Advice for readers considering visiting Angel Meadow: do; have a drink first; get stuck in; read no further, the following contains spoilers.
Manchester was built by the Irish, both the bricks and the soul. How else does a city learn so many sweetly sad songs? Fitting, then, that Dublin’s ANU Productions, fast building a reputation over the water for hard-hitting, site-responsive work – notably the award-winning Laundry (excavating Dublin’s Magdalene Convent) and World’s End Lane (the city’s Monto red light district) – should inaugurate the debut season of the city’s new arts megaplex, HOME.
Angel Meadow is sited – embedded – in the crumbling Edinburgh Castle public house (‘pub games’, proposes a hoarding in peeling gilt; ‘dangerous building’, ‘fragile roof’, ‘sudden drop’, caution others) – not in fact in notorious Victorian sinkpit Angel Meadow but neighbouring Ancoats, barely more salubrious and also heavily settled (in the sense of ‘sinking to the bottom’) by Irish refugees fleeing the famine of the 1850s. The piece immerses us in (at least) two stories coughed from the black lungs of this building’s particular past: the first, a fictionalised portrait of historically-attested resident Hannah-Mae, her gangland milieu and bloody murder; the second a relentless, simmering pressure-build anticipating the confrontation between rival soccer firms, inspired by events a decade ago which closed it.
These inciting histories – sensitively chosen, welcome relief from the hackneyed local history textbook staples brochure and programme nevertheless misleadingly shill – are separated by 150 years, and the piece understands history as chronic wound. This is a ghost-choked world in which the past is not just backstory to today’s episode (‘Previously, in Angel Meadow…’), but something stiflingly unresolved, inescapably revenant and bruising for a fight. Place is a palimpsest, skin perfunctorily scraped – but not clean – between one blotted life story and the next, the ink bleeding. Characters stare shell-shocked through each other as if superimposed from different eras; between rooms, a century might pass. Images of suspension and fixity infest: pinned butterflies, taxidermy, hung sides of meat, Christmas dinner in a room of stopped clocks. The dress is contemporary, but only as the least conspicuous option for a piece enacted never and forever.
The stories play out over a (hectic) hour duration, with a fresh audience of eight entering half-hourly. For the first half hour, you’re frequently on your own or with one or two others, led (shoved, cajoled, dragged bodily) through a warren of rooms and a montage of fragmentary vignettes, before finally regrouping for the extended climax. The interlacing of two staggered audiences and performances is not only a tour de force of engineering, it textures the whole piece: The building is constantly crowded, with glimpses of timeshifted events, and concurrent scenes audible through the thin walls.
The initiatory frame story is a sales visit to a new property development – ‘Angel Meadow’, slick logo and all – casting the audience as culture vulture prospective buyers: ‘Just over there,’ coos our guide breathlessly, ‘is the church where Kenneth Branagh did Macbeth!’ This is not just plausible, and prescient of the pub’s likely fate, but pre-emptively darts the elephant in the room – class-tourism (what’s a nice audience like us doing in a place like this?) – and moreover takes a hefty bite out of the hand that feeds it, HOME itself being a beachhead in the gentrification of another newly-rebranded slum. This is how we like our art served round here: with piss and vinegar. Bravo.
The fragmentary narrative mode ensures visitors will disagree about what they witness, and that much goes unexplained. For me, the specifically Irish context recedes. I read the show that unfolds in my subjective slice through the universes of parallel Angel Meadows as an essay in how underdog snarls at underdog, with the women wearing the bloodiest teethmarks. Your mileage may vary.
A partial inventory of scenes:
– Dressing at a table of dingy mirrors, a woman evokes the Devil (‘Do you believe in him? I’ve seen him. Do you believe me?’) and the sensation of suicide by ingesting bleach – pang by pang, and at first hand.
– In a freezing meat locker, an amped-up hooligan awaits the kickoff.
– A boxer wraps bloody fists in a straw-strewn bare-knuckle pit. He assumes the low guard of a man willing to take any number of hits as long as he lands one back.
– A man in a pig mask (the Devil after all?) dances an unconscious woman through an erotic tender duet, all the more affecting for being danced by non-dancers. He feeds her shots of bleach throughout.
Scenographer Owen Bass’s installation cycle imagines the building as a magic realist trade show for the despair industry – atomically mimetic, globally hallucinatory. Where this ignites, it scorches (Hannah hesitates, looking for the perfect pick from the jukebox; one in a thousand visitors will have noticed that the scores of buttons are all neatly labelled with the same song), but in a scene only glimpsed it risks feeling distractingly eclectic (The turf-floored room? What was in the bath?).
Angel Meadow sometimes forgets that it is teaching its language at the same time as speaking it. Should I interrupt? Should I dance? Should I down that shot glass of bleach? This brave, incandescent ensemble would clearly handle – enjoy – anything I could throw at them, but such awareness crystallises only gradually. Moreover, the interactions thrust upon the audience may be mildly uncomfortable – oil a boxer’s back, tell me your name, take your belt off, (I barrel into the next scene still hauling my trousers up) – but are always circumscribed and, on the scale of the whole piece, consequence-free. It’s telling that the most open-ended scene, the first in which I find my feet and real rapport, comes to be the emotional heart of my experience.
Ejected from the Castle, fleeing the self-immolatory final catastrophe, my audience huddles on the pavement post-show, traumatised, not ready to go home – evidence of the emotional wallop of the piece, but also of something more problematic. Angel Meadow‘s ubiquitous method is to appear to endow its audience with a latitude for action it actually withholds. My awkwardness, my hesitation – the alchemy of the piece is to sculpt and reforge these into shame and complicity (the moment where Laura Murray as Angel – Audrey Hepburn embalmed in grief and Jameson – smiles and in a whisper forgives me for not knowing how to help her still smarts) but this is psychological three-card monte. ANU’s craft is, par excellence, manipulation – overt (the electricity of a character pressed close) and occult (the arsenal of choreographed mechanical stressors: geographical disorientation, startles, constant hurry). The piece manufactures my response indifferent to my consent: nasty means to evoke a nasty world. It’s a hell of a show, but ultimately I am uneasy whose political interests it serves to teach an audience helplessness in the face of horror.