There are many Irelands in this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Yet in
a two-week programme that mixes up the international and the
experimental with bold approaches to Ireland’s literary and dramatic
canon, there are hints of Scotland too. This isn’t just to do with the
appearance of Catherine Wheels’ hit show White and puppeteer Shona
Reppe’s Potato Needs A Bath in the festival’s family programme. Nor is
it solely about the presence of New York’s Elevator Repair Service with
their impressionistic Ernest Hemingway adaptation, The Select (The Sun
Also Rises), which was a wow at Edinburgh International Festival in
2010.
It isn’t even to do with the Tron Theatre, Glasgow’s forthcoming
non-festival appearance in Dublin with its co-production of Dermot
Bolger’s stage version of James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, with the
Project Arts Centre. Rather, there’s a sense of ambition and
confidence in new artistic director Willie White’s first – and very
good - Dublin programme that suggests that a two-way traffic between
the two nations may be ongoing in even more interesting ways.
The trio of Tom Murphy plays presented by the Galway-based Druid
company is a case in point. Works by both Murphy and Druid have been
seen in EIF, and, following Druid Synge in 2006, Garry Hynes’ big,
stately productions of 1985’s Conversations on a Homecoming, Murphy’s
1961 breakthrough piece, A Whistle in the Dark, and his 1977 historical
epic, Famine could be tailor-made for Edinburgh. All indifferent ways
are about exile, with that exile's roots in the Irish potato famine,
colonial rule and the history-changing sense of emotional displacement
it fostered.
Even more displaced is American avant-garde icons The Wooster Group's
rake on Hamlet, which takes its cue from a rarely seen film of Richard
Burton's performance of the haunted Dane in John Gielgud's 1964
Broadway production. What director Elizabeth Lecompte, actor Scott
Shepherd and the company do by recreating the production as it plays is
more than a form of three-dimensional mimesis. As the grainy footage is
fast-forwarded, with figures erased or blurring in and out of view, it
becomes a bravura post-modern meditation on identity, reality and
artifice that would make a fine addition to any international arts
festival.
There are more intimations of identity in Bird With Boy, a lovely piece
of dance-theatre performed in a grand tenement town-house by junk
ensemble. Created by Jessica and Megan Kennedy and Edinburgh-based Jo
Timmins, Bird with Boy is an astonishing melding of professional and
child performers to make something that takes flight almost as
brilliantly as Dublin-born New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan does in The
Talk of the Town, Emma Donoghue's impressionistic biography of a woman
who lived physically in New York, but whose roots, as displayed by an
emotional whirlwind of a performance from Catherine Walker as Maeve,
could never escape her.
Also in search of escape in Dublin was Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's
doomed narcissist as reimagined by Neil Bartlett at the Abbey theatre
in a sumptuous portrait of decadence worthy of the Citizens theatre of
old. Most thrilling of all at Dublin Theatre Festival this year,
however, was The Boys of Foley Street, a thrillingly scary promenade
through 1980s street-culture, which thrust its audience of four down
back-alleys, in cars and housing estate shooting galleries in a
site-specific performance that cuts to the corrupted heart of Dublin.
While there's no obvious theme running through all these shows, the
historical and umbilical links are plain to see. If the characters in
Famine begat those in Murphy’s other two plays, their descendants are
even more evident, not just in Dubliners, but also in Maeve Brennan’s
flight from her home town and her burning ambition to make it in New
York, where, like all literary exiles, she rediscovers that home
through her writing. Famine’s descendants are there too in the London
drug dens frequented by Bartlett and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose
habitués pre-date the feral waifs of Bird With Boy and the 1980s
housing estate smack-heads in The Boys of Foley Street.
Without the resourceful drive of Maeve Brennan, and disenfranchised
economically and socially, the strung-out teens in the Boys of Foley
Street can only escape internally. Theirs is an emotional and
ultimately self-destructive exile. Like Maeve, Dorian and Murphy’s
battling brothers, they are the ghosts in the machine of The Wooster
Group’s Hamlet. They are what keep Dublin’s theatrical soul alive.
Dublin Theatre Festival runs until October 14th
http://www.dublintheatrefestival.com/
The Herald, October 11th 2012
ends
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