It Is Good We Are Dreaming is a rudderless effort you’ll long to wake up from

Torpid – ‘It Is Good We Are Dreaming’ fails to inspire

Emer O'Kelly

June 05 2022 02:30 AM

It Is Good We Are Dreaming The New Theatre, Dublin

Ultan Pringle has called his first staged play It is Good We Are Dreaming. Perhaps we should expect a nod to Emily Dickinson, but there’s nary a sign of the poet’s sensibility anywhere. Having sat through the play I certainly haven’t solved the mystery of the connection and suspect there isn’t one.

Over the course of an hour (it feels longer) we are treated/subjected to an unlikely estranged brother and sister discussing their past and present in a desultory fashion, with mental interjections from their unseen mother. Apparently she was/is a free spirit – translated: selfish cow who cares/cared only for herself.

Initially it seemed as though mother’s interjections were actually her daughter’s unspoken thoughts, even though they didn’t seem to have anything to do with the conversation happening onstage.

But that conversation didn’t seem to have a connection to anything either, least of all to what we are apparently there for: to witness a desperate effort at reconciliation between brother and sister.

Fionn is six years younger than Fiadh. They don’t really know each other well, because their mother left Fiadh’s father, who brought her up somewhat haphazardly after her mother left. She (mother) stuck it out longer with Fionn’s father, who is now dead (I think).

But ultimately the call of the wild took over, and she took off to Sligo to paint. She’s dead now as well (again, I think, it’s not very clear).

Now, feeling uneasy that his own new and somewhat insecure relationship with his girlfriend is falling apart, Fionn looks up his sister and they bond at her kitchen table while they wait for her (very stable) girlfriend to come home.

They talk in short staccato sentences, their cadences seldom varying. You can almost count the beats, which does nothing to enliven the topics, as they exchange descriptions of dreams (crystal fish in the sky, every night meeting the same wizened man praying in an attic) and as always with other people’s dreams they don’t seem of interest to each other.

They also discuss the Celtic derivation of their own names. Fiadh recalls her visits to what seemed to her to be Fionn’s stable home, the house in Fairview in Dublin where her mother settled with Fionn and his father.

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He recalls their mother used to get quite excited about those visits, and make a big deal about preparing a guest bed for her then small daughter.

Sounds boring? Yes. Invented conversations on stage don’t need a logic, but they need emotional credibility. In this case, there is none. There is no sense that the characters have suffered at the hands of their unconventional upbringing, which would give theatrical purpose to the premise of the play.

Apart from Fionn’s insecurity about the housing situation in Dublin, they both seem to be doing relatively fine.

All in all, one leaves the theatre (at least I did) feeling that putting up a placard reading “Life’s a bitch, and then you die” would achieve exactly the same purpose.

It’s a Lemon Soap production, rather leadenly directed by Julia Appleby, with Laoise Murray as Fiadh and Luke Dalton as Fionn, whose performances tend drearily towards the monotonous. Fionnuala Murphy is the (sometimes inaudible) voice of Mam.

The rather bizarre lighting of abrupt changes is by Owen Clarke, while the set by Eimear Hussey is a somewhat inexplicable drape of fishing nets behind the central table.

The Galway International Arts Festival will return post-Covid from July 1l-24. It’s a “packed programme”, with highlights that include an adaptation of Donal Ryan’s novel From a Low and Quiet Sea, adapted by the author and Andrew Flynn of Decadent Theatre Company.

Druid will offer a new Sonya Kelly comedy, The Last Return, directed by Sara Joyce, which will presumably feature the author’s almost inimitably lopsided view of contemporary life (and that’s a recommendation).

Chicago’s Steppenwolf company will return to the festival after a lengthy break with a revival of Sam Shepard’s now classic True West, one of the plays which established the company’s worldwide reputation in the 1980s.

Landmark and Irish National Opera will stage Donnacha Dennehy’s opera The First Child, directed by and with libretto by Enda Walsh. The score will be played by the Crash Ensemble.

And there’s plenty more…