‘Terminus’ is back at the Peacock in Dublin. This article was first published in the Sunday Tribune on January 13, 2008.
It is six hours before Mark O’Rowe’s play, ‘Terminus’, opens in New York. The cast are doing the technical rehearsal. They’ve never been in the theatre before.
Eileen Walsh is standing in a dim crossbeam, shrouded in mist, talking out to the audience. Mark O’Rowe is coughing. A technician is talking loudly. A couple of others are looking at dimly-lit laptops, or moving quietly through the gloom, fixing things. The two other actors, Andrea Irvine and Aidan Kelly, are sprawled on the stage, each straddling a large shard of (mock) glass, looking bored.
“The drill for several years has been bed alone, then tears.” Eileen Walsh plays against the rhythm of O’Rowe’s verse. She lets the rhyme announce itself, as if her character were unaware that there were anything distinctive about her speech.
In Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’, not a lot happens. Two men drink, sitting on a porch. Nobody else comes along. One of them leaves, briefly. Most of what they talk about is objectively meaningless: rambling musings on life, alcohol, women; shared memories of past misadventures. A fan hums above them erratically, till one of them shoots it. They have a fight. One of them is hurt. It seems bad. They watch the moon.
The play is softly melancholic, with a streak of bleakness and despair, and a countervailing seam of hope and humanity. It is a gentle entertainment, in which the meandering earlier scenes, which are dominated by a sometimes-awkward burlesque comedy, lead to the payoff of a closing sequence of simple, stark beauty and emotional clarity.
The action, such as it is, takes place across a long day’s drinking
I spent August in Angola, working on a documentary, and have written this piece on the town of Kuito for Le Monde Diplo. Here’s a one-minute intro to the documentary, which I hope to complete in the new year.
