Author Archives: Terry O'Donovan

About Terry O'Donovan

Terry is a performer and director. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Dante or Die and one quarter of new company Toot.

Shared Experience: Speechless

It’s refreshing to see Shared Experience in the new Arcola building. It’s rough around the edges, has plywood flooring here and there and it feels like a space in which new and exciting performances will take place. Polly Teale and Nancy Meckler’s company were one of those who lost their Arts Council funding this year, perhaps because their work had become slightly predictable.

Refreshing indeed then, to see Teale’s direction of Speechless harking back to their glory days of The Mill on the Floss and After Mrs Rochester. Those productions had an urgency and power that leaped off the stage and grabbed an audience’s attention. Fusing an evocotive soundscape by Peter Salem with a minimal and rough design by Naomi Dawson, Teale presents us with a rich theatrical story of a pair of teenage twins who have stopped talking to everyone except each other.

An adaptation of the Marjorie Wallace book The Silent Twins, the play allows us into the bedroom – the hidden world – of these twins who have ostracised themselves from society. They’ve been kicked out of school for violent outbursts and for their refusal to speak and engage with the teachers, fellow pupils and parents. Over 90 minutes, exceptional actresses Demi Oyediran and Natasha Gordon embody the twins with compelling energy. Their physical connection with each other is at the heart of the entire piece, and Gordon and Oyediran are incredibly in-sync with each other, whether it’s slowly dressing in detailed unison or the tiniest flicker of a look into each other’s eyes telling more than words ever could.

The power of physicality shines through Teale’s tense production, which spirals towards an inevitable tragedy. When the girls special needs teacher finally thinks she has cracked them the twins simply turn their backs to her again and again. It is infuriating, intriguing and heartbreaking to watch two young women manipulate each other, their lost mother and all around them through their silence. It left me looking forward to more gutsy and important work from Shared Experience.

www.sharedexperience.org.uk

Teatret Gruppe 38: Hans Christian, You Must be An Angel

Twenty Hans Christian Andersen tales are the honoured guests in Teatret Gruppe 38’s production

Taking twenty Hans Christian Andersen tales and stirring them up into a promenade theatrical experience for anyone over the age of eight, Teatret Gruppe 38 have created an enchanting experience. Hailing from Anderson’s homeland of Denmark, two charismatic waiters lead us into a dinner party celebrating Andersen’s work.

Surrounding a long table we are informed that there are twenty places set for the honoured guests: the works themselves. Heading the table is Mr Hans Christian Andersen – the guest of honour. However, each chair is not occupied by a person. Instead, there are elements of the twenty stories that inspire the show. In front of Andersen’s seat is a plate on which words appear. For ‘The Princess and the Pea’ an outline of a bed is painted on a constantly spinning plate with pea tumbling around. The little matchstick girl has a box of her matches and, sitting in front of The Woman with the Eggs, is a boiled egg.

It all sounds very twee, but in Teatret Gruppe’s hands it is anything but. The space is dark. Lights flicker on and off. Each chair is made of a cold metal and the installations for each story are intricate, off-beat and the antithesis of a Disney movie. There are magical moments during the forty minutes in which the two waiters try to please their guests – a chair starts crying with water pouring from the frame, a napkin disappears into the table, the Emperor shows off his new clothes… As we move around to get a closer look at tiny images projected onto eggs or into suitcases we are led on an adventure of the mind in which anything seems possible.

Elements of Andersen’s morals shine through, and the heartache of many of his stories emerge through the sensitive and never patronising performances of our guides. I wish I knew the stories inside-out, as many of the incredibly detailed ingredients flew right over my head. So it’s inspired me to invest in a complete works, and I urge all to head to the Barbican. Make sure you rub the Snowman’s freezing cold plate – he loves human touch!

www.gruppe38.dk

Fabulous Beast: Rian

Fabulous Beast’s artistic director Michael Keegan-Dolan has been friends with Hothouse Flowers lead man Liam Ó Maonlaí for many years. For Rian, they have brought both of their passions together to create a joyous evening of traditional Irish music with Keegan-Dolan’s contemporary choreography.

At the outset, eight dancers and five musicians sit amongst an array of musical instruments on brown wooden chairs, reminiscent of those you would find in an old village hall. They are dwarfed by an enormous emerald green wall behind them, and look eagerly into the empty green space, awaiting a performance. Ó Maonlaí picks up his Celtic harp and places it in the centre of the space, lights a candle, and sings a heartfelt and moving Irish song called Mo Ghile M’fhear.

This sets the tone for an evening that puts music at its heart. For the following 100 minutes Ó Maonlaí and his musicians elicit yelps and hundreds of toe taps from the Sadler’s Wells audience with their impassioned playing and infectious melodies. Weaving in and out are eight natural and generous dancers, offering a variety of physical responses to the music. ‘Rian’ means ‘trace’ in Irish, and Keegan-Dolan’s choreography revels in the idea of people replaying this music, learning each other’s dance steps and teaching new generations how to appreciate and ultimately fall in love with music. Repeatedly (a few too many times by the end), one dancer will begin a phrase and slowly the stage will be filled with bodies in unison. Importantly though, Keegan-Dolan’s unison celebrates the individual and allows for each dancer’s personal response to the movement to shine through.

The piece is a love song to tradition, music and dance exploring how our contemporary world can learn and engage with these rituals. Doey Lüthi’s costume design creates a perfect image of a modern setting, revelling in days gone by. All the women (including the stage manager) wear knee-length, patterned kitsch dresses in different shades of green with brown brogues. They would be perfectly on trend sitting in a café on Brick Lane, or at a céilidh.

It’s the moments that subtly merge old and new and that celebrate music and movement combined which really connect emotionally. At one point, 22 year-old Maitiú Ó Casaide sits centrestage with the entire company seated on either side of him. As he plays the pipes the dancers and musicians gently begin to sway to the music, slowly growing larger and larger in their movements. Their feet leave the floor and their limbs float in the air, their bodies transported through pain, joy, sorrow and wonder. Their giant shadows dancing on the green wall behind them become their parents and grandparents hopping wildly to the local piper in the village pub on a Friday night, transported by the raw power of the traditional music blaring from a small stage crammed with musicians eager to tell their story.

www.fabulousbeast.net

Trestle Unmasked: The Man with the Luggage

Trestle Theatre has been producing physical theatre work for twenty years, famed for their use of masks. Over the past five years they have launched Trestle Unmasked, in which they have uncovered their performers faces and embraced a collaborative ethos of theatrical storytelling.

The Man with the Luggage is the result of a collaboration between director Oliver Jones from company Blindeye and writer Lizzie Nunnery, who were inspired by Ionesco’s text of the same name. The piece is a surreal, funny and at times, captivating, telling of a story of repatriation, countries at war, the danger and absurdity of borders, and ultimately of what it means to be home.

Setting off with said luggage, Nicholas Tizzard plays Damir, a man searching for his home after an unnamed war in an imagined part of Europe. As he crosses hundreds of miles he meets a young married couple, accordion playing beggars, intimidating border police and a (beautifully masked) couple dancing in mourning of their father’s death, all played with impressive energy and precision by Nicole Lewis and John Cockerill. As Damir gets ever more desperate to reach a home where he hopes his lover is awaiting him, his experiences become surreal – he hears voices (a haunting Jim Broadbent’s voice to be exact) and has a philosophical discussion with a fish, a highlight of a production so packed with characters, images and changes it sometimes loses focus.

As an exploration of the human ability to adapt to extreme situations and bury massive problems Nunnery’s text is quietly spot on. In stark contrast, the core of this ambitious theatrical journey is our personal need to find our rightful place in the world and the unending tension between where our physical and philosophical home sits. It’s almost heartbreaking, and within the next few weeks of touring that heart of the piece will no doubt find it’s way to shine through.

www.trestle.org.uk

Hofesh Shechter: Political Mother: The Choreographer’s Cut

Hofesh Shechter has carved out a name for himself as one of the high flyers in the world of dance. Two years ago he created a ‘choreographer’s cut’ of his pieceUprising/In Your Rooms, which was performed at London’s Roundhouse as a dance-meets-rock gig. The music was impressive, the sightlines a horror.

Now, back at Sadler’s Wells where Shechter is an Associate Artist, he has assembled a 23-strong band (half of whom seem to be drummers) to rework his Brighton Festival 2010 production Political Mother. Half of the stalls seats have been removed to make room for a mosh-pit-like gig set-up and there is a stirring sense of anticipation, not often felt in a theatre, as we wait for the curtain to rise.

The opening ten minutes live up to this hype. A long line of cellists seem suspended in midair as they are individually picked out by Lee Curran’s bold lighting design. As the music builds, drummers pop up underneath the row of cellists before the lights and music explode together to illuminate another two tiers of drummers pounding out dramatic beats that pump through your body. Two male dancers appear out of darkness staring straight into the audience, arms outstretched. Their movement bursts into the empty space surrounding them as their shoulders hunch and heads drop. They are defiant but defeated.

It is a powerful sequence that repeats numerous times throughout the performance, with the company of sixteen dancers all joining at one point. Elsewhere, the cast, all dressed in rustic, diffused colours, continue to represent a people surviving through a violent dictatorship. A fighter stabs himself with his sword, a line of drummers evokes the image of tin soldiers, and an evil oppressor screams and shouts inaudibly high above his subjects. It is a strange choice of Shechter’s to perform this role himself – one can’t help but be confused by the image of a rock star-like portrayal of a dictator played by the choreographer who also wrote the music.

As a whole, the piece fails to connect emotionally or in the gig-like fashion which Shechter sets out to do. Taking out the stalls seats at Sadler’s Wells is an exciting prospect, but never once does the performance invite the audience to dance or engage with the material in a different way to traditional set-ups. The pounding music, impressive at the outset, becomes oddly obsolete halfway through due to its repetitiveness; and the choreography itself is rarely illuminating. The occasional moments of quiet have the most impact – it’s a shame Shechter didn’t allow these scenes to form the heart of the piece, saving the excessive drumming to punctuate and startle instead of banging us over the head.

Total Theatre