Author Archives: Lisa Wolfe

About Lisa Wolfe

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance theatre producer and project manager of contemporary small-scale work. Companies and people she has supported include: A&E Comedy, Three Score Dance, Pocket Epics, Jennifer Irons,Tim Crouch, Liz Aggiss, Sue MacLaine, Spymonkey and many more. Lisa was Marketing Manager at Brighton Dome and Festival (1989-2001) and has also worked for South East Dance, Chichester Festival Theatre and Company of Angels. She is Marketing Manager for Carousel, learning-disability arts company.

The Gathering

Lisa Wolfe reports from the Dublin Theatre Festival 2013

Ireland 2013 is branded by a concept called The Gathering. It calls for the international diaspora to come home to the old country for while. It encompasses sport, aviation, business and the arts. There is the Garda versus the NYPD Boxing Tournament, The Irish Global Pub Owners Gathering and Cork Rebel Week. It is a great hunk of tourism marketing.

I’m not at all Irish, despite my surname, but hang it, I’m coming too.

Dublin Theatre Festival’s contribution to The Gathering is to feature Irish writers who lived outside the Emerald Isle. There is Eugene O’Neill (America) Samuel Beckett (Paris) and James Joyce (Zurich, Trieste, Paris and er, Bognor Regis). I travelled with my personal James Joyce and Irish history expert Peter Chrisp and discovered further ‘exiles’ during my three days in the City.

Day One: Friday 4 October

From the airport bus, through the new tunnel, past the new James Joyce Street and down to O’Connell, a stop right by Wynn’s Hotel. It looks Victorian, but was bombed in 1916 during the Easter Rising and was rebuilt a few years later. Wynn’s seeps history; it’s mentioned twice in Ulysses and three times in Finnegans Wake, and last month hosted an exhibition about the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist military organisation which was founded here.

But there is no time for complimentary tea or coffee – it’s straight round the corner to The Abbey theatre for play number one.

Written and Performed by Eamon Morrissey, Maeve’s House is an Abbey Theatre and Dublin Theatre Festival commission and world premiere.

His mother had often told him that the writer Maeve Brennan – an Irish exile, had lived in their house, boasted of it, kept clippings about her, but it wasn’t until he was in New York in 1966 as a young actor that Eamon Morrissey fully understood the novelty of the link between them. For many years, Brennan had been writing short stories and prose pieces which she set in that same Dublin house and described fondly and in great detail.

When he first discovered the writing about 48 Cherryfield Avenue in a story in the New Yorker, Eamon says ‘my entire background and childhood came leaping out at me’ and it’s easy to appreciate how strange that would be. Decades later Morrissey has pieced together excerpts from Brennan’s stories and reflections on his own history.

Maeve Brennan wrote stories about relationships that were often stagnant and bereft of affection: she had married and divorced a wrong-un, and had a hard life, ending up destitute, deranged and alcoholic. Her articles were more lively and entertaining, with sharp observation and a pleasing curiosity. This is great material for the stage. Here though, Morrissey doesn’t quite nail it and the performance falls somewhere between a conversation and a play. The writer’s own story is told anecdotally and Brennan’s more theatrically. Yet it stays at the same emotional level except for one episode, a fairly brutal story of man unable to grieve for his dead wife, where Morrissey shows his acting chops.

The staging is simple with a curved pew, a stool and pools of light. A backdrop evokes the New York skyline. There are some unnecessary sound effects – a ringing phone, kitchen dishes clattering – that reinforce the lack of an overall vision for the show.

It’s an easy hour, and Morrissey is always watchable, but it is like a soothing shade of grey. The Technicolor version of Maeve Brennan’s life has yet to be told.

Time for dinner and a refresher in the Stag’s Head (boy was that a big stag whose head is on the wall) then into Temple Bar and the Project Art Centre.

Next came Riverrun: presented by TheEmergencyRoom and Galway Arts Festival; adapted, performed and directed by Olwen Fouéré.

There is a low, electronic rumble in the room. Olwen Fouéré stands at the front of the stage, hands clasped together, smiling at us. Once everyone is seated and silent she takes off her gold shoes, steps over the elegantly trailing mic stand onto salt crystals, and becomes water.

So begins the most exquisite and captivating performance that I have seen for a long time. Joyce’s notoriously tricky language is sometimes completely opaque, sometimes ringing clear. Fouéré embodies all of its musical texture and character, capturing nuances, exaggerating sounds, riffing on the poetry of Joyce’s playful text. ‘Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!’ The sound design (Alma Keliher) is beautiful, underpinning not overwhelming the voice which, whether in words or noises – Bulgarian style throat singing no less – is a joy to hear.

Most of the piece is done stage front and into the microphone, so when, at one point, Fouéré moves upstage, takes off her steel grey jacket and swings it around her head, side lit and majestic, well, that’s quite a moment. The lighting (Stephen Dodd) is stunning throughout, providing just the right level of grandeur to this wholly toned and tonal piece.

In an interview Fouéré said that she chose her text so as not to be too easy on herself or her audience. Had she just done the final monologue, of Anna Livia’s flowing out to the sea, it would have been ‘a bit too Molly Bloom’. So the play begins with the more difficult narrative voice from the first part of the chapter. It is a mind-boggling feat of memory and interpretation. Then we launch into Anna Livia’s journey – flowing into the sea is death for a river: ‘My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.’ Here Joyce conflates the autumn leaf with the page of the book – itself a leaf. Fouéré is now more female, constantly in motion, almost ululating, using her breath and her body in a gorgeously rich theatrical climax. A final word, from this circular novel, is left hanging, from an unforgettable face in a crystalline light: ‘the’.

After the show, Olwen Fouéré and some of the audience walk to the Millennium Bridge to raise a dram in a paper cup to the Liffey. Asked how she memorised so much of the chapter, Olwen says, ‘I read it aloud a few times, as I was compiling the piece. Then I found I just knew it.’

Day Two: Saturday 5 October

Mundo Perfeito, Three Fingers Below the Knee | Photo: Magda Bizarro

A swish tram to the Irish Museum of Modern Art near Heuston Station for an exhibition of work by Leonora Carrington. Leonora was another exile of Irish extraction; she ran off with Max Ernst and moved to Paris, but lived most of her long life in Mexico. An extraordinary artist and a key figure in the Surrealist movement, she painted intricate myths and visions, printed, wove and sculpted. It is her writing that captivates me most though – haunting, dark and hilarious stories from a hugely imaginative mind.

It is a glorious day and walking through Phoenix Park I spot a big fallow deer in the trees. There are lots of people jogging in a Guinness Triathlon. On a hill is the Magazine Fort, which features in Finnegans Wake. As does the village of Chapelizod down below with a pub called the Mullingar Inn which claims to be the setting for ‘all the characters and elements of Finnegans Wake’. It has a James Joyce Bistro – closed.

This evening I am seeing something not Irish, again at Project: Three Fingers Below The Knee which is written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, produced by Mundo Perfeito, and performed by Isabel Abreu and Gonçalo Waddington.

On 25 April 1974, the Carnation Revolution overturned forty eight years of fascist dictatorship in Portugal. In the national archives theatre-maker Tiago Rodrigues found a mountain of documents relating to theatre, as it existed under that regime. He was particularly taken with accounts by the censors of what they would or, more frequently, wouldn’t allow on stage. Unsurprisingly, several modern dramatists were immediately censored – O’Neill, Max Frisch and Brecht – but also plays by Shakespeare and Moliere. In Three Fingers Below The Knee, Rodrigues casts the censors as playwrights. ‘Let’s see how you cope with this,’ he seems to say.

The stage furniture, a chaise-longue, other fin-de-siecle chairs, is covered in polythene as if to suggest the newness or cleanliness of this artform called drama. There is a clothes rail from which the two actors, in their undies, select costumes.

Surtitles switch between translation of the spoken text and quotations from plays. It is theatre about theatre, and to a theatre festival audience amusing to hear the denigration of several playwrights whose work is being shown this year.

The performance style is parodic and direct to the audience. They go into comic raging over Beckett, they re-write a censored Shakespeare play, they fight over Desire Under the Elms – the play was banned but the film wasn’t. Much of the censorship is against women (from Iphigenia to Masha) and this is illustrated graphically with Abreu writing on her body with blood red lipstick.

It is clear that the regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar considered his citizens so totally ignorant (‘the public is Catholic and simple’) that they wouldn’t understand Brecht, so why stage it? One determined director submits Max Frisch’s play Andorra to the selection panel five times. It is rejected each time, even with the necessary changes made.

The text is constantly playful and thought provoking and the performance style has a refreshing openness to it. The surtitles become part of the questioning process, the staging undermines the action, the film sequences are bizarrely static – yes, that’s what we want!

The Festival club is an upstairs room in a glamorous nightspot called Odessa. Unfortunately it is rather sparsely populated tonight and there are other drinking sheds in the city with more appeal.

Day Three: Sunday 6 October

Gare St Lazare Players, Waiting for Godot | Photo: Eliott Erwith

Looming over the skyline from a huge tower is an advert for The Dublin Lockout exhibition. It’s on at the Hugh Lane gallery (which also houses Frances Bacon’s original Soho studio). The Lockout 2013 was a pivotal event in Irish history; a stand-off between the bosses, notably William Martin Murphy, owner of the Dublin Tramway Company, and the unionised workforce. It resulted in the infamous Bloody Sunday. Looming over O’Connell Street is the statue of the workers’ hero, James Larkin, arms aloft as if in proclamation. Larkin is Liverpool Irish and another exile; he moved to America to try and galvanise the unions there.

A matinee at the lovely jewel box Gaiety Theatre – Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett, in a production by Gare St Lazare Players Ireland and Dublin Theatre Festival.

Here’s a Pozzo that has been dividing critics, and perhaps audiences, during its run.

This Godot is set on a circular stage, a lunar landscape reflecting the huge moon that hangs at the back, waiting to rise. The tree looms starkly down from above. Estragon (Gary Lydon) and Vladimir (Conor Lovett) a fairly sprightly pair, are natural clowns with a warm rapport and at ease with the language and rhythms of the text. Pozzo enters, with Lucky in tow, and we are further thrown into the world of the circus. Gavan O’Herlily has the looks of Wild Bill Hickok and the voice of Orson Welles. He is huge and ebullient, bellowing out commands to the luckless ‘pig’ yet showing the weakness of his class: he is unable to sit down unless invited.

Lucky (Tadgh Murphy, last seen with a very bad haircut in The Walworth Farce) gives a tour de force gallop through his speech which draws applause.

There is beautiful lighting by Sinead McKenna and the costumes and design is exemplary. Director Judy Hegarty Lovett has many productions of Beckett under her belt with this company, and it bears their trademark purity of vision and economy of movement. To see Vladimir skip about, doing his exercises, is quite a coup de theatre.

In the second half, with leaves on the tree, a blind Pozzo and ever more frustrated pair of Godot waiters, the action dips slightly. But overall it’s a really effective and effecting production, finding lots of humour in the text without distracting from the mystery and misery of the story.

Back to the Project for the final show of the weekend: Dusk Ahead by Junk Ensemble.

The dance space is patterned by strings of wire and elastic, glimmering in crepuscular light (designed by Sarah Jane Shiels). Three blindfolded dancers enter, their passage led by a couple ringing hand-bells. It is apparent that all is not well in this silvery place, in this hour before darkness that we call twilight or dusk.

Episodes follow to illustrate this tension. Couples are tied to each other by their hair, by a lasso, by their mouths. This kissing duet is accompanied by the noise of a pomegranate being squelched. There is much grappling after each other, sometimes in a state of blindness, at one point framed by a waft of green smoke. The space is well used and the choreography, by Megan and Jessica Kennedy in collaboration with the dancers, is quirky and occasionally dangerous. At times, over-used devices distract from the originality of the piece, a dancer walking across a row of upstretched hands, or falling backwards in the arms of others for example. But all the performers are highly watchable and skilled.

There is a fabulous composed score by Denis Clohessy that perfectly matches the eerie fairytale atmosphere of Dusk Ahead. Live cello by Zoe Ni Riordain, accompanied at times by the whole cast on a variety of instruments and in song, is subtle and effective.

It is a shame that it goes on for too long; an episodic piece like this says what it set out to say after about forty minutes. We don’t need to see the wolf twice. We don’t need so many varieties of containment and release. The ending, when it comes, is beautifully simple and stark. One dancer, one light, the small hand gestures that opened the show. Sometimes, less is more.

Leaving Dublin on a fine Monday morning, knowing the Festival is still going full throttle, is quite a wrench. But memories have been gathered, and will endure.

Gathering the Threads of Irish Theatre

Lisa Wolfe previews Dublin Theatre Festival

It will be interesting to see, in perhaps a decade from now, if the current density of productions of Samuel Beckett’s plays and stories have influenced a younger generation of writers. Will there be a fashion for plays about loss, failure and regret? Will stages be populated with curious singletons, living in their own oddly coded worlds?

For now, we can enjoy the clarity of Beckett’s language and his characters at just about any theatre festival in the world. Edinburgh International Festival overflowed with Beckett on stage, in film, in books and discussion. Brighton Festival commissioned a Beckett and music combination from Gare St Lazare Players back in May. London has hosted major revivals and Lisa Dwan’s record breaking performance of Not I at the Royal Court. The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival took place in August. Shall I go on?

Dublin Theatre Festival, which opens 26 September 2013, continues the trend with a new production of Waiting for Godot, also by Gare St Lazare, starring Conor Lovett. Lovett is my favourite interpreter of Beckett; he just becomes the character and with minimal gestures lets the words do their work.

There is also plenty of James Joyce available to theatre-goers this year, thanks to the relaxing of copyright on his writing, wrestled at last from the unholy clutches of Stephen Joyce.

Beckett contrasted his own approach with Joyce’s:

‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.’

I recently reviewed the Tron Theatre and Project’s co-production of Ulysses (at Edinburgh Fringe). Soon I will tackle more the opaque waters of Finnegans Wake, courtesy of Olwen Fouéré’s Riverrun. It’s a good progression. Ulysses is the book of the day (16 June 1904) and Finnegans Wake is the book of the night.

At the end of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the ‘Wake’ chapter about Dublin’s River Liffey, who is also the great Mother in the book, Joyce writes:

‘Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger.’

It’s a dialogue between two washerwomen over the Liffey. The first asks, ‘Where now are all Anna Livia’s children?’ The second replies, ‘Some remain here, more are dead, more again are lost to foreign lands.’

Beckett and Joyce both left Ireland in order to write. Curious then that this year Ireland is staging a nationwide series of events called The Gathering, a call-out to Irish people the world over to connect with their roots. People and communities throughout the country are creating Gatherings and inviting friends and relatives back home. It covers science, aviation, politics and the arts.

Willie White, artistic director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, explains what The Gathering is, and the part the Festival is playing in it:

‘The Gathering is a year-long celebration of all things Irish. For Dublin Theatre Festival it’s an opportunity to recognise the international range of Irish theatre and theatre artists. We’ll be celebrating writers such as Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, producing work by Irish artists who have made their home in other countries, like Desperate Optimists and Gare St Lazare Players Ireland, and convening a symposium on the Irish theatrical diaspora, with a guest lecture by Fiona Shaw.’

It’s White’s third year in the role, and I asked him what has made him most happy since he took over in 2011 and what would be his dream commission.

‘The thing I am most happy about since I took over in September 2011 was the success of my first programme in 2012. We had the biggest representation from Irish artists in years, presented The Wooster Group in Ireland for the first time, and ticket sales were up. Each festival presents different opportunities and this year the programme has a different complexion. There’s still plenty of strong Irish work but there are many more international productions on offer. We’ll be introducing our audiences to exciting artists from India, France, Japan, Portugal and Canada, amongst other places, and bringing Actors Touring Company, Lone Twin and the RSC from the UK. I will be happy if this programme elicits a similarly positive response.

If money, time and international boundaries were no obstacle my dream commission would be to invite Royal de Luxe to make a piece akin to The Sultan’s Elephant in Dublin. It would be called Wake the Tiger and like St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland we would symbolically (and humanely) purge the country of the ravages of a giant Celtic feline.’

Check out the programme at www.dublintheatrefestival.com and watch this space for my round-up of some the plays taking place.

Dublin Theatre Festival runs 26 September – 13 October 2013 at locations around the city.

Tron Theatre Company: Ulysses

It was all a dream! Dermot Bolger’s effective adaptation of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses reconstructs the novel as if it is being dreamed by Leopold Bloom. Doing so means it can start and finish with Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy and make that evocative speech the narrative thread.

The opening scene has Molly (Muireann Kelly) in her much loved bed, and it is evident from the start that this Molly is all for fun. She talks directly to us which is rather unnerving. Isn’t this an internal monologue, dreamy in nature and murmured seductively? The words are so fruity and become quite explicit – Molly would never have spoken them aloud. But this is the way it goes, with a focus on the sexy bits of the book, and some fabulous characterisations from the strong ensemble cast.

The set is a busy arc of cabinets, drawers, cupboards and windows through which people can enter, peek, shout or sing. It evokes the Martello Tower in which the hapless Stephen Dedalus (Michael Dylan) endures Buck Mulligan. There is a lot of playfulness in Andy Arnold’s direction. The cat is represented by a swish of a scarf, The Citizen’s dog by a smoke machine. There is a pleasing simplicity to the use of props too; a ladder becomes a pulpit, a diving board, a hovel.

The narrative largely follows the chronology of the book, with sequences such as The Sirens – a nice call of ‘Sirens please’ to introduce it – and lots of lovely close harmony singing. The climax of the first half is the Cyclops story, with Bloom escaping from the bigoted Citizen in the pub, who sends the glasses flying.

The second half (yes, an interval, in Edinburgh!) opens with the Nausicaa episode and Bloom masturbating on the beach while the provocative Gerty (Mary Murray) displays her, erm, wares. Cue fireworks. Then comes a hallucinatory vision of the brothel scene, in which the madam Bella Cohen is played with great relish by Grant Smeaton, wearing a lobster pot and effecting a German accent. He looks alarmingly like Benny Hill. Poor Bloom (Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert) gets fisted (I said it focuses on the ‘durty’ stuff).

At last Bloom and Stephen get to walk together after narrowly avoiding arrest, and this is a welcome moment of calm and a sort of epiphany for Bloom. He can relate to Stephen more than any other character and be a father to a boy – his own son having died when a baby, the consequence of which has made it impossible for him to make love to Molly.

We end with the remainder of Molly’s monologue, describing her lover Blazes Boylan (a fine performance by Stephen Clyde) and remembering the time she first said ‘yes’ to Leopold on Howth Head.

All the cast in their various roles are highly watchable. Maeve Fitzgerald in particular is a total delight. The lighting, costumes, sound design and choreography are all top class and make for a grand afternoon of theatre. There is some odd switching from behind the fourth wall to a direct approach to us in the audience, which doesn’t sit well with the traditional presentation. But that’s a small caveat. It’s not easy to stage such an epic, complex and multi-layered text so successfully. And it is the language that shines throughout. ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’ It’s enough to move a grown man to tears.

Dan Canham: Ours Was The Fen Country

The Fenlands of East Anglia are strange. Misty, moist, flat, ancient, sinking. Dan Canham and his company give us a visual, aural and emotional account of life in this place. Of generations of farmers, cow-men, horse-men, eel-men. The work is solitary and hard and they love it. The traditional methods, the life on the soil that is ‘black gold’, the distances between their households and the old characters they have known.

We view this landscape through images on a screen and from recorded interviews, some relayed by the company, some lip-synched, some just played from the computer deck. The lighting grades through gentle gloom to a morning brilliance.

All is muted, balanced, controlled and this aesthetic carries through to the dancing, which, when it comes, brings a strong physical energy. The choreography at first is totally grounded, not representational exactly but evocative of the labour being described. The performers are all strong; Tilly Webber gives a particularly fine solo which I took to be an evocation of an eel. They can be as thick as a man’s arm and wriggle for half an hour with their heads cut off. The movement was pure and heartfelt. At other times the four swirled together in and out of clusters then spinning off to corners. They did some flat-flooted stamping rather like a clog-dance. You thought of the last horse, Monarch, working the field.

Ours Was The Fen Country captured the essence of this disappearing way of life, of the shrinking peat levels. It was a story of individuals, connected through the land and history. One fellow declares himself a Cromwellian – suggesting the Fen people are fiercely determined to be themselves and take no orders. It’s an interesting moment in the piece, giving a broader picture. I would have welcomed more variety of this sort. Perhaps a flight of fancy of what might be, of contrast. The piece ended with the four dancers jumping and it was great to watch them take flight.

Northern Stage and Guests: The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project

By the time we reach the thirteenth verse of the St Stephen’s Border Ballad, the foundling has had a child of her own, become a painter, escaped to the Highlands via the A9, and been battered by forces internal and external, but we have yet to find out where we stand on the issue of Scottish Independence.

Northern Stage’s Lorne Campbell has given himself, his company and the audience quite a task here. Collectively we are to produce a new border ballad, to help us understand the broader picture of the dilemma being faced by Scottish voters. Lorne says that his own lack of certainty about how to vote inspired this huge undertaking. He says that a border ballad is no place for irony – you have to wear your heart on your sleeve. The audience is ready for it – there is good energy in the room. Tables and chairs at the front, raked seats behind. There are matchboxes and tea lights on the tables and the stage floor. Aly Macrae is musical maestro, as arresting here as he was in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. Aly also wrote the first verse of the ballad, establishing the set-up of a foundling in a Moses basket, found on the night of the dissolution of the Union.

This musical and poetic endeavour involves a guest ‘balladeer’ each night who moves the story on, like a game of wordy consequences. Supported by two or three musicians, the team of actors and writers recite the previous verses, and in between each we sing a rousing refrain from the very first verse.

Before the ballad starts, there are two personal pieces, and tonight it’s the turn of Daniel Bye and Lucy Ellinson. Daniel attempts a ballad about Middlesborough and weaves a tall tale which results in him being burnt in a sort of Wicker Man scenario by staunch ‘Berwick-on-Tweed nationalists’ by mistake. They thought he was a Geordie. He is a good writer and delivers well. ‘If you find this painful and upsetting,’ he quips knowingly, ‘just think of it as performance art.’

Lucy, hotfoot from performing in Grounded at the Traverse, gives us an exercise. The audience is invited to the stage space to sit amongst the candles and slips of paper. Lucy is quite a radical and the papers have messages from people across the country saying what national services are most important to them. Services such as healthcare, transport, education facilities that are under threat. It is great to witness a disparate group of people become a community through doing this; our voices never overlap, the tones vary, the lights are gradually blown out. It’s not a ballad, but it’s moving, and thoughtful and political.

For the Saturday night audience, the foundling’s journey ends with a lovely piece by Deborah Pearson. The foundling mother is going through a feisty stage with her now teenage daughter, whose propensity to speak ‘American’ stretches her nerves. Deborah takes language as a metaphor for nationalism. She ends with a beautiful couplet: ‘Age is its own country and border, we’re told, and the young they speak differently there.’

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the run goes. Each night is videoed and viewable online so you can keep up to date with it. And each night the audience sings a song for the next incoming audience and nominates one for them to sing. We had Eye of The Tiger, they get Jolene, poor devils.

I expected to be challenged by questions of sovereignty, of nuclear disarmament, of European isolation. I would have liked some that. Instead the evening was a varied and enjoyable mix of words and music and games. There will be many folk by the end of the week with an ear-worm of a refrain stubbornly refusing to shift:

‘The wrangling is over, the deal has been struck. Let’s see what the foundling does now.’

Total Theatre