Best of International Theatre 2010 #3: Shared Experience & Sherman Cymru, ‘Speechless’

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Aug 5-29

“I hate the life I am leading now. But why do I say leading? I do not lead my life at all. It is pulled along by an invisible string. By whom? By what? A circumstance of the past. A force. I’m just an onlooker”

– June Gibbons.

“You are Jennifer. You are me”

– Jennifer Gibbons

Edinburgh Fringe is a brilliant place to be. No where else do you quite see the spirit and possibility of theatre at its most free as when you walk down the Royal Mile, every inch of which canvassed by pamphleteers and street performers. The city turns into a vast marketplace for the month of August, with the best and worst of today’s theatre on offer. Luckily I was able to locate the former with Sherman Cymru and Shared Experience’s joint effort: Speechless.

Shared Experience are a London-based theatre company who have come to distinguish itself through a series of critically honoured literary adaptations, notably their homage to Charlote Brontë, Eyre, which received acclaim for its unison of world-class acting and text. Co-artistic director Polly Teale’s script achieved praise for reaching eloquent depths in writing about the destructive effects of retreat into imagination in adversary to isolation, an artistic feat Teale would also achieve with her company’s follow-up – a project based on Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins.

Best of Irish Theatre 2010 #4: Druid, ‘The Silver Tassie’

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Sept 1-7 

 “There it is, the Silver Tassie, won by the odd goal in five, kicked by Harry Heegan”

– Harry Heegan

“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November –

November – that’s the month I was born”

– Croucher

“Our best is all behind us – what’s in front we’ll face like men, dear comrade of the blood-fight and the battle-front”

– Teddy Foran

It’s 1928, and W.B. Yeats is writing Sean O’Casey a letter. As artistic director of the Abbey, Yeats is writing to inform O’Casey that his latest play will not be produced by the theatre. O’Casey had written a tragic-comedy epic about Irish soldiers in the First World War, but Yeats finds that the writer has no claim to conceive the conditions of war – “You never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals”. 

It’s August 2010 and I’m catching regular sightings of Aaron Monaghan, Aoife Duffen, Derbhle Crotty, and Bush Moukarzel on the streets of Galway.

 

They’re all in town rehearsing for Druid’s production of The Silver Tassie.

"No 'L', No 'L' ..."

 

Merry Christmas folks! Thanks to all who have read this blog in 2010 (I still need to wrap up my end-of-year round-ups, so a few more posts will be up between now and the new year). 

If you are looking for a good read over the holidays, I recommend checking out the Irish Theatre Magazine website. Patrick Lonergan, Thomas Conway, and Peter Crawley have all written pieces about the last year in Irish theatre, very enjoyable and insightful. 

Take care, and here's to a brilliant 2011 ...

Chris

Best of International Theatre 2010 #4: News From Nowhere, ‘The Author’

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Oct 12-17

“We’ve got ourselves into a terrible pickle about staying in character and suspending disbelief and those literal manifestations of otherness that have become so central to a way of looking at theatre. I think we as an audience deserve more than that, or can deal with more than that, can cope with more than that” – Tim Crouch

I wrote a piece about The Author after its run in the Dublin Theatre Festival (the link to which is at the bottom of this post), where I paid particular attention to the tension, or negotiation rather, between the real and the illusionary.

Crouch’s play is a bold cocktail of theatrical harmonics and particulates, the consistencies of which are not necessarily sensitive or recognisable. Its aftertaste disorientates and betrays preconceptions. What we have in The Author is an arranging of theatrical elements towards Brecht’s ‘dialectical theatre’, resulting in an expulsion of, what Brecht calls, “an engendering of illusion”. Two seating banks are placed opposite each other, and there is an absence of any stage. The audience never lose sight of each other, the actors, or the performance itself. We negotiate through every word and every magnetizing pair of eyes. We learn to establish where we stand with each other. We become our own ‘authors’ and create our own landscapes of co-existence and social realities, only for Couch and company to topple our structures, burn our allegiances, and twist all that we hold reliable. 

Brilliant theatre.

Original review: 

http://musingsinintermissions.blogspot.com/2010/10/news-from-nowhere-author-story-time.html#more

Best of Irish Theatre 2010 #5: The Company, 'As You Are Now So Once Were We'

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Sept 9-15 

 “Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing” - G.M. Trevelyan

“All these here once walked around Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we” - James Joyce, 'Ulysses'

                                                                                                  

I am part of a scene. It consists of those of the artistic sort, mostly in their twenties and thirties, not on the receiving end of any annual funding that could make Hamlet’s father fly, and are, undeservedly for some, overlooked.

Dublin ensemble The Company may just be the exception to the rule …

Best of International Theatre 2010 #5: Ontroerend Goed, ‘Teenage Riot’

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Aug 17-28

I imagine it went something like this ...

One day a man woke up and said “I want to do a play. I want to do a play, and it will be about teenagers and performed entirely by teenagers. It could only be performed by teenagers. It will be unapologetic, chaotic, and unpredictable”.

Alexander Devriendt – artistic director of Belgian theatre entrepreneurs Ontroerend Goed – found thirteen Flemish teenagers and put together a show which became aptly known as: Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen. Devriendt (33) and his motley crew of adolescents brought the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2008 where it received critical acclaim and earned a tour to festivals all over the world. Critics especially applauded the show’s gleaming nostalgia, and its artful artifice of a universal ‘teenagedom’ realised as a realm now lost to today’s adults. Devriendt became something of champion of unheard teenagers, a Peter Pan to the Lost Boys if you will. Nestling tour dates around school holidays, Once and For All…was on the road for two years before its final performance in Ghent in April of this year. The Lost Boys had to grow up eventually, but seemingly Pan didn’t …

Cancelations and Salutations

I headed East towards home for the weekend, only to discover that Kildare and Dublin have transformed into Hoth in my absence. Unfortunately, the icy roads derailed my plans to see Slattery’s Sago Saga in the Riverbank and Wayne Jordan’s siren Ellamenope Jones in the Project (those who have seen either, feel free to discuss them in the frozen pipes comments section below).

My time hibernating in the midlands got me thinking about a ‘Best of Irish Theatre 2010’ list to post up on the blog. The list will be impaired by my having shamefully missed several significant productions this past year (Annie Ryan’s Happy Days, pretty much anything by Lynne Parker and Rough Magic, John Gabriel Borkman, World’s End Lane, to name a few). Eventually, I was able to condense the list down to five productions which I saw and felt were a league above the others. I’m also going to do a ‘Best of International Theatre 2010’ list, which will feature five performances from non-Irish practitioners which I saw here and abroad. 

What are your thoughts on the past year of theatre? Best shows? Worst shows?

Pan Pan, ‘Oedipus Loves You’: Oedipus, You Punk

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Nov 15-16

A few thoughts on Oedipus Loves You coming up just as soon as I fuck up the marinade …

Excuses, excuses …

I have been away from the blogosphere for a while now, mostly because I’ve been busy working on shows. My Oedipus Loves You review will be posted in the next 24 hours, meaning it will be done so ten days after having seen it. From now on I’ll be committing myself to writing and posting materials while they are still relevant and recent. 

Now, in non-economic/political related news …

Fregoli, 'The Idiot Box': The Truman Show

Nun’s Island Theatre

Oct 25-26

Thoughts on The Idiot Box coming up just as soon as I alienate the blind …