★ ★ ★ ★
It’s true that nothing lasts forever. But lately there’s been a resurgence in analogue technologies, in putting your hand on something tangible in a digital world. (I got some new vinyl. Come over and listen).
In Transmission - Caitríona Ní Mhurchú’s superb new solo play for Little Wolf - there’s a lot of old tech. Caitríona begins explaining her concerns with the obsessive nature of nostalgia and how it stops people from living in the present. She discards tape cassettes into a bin, the main records of her career as a continuity announcer for RTÉ in the 1990s. They were the days when someone appeared onscreen between TV shows and gave an enigmatic synopsis of an upcoming film from an armchair. Alas, we only hear their voice nowadays.
There are chunks of time theory here that could easily be indigestible. In fact Ní Mhurchú’s 2014 play Eating Seals and Seagulls’s Eggs, an old-tech biography of Peig Sawyers where cassette tape was scattered like Blasket Island seaweed, tried to say too much too acridly. But here Ní Mhurchú and director Gina Moxley find arch conceits for the tension between moments saved and those threatened to vanish forever. For instance, Caitríona’s mother is played by a vacuum robot who bleeps every time her daughter throws another precious memory away!
As she de-clutters her life, Caitríona reflects on the events that led to her TV career. Andy Warhol’s claim that everyone will be “world-famous for fifteen minutes” has been disputed to originate from the photographer Nat Finkelstein, she says, but it wouldn’t have been immortalised if it didn’t come from Warhol’s lips. Curious about the point of origin of her own life, she traces history back to her great-grandfather who was a lighthouse keeper, another profession that seems to have stayed in the last century.
Moxley and designer Sarah Jane Shiels seize the opportunity to shine, so to speak. There’s a fantastic scene where the lighthouse keeper becomes the last onshore witness to the Titanic before it sinks. Against Jason Byrne’s elegant video visuals, the lighthouse beam freezes like a final snapshot of the ship, the last comforting beacon for its passengers. Beeps and signals impressively stir to life, tapping out “SOS”.
Clocks tick slower the closer they are to sea level. As Caitríona details the passing on of recorded stories and kept mementos throughout the generations of her family, moments in time are fascinatingly unlocked and magnified.
What’s most touching is the chronology that forms. Whether it’s the light-bending power of a lighthouse’s guiding beacon, of a continuity announcer’s goodnight message on television, and, finally, of a play’s transmission to its audience, these are crucial moments captured beautifully.
Runs until 12th September.
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