Dublin theatre festival review – city's players adapt to age of Covid
“You see me, right?” In Dublin’s city centre, Izzy (Nandi Bhebhe) is furiously trying to make herself visible to passers-by. She and the two other characters in ANU Productions’ The Party to End All Parties, are picked out on camera, coming briefly into focus before disappearing into rush-hour crowds. Shot on the quays of the Liffey and livestreamed, this was a last-minute adaptation to revised public health guidelines regarding live performance.
Even without the unique sense of physical intimacy that ANU creates in its immersive productions, the burning intensity of Bhebhe, Niamh McCann and Robbie O’Connor survived the transition to the screen. Playing a market researcher, a pressured social worker and a man struggling to escape from a cycle of crime, their performances were riveting, especially McCann’s, as a woman at breaking point. Beyond them, the larger subject is Dublin itself, the present and future of the city. If the thematic attempt to link history, politics and even time – a specific 25 minutes and 21 seconds – feels like a stretch too far, it raises high expectations for a fuller realisation in the future.
Congregating in darkness, following distant lights, the expectant audience for the Abbey theatre’s first live performance in six months would probably have settled for crumbs. The Great Hunger of the title of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem from 1942 was never intended to refer to our present craving to share the experience of live performance. But in its imagination and scale, this outdoor staging created something expansive and communal. Singer Lisa O’Neill, with a guttural, elemental tone, lured the audience into open ground where, in the distance, the “small farmer” Paddy McGuire (Liam Carney) railed bitterly against the confines of his lot. From there, the multi-talented troupe of 10 musicians and 16 actors conjured episodes from McGuire’s frustrated rural life, taking the text as a starting point for a series of luminous moments, set among trees. Conor Linehan’s infectious jazz-folk music, Paul Keogan’s lighting and the overall conception by co-directors Caitríona McLaughlin and Conall Morrison combined to create a performance that fused past and present.
Following last year’s Beckett’s Room, which had no actors on stage, Dead Centre’s clever and original new production reverses the experiment. In To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), an actor (Jack Gleeson) stands on a bare stage speaking remotely, by livestream, to an audience that is both there and not there. As the lights go up on the empty auditorium, each viewer from home can make out their own face glowing on a tablet screen from the rows of seats. These pre-recorded images of disembodied heads prove to be an apt metaphor for an excursion into transhumanism, and for the creation of a theatre performance when we can’t be in a room together.
Based on Mark O’Connell’s award-winning book about attempts made by scientists to transcend the body through technology, Gleeson plays the author, presenting his ideas in Ted-talk style. Whether by uploading our brains to the cloud, or the more extreme measure of freezing decapitated heads in a cryonics lab – each experiment becomes a reference to the art of theatre. With growing doubt, Gleeson questions his ability to be “himself”. As an actor, can he “upload” the character he is playing, or maybe even merge with him? Either way, he is suffering from “a serious case of the human condition”. Even Version 2.0 might not be able to rectify that.
Dublin theatre festival continues until 10 October.
