Colin Murphy

Posts Tagged ‘The Abbey’

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From Michael Collins to pastiche Charlie

In Ireland, Theatre on June 10, 2009 at 10:48 pm

A great, but tragic, Irish leader struggles with his fate. He is the foremost Irishman of his day, though he divides the country. He is confronted by treachery, and distracted by beautiful women. And as chaos threatens to consume his world, he replies… with a song.

Plays dealing with Irish politicians are rare, and Irish musicals are rarer still. So it’s a striking coincidence that not one, but two leading Irish historical figures are currently to be found on the Dublin stage, singing.

Tom Mac Intyre’s ‘Only an Apple’ (at the Peacock Theatre) tells a twisted tale of political excess, centred on a pale imitation of Charles Haughey. It is not actually a musical (though it is difficult to say what precisely it is), but at its theatrical heart is an outré and quite bizarre showtune. Read the rest of this entry »

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Synge and his lover’s song

In Ireland, Theatre on March 27, 2009 at 5:44 pm

It was any girl’s dream: young Molly Allgood, just 19 years old, an assistant at Switzer’s drapery, was about to make her debut on the Abbey stage. As she waited nervously in the wings, the stage manager called out, “beginners please”. And Molly dissolved in tears.

It was the conventional call for the actors to be ready, but Molly had never heard it before; she took it to be a jibe at her lack of experience.

But Molly impressed. Within a year, she was taking a lead role at the Abbey, in John Millington Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’, directed by the playwright. Synge was naturally shy, and had a reserve appropriate to his strict Puritan upbringing. But in the agreeable company of the Abbey players, he relaxed; an attraction grew between the writer and the young actress and, tentatively, a relationship. Read the rest of this entry »

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Review: Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’

In Theatre on March 18, 2009 at 12:23 pm

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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Seven Jewish Children

In Theatre on March 2, 2009 at 11:32 am

It’s been described as anti-Semitic, as a “ten-minute blood-libel” and as a “hate-fuelled little chamber-piece”, and it may be coming to a theatre near you, next weekend.

‘Seven Jewish Children’ is a very short play by Caryl Churchill, a leading English playwright. She wrote it in a matter of days in response to the war in Gaza, the Royal Court Theatre immediately decided to stage it, and it went on two weeks later, piggybacking on their scheduled evening show.

Entry was free, and performances were followed by a collection for Medical Aid for Palestinians. Now, Churchill has made the play available for free online (at www.royalcourttheatre.com): anybody can perform it, without need to acquire the rights, so long as they hold a collection. The inventive Dublin collective, Project Brand New, has responded by co-ordinating a series of performances around the country next weekend.

Lynne Parker is directing a performance to be staged after a preview of the new Rough Magic show, ‘Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer’, at the Project Arts Centre next Saturday. Project Brand New hope there’ll be up to 20 other performances around the country. (Contact them on projectbrandnew@gmail.com, or check their Facebook page, or www.theatreforumireland.com, for details from midweek.)

Popular culture may be defined by the always-on and participative features of Web 2.0, but Irish theatre has typically remained rooted in a more ponderous model: events happen; the writer thinks about them; eventually, a play is written; and later still, an audience sees it. The idea that a leading playwright can respond to a shocking international event within days, and that a key theatre can have that play on within weeks, is a revolutionary one.

Make that play available for free, via the web, and you have a formula for a theatrical event to fit the ‘age of Obama’: a combination of politics, performance, and virtual media that has immense potential to democratise and politicise the theatre.

But politicise it for what? According to some of the responses in Britain, Churchill’s play is less an exercise in broadening the political reach of the theatre, than an exercise in broadening the appeal of anti-Semitism. In the London Independent, Howard Jacobson wrote that it was “Jew-hating pure and simple”. In the Spectator, Melanie Phillips wrote that the play was “an open vilification of the Jewish people”.

The play is in seven short scenes, set at key points in recent Jewish history, in each of which a group of (presumably) Jewish people is discussing how to explain recent events to a young girl. “Tell her it’s a game,” it starts. “Don’t tell her they’ll kill her. Tell her it’s important to be quiet.” The context is clearly the Holocaust, and a family hiding from the Nazis or their agents. By the final scene, where a family is debating how to explain the war in Gaza to a young girl, the tone has become cruder. In the play’s only speech, just at the end, the (unnamed) character cracks:

“Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,” the person says. “Tell her they can’t talk suffering to us… tell her we’re the iron fist now…. tell her they’re animals.”

Taken on the face of it, Churchill, a gentile, and patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has written a play about Jewish history, of Jewish characters, in which she posits that the Jewish people, brutalised by the experience of the Holocaust and displacement, are exacting a proximate revenge on the Palestinians. At best, that’s crude psychological determinism. At worst, it’s classically anti-Semitic, as her critics have charged.

The context of the production – being disseminated and performed for free, and accompanied by a charitable collection – clearly give it the ring of propaganda. If this is truly Churchill’s view of Jewish history, and of the ‘Jewish mindset’, then she is a lesser dramatist and thinker than her reputation allows.

But, on my reading, Churchill’s instincts as a playwright trump what the critics assume to be her intentions as a propagandist. Every line in the play contains the seed of its opposite; the whole play is riven with doubt, rather than ideological certainty. Churchill is exploring mindsets, rather than saddling an entire people with the one mindset. And with no instructions as to how to allocate the lines among different characters, there is ample opportunity for a sensitive director to create a performance that is provocative without being entirely polemic.

This seems to be how the Project Brand New team sees it. Conceding that some people will shy away from it following the furore in the UK, Jody O’Neill says that they see it as a unique opportunity for the theatre to respond quickly to a humanitarian crisis. Rather than advocating any particular politics, she sees the play as being a way of “getting the theatre community involved, getting people talking, and raising some money”.

Is that noble, or naïve? See for yourself next weekend. Or better still, stage it.

For the Irish Independent February 28 2009

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Review: Marina Carr’s ‘Marble’

In Theatre on March 2, 2009 at 11:18 am

Marina Carr has moved to the city. The bogs are gone; it’s all shiny marble and new sofas. The couples have names like Ben and Catherine, not Portia and Raphael. Their clothes are bespoke, not threadbare, and they speak as if reared with marbles in their mouths, not briquettes. Welcome, Marina, the city needs you.

For what has not changed is Carr’s ferocious sense of injustice. That is, as before, an existential injustice – her women (and what women) rail against the pettiness of society and the squalidness of fate. But there is a more pointed, urgent injustice also, a sense that this present society and city have failed its people. “I walk this city and all I can see is scaffolding”, cries Catherine: these are a people whom modernity, or money, or ambition – or something – has sundered from the land and from the possibility of any sense of self.

Carr gives us two couples, the men old friends and corporate colleagues, the women housewives rearing children. It makes for a nice counterpoint to Tom Stoppard’s ‘The Real Thing’, currently running at the Gate: Stoppard’s play is neater and cleverer, and dated. Carr’s play is funnier, though clumsier; it possesses precisely what ‘The Real Thing’ lacks: passion and urgency.

Art dreams about making love to Ben’s wife in a marble-decked room, and tells Ben, jokingly. But Ben’s wife, Catherine, has the same dream, about Art. The dreams continue, and become the catalyst for the bursting of the bourgeois bubble in which these people have been living. Ben is driven towards breakdown; Catherine retreats into an almost permanent dream world; only Art’s wife, Anne, appears able to withstand the onset of this social madness, protected by her own, carefully-drawn screen of cynicism and routine.

Downstairs at the Peacock, Stephen Rea and Sean McGinley face off in the new Sam Shepard, ‘Ages of the Moon’. But they will be hard pressed to better the duet (or duel) between Derbhle Crotty, as Anne, and Aisling O’Sullivan, as Catherine. Carr’s words are not easy for actors: the more beautiful they are, the more improbable. But both women speak as if discovering these words for the first time, stumbling into them and finding them right for the feelings from which they spring. O’Sullivan laughs her way through lines as if in realisation of the madness of even voicing them. Stuart McQuarrie is strong as Art, but Peter Hanly’s Ben seems misdirected. Hanly was particularly good as the straight man amidst craziness in ‘Improbable Frequency’; here, he again plays the straight man, but his words belie his persona. Ben, like all the others, is fighting against the oncoming dark; Hanly needs to bring him closer to the edge.

Carr’s play has an unfinished quality about it, exacerbated by a final scene and closing tableau that seem uncertain. Perhaps she needs a tougher dramaturge or director, or perhaps she likes it like that. Crucially, though, she is speaking to our times, even as she speaks of the eternal, existential predicament. The word “bravo” springs from the word “brave”, my dictionary tells me. That seems appropriate.

For the Sunday Tribune March 1 2009

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Review: Kicking a Dead Horse

In Theatre on August 6, 2008 at 7:48 am

Published in the Irish Independent, March 2007

The US is kicking a dead horse in Iraq, the outcome of a misconceived adventure that was supposed to be about taming the wild. Their only hope for retaining some dignity is to bury the bodies and get out as quickly as possible. This could be what the renowned American playwright, Sam Shepard, is talking about in his enigmatic new play, written for the Abbey, ‘Kicking A Dead Horse’.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Theatre under the radar in New York

In Theatre on June 26, 2008 at 10:59 pm

First published in the Sunday Tribune, 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Review: ‘Romeo & Juliet’

In Theatre on February 14, 2008 at 11:05 am

At the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Published in Irish Theatre Magazine.

At the core of Jason Byrne’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a scene that is, more typically, neglected: Juliet’s feigned suicide.

It comes after a first half that bustles and bristles, theatre of swaying hips and preying hipsters. Then, after the interval, this early exuberance is allowed to drain like Tybalt’s blood.

For long minutes, our attention is focussed on Juliet’s bedchamber: first, the scene of a bizarrely modest post-coital embrace with Romeo, before he flees; then, the scene of tiresome familial wrangling between Juliet and her nurse and parents.

And then Juliet drinks her vial, and collapses. It goes dark. In darkness (though it is now morning), her nurse enters and finds her, and cries for help. Her mother enters, and then her father who stoops and gathers her in his arms. A dim halo of light rises on this scene of mourning. Then the Friar, and Paris, her intended. They set to keening. The light rises and falls between near-total darkness and a chiaroscuro focus on the scene around the bed. (Lighting is by Paul Keogan.) Read the rest of this entry »