Beauty and the beasts in epic struggle
THEATRE
Sunday July 18 2010
FOUR men live in a drained swimming pool, metaphor for lives drained of dignity, empowerment, and motivation. They are the last of the 100 suitors for Penelope's hand as she waits 10 lonely years for the return of Ulysses after the Trojan Wars.
The very last of their rivals has only just died, induced by their taunts to slit his wrists. His blood still stains the walls of the pool.
Inside the villa, Penelope occasionally watches their hopeless, helpless, selfish rivalries on a CCTV screen. They have never seen her.
But now the men have all dreamed the same dream, described by Quinn: Ulysses is almost ashore and ready to wreak a terrible, bloody vengeance, cutting out their hearts, not just for their presumption, but for their venal idleness and uselessness . . . and for their simmering hatreds of humanity.
This is Enda Walsh's dream of society sinking into its final depravity, and it's a horrible one. Penelope has its world premiere for Druid at the Galway Arts Festival, prior to a return in September and a major tour, and it is likely to be a triumph.
The four men, Fitz, elderly and bookish; Dunne (Denis Conway) who howls that he will "stand on the shards of your husband's past", but uneasily aware of his physical lacks; Quinn, vainglorious and the most openly hate-filled; and Burns, younger than the others, and so not yet lost to all sense of decency and pride, desperately make their last bids for Penelope, imagining that if one of them can gain entrance, if not to her heart, at least to her home and body, they will have protection from her husband's wrath.
But when Penelope finally lets them see her, it is at first only Fitz's (Niall Buggy's) devastating description of his own nothingness and helplessness that touches her. All the brazen appeals to the falseness of love (an extraordinary "cabaret" from Karl Shiels as Quinn) leave her cold. But finally, as Ulysses (metaphorically) steps ashore to take his revenge, it is Burns (Tadhg Murphy's) appeal that "if we fight to let love win, even in death we are free" that moves her, too late, to want to save them from their death.
This is extraordinary theatre, as difficult as it is terrifying, with outstanding performances all round (Olga Wehrly is the ageless, beautiful Penelope) and frenetically effective direction from Mikel Murphy in Sabine Dargent's wonderful set lit by Paul Keogan.
*******
THE English company Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (SATTF), under their artistic director Andrew Hilton, have a reputation for admirably clear-sighted and faithful representations of the classics.
So too does Stephen Mulrine, who has adapted/translated a number of the works of Chekhov and Strindberg, always to high praise. Last year they came together under joint production with Bristol Old Vic to stage Mulrine's 2005 version of Uncle Vanya which has been presented at Galway Arts Festival.
And it is the clarity and fidelity of the production which strikes so overwhelmingly: no sign here of a struggle to twist "otherness" to match an English national view. This is unapologetically pre-revolutionary upper middle class Russia, its often admirable values decaying as it watches with dismay the rise of the vulgar bourgeoisie.
Vanya sacrifices his life to old-fashioned duty and the memory of his dead sister, running the estate she left to her daughter Sonya, while Sonya's father postures in Moscow and Petersburg, his supposed scholarship not of a quality which can sustain him.
He and his beautiful second wife Yelena are a distant drain on the estate; but only financially until Serebryakov comes home demanding the sale of an estate which is not even his to put on the market, a move which will reduce Sonya and Vanya to penury.
Cue the tragi-comedy that lies within all of Chekhov's work (he saw his plays as comedies) as Vanya falls hopelessly in love with Yelena, she takes a bored shine to Doctor Astrov, who haunts the house, tolerated by Vanya and Sonya, the latter of whom is yearningly in love with him.
The tragedy is that there can be only one outcome: the restoration of the status quo. But it is underlaid by the two central characters' new self-knowledge and despair in their loneliness that they perhaps deserved better, as indeed, as the only two decent human beings on the estate, they do.
The SATTF/Bristol company by and large do a wonderfully lucid job. But everything falls apart in the playing of Vanya by Simon Armstrong. He rants and yells, more Jimmy Porter looking back in anger (but with enough interest in other people to try some heavy-handed flirtation) than emotionally repressed and broken by years of silent selflessness. And he is not particularly helped by Paul Currier's Astrov: the scene as the two justify themselves to each other is more Morecambe and Wise than chilling stripping of souls, one contemptible, the other shattered.
For the rest, there are fine performances, with Andrew Hilton's direction allowing Mulrine's text to speak clearly, and the design by Harriet de Winton delicately suggestive of authentic time and place. But the overall weakness is that tragi-comedy and farce are two very different genres, which the company seems not to notice.
*******
BY his own admission, director Ronan Wilmot has cut Behan's The Quare Fellow by about 45 minutes. He's following in an honourable tradition established nearly two generations ago by Joan Littlewood with The Hostage in Stratford East: honourable because it now distils and delivers Behan's narrative and message with savage, horrible simplicity: capital punishment is uncivilised and degrades the society which imposes it far more than it degrades the condemned.
Further, Wilmot's new production at the New Theatre in Dublin is an object lesson for those who think that Mountjoy or any other jail is a holiday camp. The Quare Fellow is set there during the 1950s, during a long night before a murderer is to hang. It makes the blood run cold with the simple purity of the authoritarian desire to de-humanise, and the ability of many of its subjects to keep their humanity despite it.
Mountjoy Jail is a terrible place, worse today in many ways than it was in the 1950s due to its overcrowded conditions. Only those who have sickened society and degraded the human dignity of others beyond endurance deserve to be there; and often such people are not murderers, but far worse. But even in the 1950s, only murderers were hanged.
The Quare Fellow should be required viewing for every member of the "whip 'em and flog 'em" brigade. It might educate them; and it won't be the fault of the director or cast if their blood does not run cold.
There are some terrific performances, notably from Luke Hayden in the pivotal role of Regan, the warden who still hasn't lost his humanity despite having witnessed a sickening number of hangings; Conor O'Riordan as Prisoner A; Cormac McDonagh as Prisoner B; and Michael Shanley and PJ Brady as old lags Dunlavin and Neighbour.
- Emer O'Kelly
Originally published in
