To read PART I of this report, go to this link.
The line of Irish productions at 2024 Dublin Theatre Festival provoked questions about how to make theatre relevant to contemporary audiences and what role can drama play in the debates about today’s societies. In the festival programme note, Willie White mentions “turbulent and divided world” for which theatre “can offer refuge” as well as “time for solidarity and celebration”. In this respect, The Agreement by Owen McCafferty, as well as Dancing at Lughnasa and Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel, which formed a significant part of the programme, might disappoint with their immersion in historical times without a clear indication of how to project their diagnostic message onto contemporary situation. With other shows on the festival track, the attempts at formal experimentation seemed more successful.
Abbey Theatre’s production of Lady Gregory’s Grania presented a surprising streak of modern theatre, bravely delving into a display of natural, youthful passion or even eroticism. Perhaps the greatest success of the production was to avoid historicising the playscript in what would have been a futile attempt to recreate its “illo tempore”. Quite the opposite, the creative team, carefully measuring the archaic atmosphere of Grania’s and Finn’s world, managed to suffuse it with contemporary references and echoes. This effect was primarily achieved by two singers, dressed in contemporary clothes (modern jackets, woolly hats), who regularly crossed the stage, providing a chorus of meditative, ritual singing. This intrusion into the action (added to the original text) enforced suspension of other stage activity, allowing the audience to contemplate prolonged periods of melodically guided meditation in which the modern singers stood for our own perspective on the atavistic drives of the protagonists. The costumes designed without any obvious historical reference left much space for flexible, naturalistic, and psychological acting which needed no amplification from recitation and from cadenced or stylised delivery.
Photo credit: Ros Kavanagh
Ella Lily Hyland’s Grania conveyed a touch of youthful innocence but also erotic provocation, disrespect and emotional attachment. Her acting was full of irony combined with controlled, maybe even manipulative hesitation, fittingly representing a character who is just realising what she wants and where her passions lead. Her sexuality emanated in a bath scene in which Grania displayed pure femininity which proves destructive to both of the male protagonists.
Photo credit: Ros Kavanagh
In Abbey’s production, acting was very much helped by the imaginative set design. The stage was built over with a set of rising platforms separated with stretches of yellow reeds, earth and stones which stood for the camp or forest abode. Leaves, snow or rain were released from the top, indicating the passage of time. The characters’ feelings were suspended between emotional realism and timelessness of the mythical cycle. Primarily, the depth of the uncontrolled love, bringing happiness and demanding ultimate sacrifice, comes from the fact that Lady Gregory’s text does not privilege one character over another, and Finn’s passionate attachment to Grania is rooted in genuine and hopeless love pushing him to squander his kingly respect and fame. With these very persuasively argued emotions the protagonists turn into individuals ready to sacrifice everything for the honesty of their own feelings. In the Abbey production, they persisted in this task to their self-destructive ends.
Photo credit: Ros Kavanagh
Out of the two experimental pieces – Enda Walsh’s Safe House and Anu’s The Starjazzer – the former turned out to be a fabulous success, the latter a surprising disappointment. Irish drama and theatre are so immensely lucky to have Walsh. He is one of very few writers who unabashedly shakes Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey off his shoulder to write back home in the language that everyone sees as familiar, their own and touching. Safe House, presented on a more intimate Peacock stage, thrusts us into a world of garbage and waste. We watch an abandoned backyard which used to be a concrete pitch with the football goal still painted on the back wall. The space is littered with odd debris and neglected rubbish, dusty carpets, plastic chairs, washing machines, fridges and wobbly furniture. As is usually the case with Walsh’s worlds, these neglected remnants of once happy times retain a sort of half-life of their own. Therefore, the round glass door of the washing machine lights up and the wooden wardrobe proves useful as a safe shelter for Grace, the female protagonist. We follow her life through songs and through projected film footage reaching back to her childhood, her mother’s death, life of an abused child, or home parties for young and elderly family members. Songs performed live on stage by Kate Gilmore veer through genres and styles, from angry rock pieces to soft and poetic ballads. The lyrics touch on her lost life and disappointed hopes but also evoke images of the sea, the sky and freedom. The character’s lonely and poetic search for “safe house” among the refuse of modern world culminates in a scene where Grace appears as a grotesque figure resembling Athena Parthenos resting on an elevated throne made of a white toilet seat and propped on wooden pallets, broken home appliances and foldable deck chairs.
Photo credit: Ste Murray
Donning a paper McDonald’s crown, she wheels on the stage in a dignified posture of a queen. In Walsh’s vision and lyrics, Grace – dressed either in track suites or evening attires – re-lives her past and dreams about a better future with monologues and songs which exist somewhere between internal thoughts, solitary dialogues and daydreaming. In the final sequence, Grace climbs up on the wardrobe, reaches for a hidden door and squeezes into a little recess which is filled with clothes and cushions, fitted with a lamp and stored with bags of chips. The stage goes completely dark but for the projections of brightly blinking stars scattered across the set. Sublime, tranquil, tender and melancholic, she has just found her “safe house”.
Expectedly, with Anu we go site-specific. Its production of The Starjazzer, based on a short story by Sean O’Casey (the festival presentation was its world premiere), offers an account of two women in a tenement house. While O’Casey’s original work caused controversy showing marital rape, Anu rather focuses on two female characters who are constantly occupied with minding children, doing the washing and pursuing daily chores. The production was staged in a historical building of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Marion Square. The audience had to split in two groups, each of which alternated in visiting different spaces to watch fragments of the production. Candles placed on landings or in darkened corridors added earie tone to the dim tenement tale from a hundred years ago. One can naturally see the intentions behind the idea which mixes physical performance with site-specific immersion. However, I was not able to fully engage with the style and method of this kind of theatre. Scenes performed indoors, in a room furnished only with a double bed and wooden boxes or chests were realistically acted and did not differ much from what you might see in a conventional production. Their reception was not essentially altered by the fact that the audience were seated on chairs placed in a circle around the room or by the fact that we’d just climbed a dark staircase instead of loitering in a brightly lit foyer. The interior of the Society’s building, rather posh and definitely not reflecting the style of a working-class tenement, was at loggerheads with the contents of the stories in which the women complained about constant treadmill of menial jobs. Similarly, the part located in the outdoor yard offered such a small space for the actress to develop any serious form of physical theatre that it practically came down to navigating among members of the audience who had to make way with rather uncomfortable manoeuvres. Instead of engulfing experience, one was troubled with the artificiality and awkwardness of the situation, which effectively put you out of the immersive mode of reception.
The question that kept recurring through the festival circuit was whether theatre and performance art should provide a hide-out from reality around or, conversely, plunge us in the middle of world’s most contentious crises. Should it be a form of alienation from rough and raw lives that some of us experience or an encouragement to actively cope with reality. It seemed that the 2024 edition of the Theatre Dublin Festival opted for the former. Plays showcased might even resonate with issues relevant for Ireland, Palestine, Gaza, or Ukraine; however, with some notable exceptions (Walsh, for one, Grania – perhaps), their effect was pleasing at best. Instead of looking at past works or the canon with contemporary reality in mind, Irish theatre seems to be looking at our world with the perspective of the classics. Not really the same thing, is it?
Dublin Theatre Festival 26 September – 13 October 2024
Productions reviewed:
The Agreement
Owen McCaffery
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Directed by Charlotte Westenra
Dancing at Lughnasa
Brian Friel
Gate Theatre, Dublin
Directed by Caroline Byrne
Molly Sweeney
Brian Friel
Decadent Theatre Company, Town Hall Theatre
Directed by Andrew Flynn
Grania
Lady Gregory
Abbey Theatre
Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin
Safe House
Enda Walsh, Anna Mullarkey
Abbey Theatre on the Peacock Theatre
Directed by Enda Walsh
Starjazzer
Source text: The Starjazzer by Sean O’Casey
ANU Productions
Directed by Louise Lowe
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Michał Lachman.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
