Thirteen: review

Dublin has always been a city of contrast. The wealthy walk swiftly past the poor.  Some of the oldest buildings in the country stand, crumbling, beside shiny metal architecture. No work I have seen illustrates this more vividly than part of Anu Productions’ Thirteen. Constituent(s) begins at a LUAS stop, where I had waited for forty minutes, watching shiny new trams glide by. The audience are guided to a preserved tram from 1900’s Dublin. It’s easy to see where this is going: Dublin. City of contrast.  A LUAS stop and then a re-enactment of a Dublin long gone by. So far, so Fringe.  A roughly-dressed Dublin lad hops on our tram, shouting at us about standing with Big Jim Larkin. He tells us that Dublin is in chaos and would we not rise up with him? His brother is missing, the audience enraptured by his retelling of a Dublin mired in political chaos, poverty and hardship.

The performance is suddenly interrupted by two strongly-accented, tracksuit-wearing Dublin people. Hurling insults, shouting, punching: the interruption is shocking.  The lead actor disappears and Fringe volunteers try to calm the chaos, to no avail. The locals lock the door, and it’s just the audience and their rage.

By beginning Constituents in a time gone by, Anu Productions have oh-so-cleverly created a contrast between actor and audience. The screaming row between the two Dubliners quickly dies down to heated debate – he has no money, she can’t feed the kids. She has to queue for bread in the mornings while he lazes about. The actors address the audience – “and here yous are, watching a play?” The effect is mesmerising and terrifying. Instead of the poverty of 1913, the poverty of 2013 is brought sharply into focus – exposing the audience as those who turned their backs; the “scabs” of the 1913 Lockout.

Part of a series of thirteen spectacles linked to the Dublin Lockout, “Constituent(s)” leaves the viewer raw and uneasy, still unsure if what just happened was real or not. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter – be they actors or real people, the wealthy continue to walk past the poor, and Dublin remains, as it always has been, a city of contrast.

Revenant: review

According to Wikipedia, a revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living. If you know your mythical creatures, then the very title of this one-man play is a spoiler. “Revanant” begins full of promise – a lone actor plays a struggling filmmaker hellbent on creating his magnum opus. When I say a lone actor, I mean lone: this is a one man show. The set is gorgeous – a desolate, torn up room with a sole table and chair for the actor to sit on – and the New Theatre is a really beautiful, intimate theatre that invites an intense theatrical experience. Simon Toal does a great job of creating several characters for the audience- his accent range, facial expressions and body language change entirely for each character. This extraordinarily difficult performance demands physicality and ability, which Toal has in spades. At one point in the play, the director mentions that an actor has “it”. He isn’t sure what “it” is, but he knows it when he sees it. If this is true, then even to the most amateur of theatre critics, Toal has it in spades. He delivers the story through about fifteen different characters, which is certainly an interesting way to perform a drama.  Toal certainly delivers in terms of talent, charisma and ability - it’s just a shame about the messy, lazy script.

As I said, it all starts promisingly enough. The script is witty and tight – we get hints of the mystery surrounding Vardell, the director’s star actor, but it’s not given away to begin with. However, the script goes rapidly downhill when we start to hear of strange disappearances. Toying with the supernatural in media, cinema or literature is never an easy task. We’ve all read “Dracula” and seen “Night of the Living Dead” in several incarnations over the years. The classic formula is tired by now – we’ve seen it reinvented over and over in the past few years. Loathe as I am to mention (much less praise) the “T” word, at least it tries something new with the supernatural being formula. “Revenant” is stuck in the dark ages and when the plot’s twist arrives, it’s the least surprising thing ever. I tried to enjoy the comic horror elements, but the clichés came too thick and too fast for me to grab onto anything concrete.

The message of “Revanant” seems to be the high price of fame, but after scenes of gore, terror and shouting, any sort of socio-political message gets lost in translation. The first half of the play is a lot of fun – funny and occasionally clever. But it’s dragged down by a script that’s outdated and dull, leaving the audience wondering if they’ve missed the point of “Revanant” or if it really was that silly.

4/10 

Marvel: review

Review of Marvel– performed in the Project Arts Centre, November 2013. Published in TN2’s theatre section, November 2013.

Noise pervades “Marvel” from start to finish. When it stops, it makes the performance all the more eerie, a damning silence. As the play opens, the rush of city centre traffic mingles with a news report that tears the life of Dion (Liam Hourican) apart. It is September 2008 and the bubble has finally burst.  Time is a finite commodity.

“Marvel” explores not only the economic crash but what life was like beforehand; literally every second scene is in flashback. This takes some getting used to for the audience but creates a pleasing juxtaposition of then and now. Voiceovers are heard; BBC announcers, economists, the instantly familiar drawl of Bertie Ahern. We swing between good times and bad, magic and horror, celebration and despair. It asks a lot of tough questions and it’s certainly not easy viewing.

Glamorous prostitute Marvel (an excellent Alma Eno) comments that “beauty is an unstable commodity” and the idea of finite resources form the core of this strange play. Elizabeth Moynihan, an accomplished playwright, contrasts the lavish, decadent world of the Celtic Tiger against the horrors of Liberian war. Time is a finite resource for Dion and Marvel; they just don’t know it yet. The first half of “Marvel” is absolutely stellar, keeping the audience on the edge of its seat as our two characters’ webs of lies spin out of control. There’s a lot going on for such a sparse stage – deception is as prevalent as decadence in the dying days of the boom, it seems. However, the last third of the play sees the plot unravel slightly, as the characters become more desperate and the cuts between past and present more jarring. The plunging into darkness, at first a brilliant scene-changer, becomes slightly flat. “Marvel” leaves the audience hanging for up to a minute; instead of making me want more, it was simply annoying.  

Criticisms aside, “Marvel” offers an awful lot to chew on. It offers a neo-Victorian look at a prosperous Ireland: where the people have become buying and selling machines, unable to feel. Dion is a shell of a man, eaten up by greed and ingratitude. He seems to know this, too, telling Marvel that “nothing was ever enough” in those last days. By contrast, Marvel’s sensitive portrayal of a trafficked prostitute rejects materialism, preferring love and security. Marvel is tarnished by the selfish, heady atmosphere in Ireland, but not totally – perhaps as someone from outside, she can hold onto what is important. “Marvel” poses plenty of challenging questions for the audience – did the country lose a little soul in those heady days of the last decade? Did we swap our feelings and morals for fast cars, big houses and flashiness? The notion of a people spoiled is embodied in Dion, who acts like a spoiled child when Marvel doesn’t behave as he wants. Ingratitude is indicted by “Marvel”, with tragic consequences when the bubble bursts.