Project
Arts Centre Upstairs, Dublin
Jan
17-28
My review of The Family (with
spoilers) coming up just as soon as I see Mrs. Green on Sunday for book club …
In a recent interview with Entertainment.ie,
THEATREclub’s Grace Dyas revealed how the company had become centred on a
trilogy of plays about Ireland, commencing with The Family, followed by the already acclaimed and unforgiving Heroin (both of which are intending to
tour), and finally a project commissioned for St. Michael’s estate called History. If all goes according to plan I
will get to see and write about these plays in that order (I’ve already seen Heroin but due to its sheer antagonism
I’m still undecided as to what side the coin has landed for me, so a second
viewing will be required).
If you’re going to put a sociological
history of Ireland onstage, there is nowhere more appropriate to begin than the
family. From the very beginning, as a unit of individuals, it is influential to
our development as social beings, even teaching us our first words. Culturally,
it holds great power in Ireland as some notion of ‘family’ constituted the
nucleus of our legislative history, the effects of which are still seen today
with phrasing in the constitution that still perceives women primarily as
homemakers and overlooks the underdeveloped rights of children. In the present
from which THEATREclub are harking back from, the complications of such a
constitution are increasingly evident and the process of resolving them is
frustratingly slow. If there is a need to review ‘the family’ in Irish society,
the company’s approach isn’t to battle it out in some frictional political
arena.
Instead, THEATREclub bring us all home.
Doireann Coady’s set gives us Portmarnock through
way of 1950s Pleasantville America. Louise and Lauren, their hair classically
curled, scuffle over a black dress while Shane and Ger get up to mischief in
the estate, a possible parallel to Richie Cunningham and Fonzie. Barry is a
more mature guy, always wearing a tie, always drinking tea. However, in a
kitchen made from plywood a scarlet kettle is not the only thing that reaches
boiling point. Tempers rise as individuals aren’t listened to, or saying enough
as the case may be, and a cacophony of voices all speaking at the same time
becomes a glorious symphony of miscommunication that will leave the Irish son,
mother, daughter or father with a grin. It’s a scene we all know well.
Our families are in here too, in some guise.
Performers slip in and out of the performing roles of parent, child and sibling,
and in this ambiguity we can glimpse resemblances to situations with our own kin. The idea of a
family meal is wonderful but the effort of producing it can be another story.
Lauren might as well take to the carrots with a pick axe, and while her
approach may be destroying their dinner and worthy of Louise’s protests, at the
same time we see a daughter’s determination for independence. When Louise
stands tiptoe to teach the colossal Ger to waltz, as if a mother teaching her
son to dance, with an unexpected belt of Moon
River: the scene becomes completely disarming and moving. And you know a
THEATREclub show has gone dark when Lauren Larken needs to light up a cigarette
and cry her eyes out. That little woman has a huge heart.
Dyas is in greater control of her
space than ever before. If the punches and slams of her beat poet playwriting was
what had people taking notes in the early days, her confidence as a director
impresses here, using a theatrical code which causes Aristotelian poetics to
fuse, spark, and the physicality of her performers basks in the ensuing
fireworks. When Shane Byrne takes to the air, pirouetting to the club music
behind him, there is no fixed interpretation to the action. All we’ve got is
our intuition, and what we know to feel. Perhaps we’ll never really understand
Shane. But when Ger takes up position to the same song, it could suggest that
somebody does.
The Family are not alone, of course. Brian
Bennett plays his silver bow tie-wearing neighbour with delightful cheese(*)
and an eerie sense of suspicion. When he tells disappointed Gemma that she can
come into his house any time, it’s hard to know whether to consider him kind or
possibly dangerous. I suppose you don’t ever really know your neighbours.
(*) It
always gets me how Bennett can make the simplest statement funny. His out of
the blue “I’m going to go inside now” is funnier in retrospect of the fact that
he was purely setting up the knick-knacking gag later. Also, does he always end
up nick-naming other performers in the shows he’s in? I think he did in ‘As you
are’ and ‘Jumping Off the Earth’. Here he christens Gemma “Gem-Jam”.
THEATREclub’s work always considers itself
in the urgent present, and in the effort to make a cultural conversation around
The Family a series of post-show
talks have been planned this week in Project Arts Centre. The fake grass and white picket fence could literally
have been blasted here from the postmodern explosion of the Sixties but where
such ideology was born in uncertainty, THEATREclub gives us a discourse that we
can rely on, and the universality of which makes everyone an expert. When
Louise Lewis realises she’s not abandoned as she believed, asking us all
“Can you see me?”, we see in her someone we've seen all our lives, yet somehow different.
What did everybody else think?
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