of thin sand. Under Ushio Amagatsu's superb lighting design (realised with spot-on specificity by Satoru Suzuki) glass bowls placed around the space become pools of water rippling with the suggestion of life. Meanwhile, an evocative original soundtrack evolves from a single repeated piano note that sounds like rain falling to a full symphonic composition for piano and strings.
The dancers' movements are so fluid that at times it almost seems like they are not moving at all. As they curl and unfurl foetal figures in the sand in the opening and closing moments of the piece, it could be the discs of light slowly spinning as much as the dancers. Postures are held for extended moments of meditation, both for the performers who are always building energy for their next movement, and for the audience forced to contemplate their stilled somatic sculptures.
Evolving in the same post-war climate, it seems unsurprising that so many of these composite stage pictures recall strikingly images from Beckett's plays; an interesting way in which Eastern and Western theatre traditions might find common ground. Many elements of Butoh's austere aesthetic have also been absorbed into international theatre training and performance since the 1960s, and as a result Hibiki's use of Butoh in its purest form loses some of its dramatic effect. But there is still much that is strange and fascinating in Sankai Juku's 90-minute piece.
Hibiki unfolds in six scenes, whose themes suggest a progression
into darkness and a return to light. However, it would be futile to
try and extract any concrete narrative from the dance. It seems to
find meaning in movement alone.
Ends tomorrow
Sara Keating
bobrauschenbergamerica
Project Arts Centre
Titles can be telling. If the style of this one, with its lower-case lettering and pushed-together words seems redolent of an outdated idea of what is hip and happening, the signal is not altogether misleading. bobrauschenbergamerica, written by Charles Mee and directed by Anne Bogart, had its premiere a few months before 9/11. So much has happened since that, for all its moments of brilliance, the show's kooky, nostalgic, indulgently optimistic take on the US seems strangely out of synch with the times. What might have felt refreshingly innocent before 9/11 or defiantly celebratory in its immediate aftermath now seems redolent of that most distant of times - the recent past.
This is, in part, a matter of style as well as content. Bogart is a key figure in American theatre, and her SITI company, which brings both this show and Radio Macbeth to the festival, has rooted itself in a collaborative, experimental and multi-disciplinary aesthetic utterly at odds with the blandness of Broadway. But the downside of such a position can be a reliance on energy over focus, on creativity over structure, on inspired improvisation over clarity of purpose.
Such an approach tends to be at its most potent when it rubs up against a robust text, and Bogart's take on Macbeth will be an interesting test of this proposition. But when the text is also loose and improvised, the absence of tension can be problematic. This can work the other way around too. Charles Mee's work with the choreographer Martha Clark on Vienna Lusthaus 20 years ago produced an electrifying mix of openness and rigour. But his approach and Bogart's are perhaps too similar to generate the friction that really makes sparks fly.
Bobrauschenbergamerica is an attempt to reproduce in theatrical form the world of the great visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose dynamic eclecticism involves the conjunction of created and found objects. The idea is to create a play as Rauschenberg "might have conceived it had he been a playwright". It is a notion that verges on the meaningless, implying as it does that the nature of an artistic impulse can be separated from the form in which it is expressed. But if such a thing were possible it would have to translate the artist's technique of collage - in which all the disparate elements appear to the view at the same time - into the theatrical form of a kaleidoscope, in which they follow each other in a sequence that achieves some kind of unity.
In fact, the piece remains very much a collage, not least because Mee is interested in patchwork texts that incorporate whole chunks of other texts, in this case using passages by Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, William S Burroughs, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and others. These are thrown on to a canvas that includes a gently deranged housewife (the charming Kelly Maurer) as Rauschenberg's mother, a woman in a 1960s bikini, a girl on roller skates, a tramp who lives in a cardboard box, a pair of gay men with ambitions to become chicken farmers, a rough trucker, a squabbling, on-again, off-again couple and a Domino's pizza delivery man.
Some of the individual images are superb. Ellen Lauren's way of
eating a cake to assuage her emotional distress is worth the price
of admission. A sequence that uses the sounds of space travel to
counterpoint the journey across the stage of a man in a chicken
suit rises to the level of genuine absurdity. Gian-Murray Gianino's
pizza man, recounting his career as a triple murderer, is chilling
and hilarious at the same time. There is a memorable strangeness in
the trucker and the girl in the bikini body-surfing in a giant
martini. But without an overarching structure or a sense of
urgency, these images are ditzy rather than disturbing.
Rauschenberg knew how to put apparently disparate elements together
and give the result the feeling of necessity. Here the conjunctions
remain capricious and there is less to everything than meets the
eye.
Ends tomorrow
Fintan O'Toole
Bistouri
The Ark
Bistouri, from Belgian company TOF Theatre, was first imagined as street theatre and you can see why as the entire show is performed inside a mobile operating theatre that would suit an outdoor setting well. The retired surgeon (a bespectacled ruddy-faced almost life-size puppet) has an array of rusted tools that are more like outmoded household gadgets than sterilised surgical instruments. However, he does have an endoscopic camera which relays on to a video screen the procedure he is carrying out on his patient.
To give details of what does emerge from the patient's insides would ruin the show for audiences this weekend but one can safely say that the puppet surgeon and his assistant (Maxime Durin) take revenge on one familiar fairytale character.
Aimed at seven-year-olds and over, Bistouri is unusual in both
its subject matter and its style. Although only 50 minutes long, it
was hard to keep focused on the operating procedure which really
only got more interesting as the surprising contents of the
patient's insides were revealed. Also, the idea of basing an entire
children's show on a surgical procedure seemed quite bizarre to
this reviewer. All in all, Bistouri represented an inauspicious
start to this year's family season at the Dublin Theatre Festival
and one hopes for a lighter touch in forthcoming productions.
Runs today and tomorrow at 1pm & 3pm in the Ark, Temple
Bar, Dublin.
Sylvia Thompson
• The Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival runs until October 14th. For bookings, tel. 01-6778899 or see www.dublintheatrefestival.com