Join us on a trip through our anxieties
There is more to play for amid the final preparations for the Dublin Theatre Festival, writes Eugene O’Brien
THERE is a woman in front of me ranting and screaming: “I am not deluded. I believe. I am Joan of f ***ing Arc!” Another man insists he has committed murder to impress a girl, just like the guy who shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster: “Last night I shot a president in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know!” Everyone else in the room roars with manic laughter.
But I’m not in an asylum or some nightmarish dream, I am sitting in the Methodist Hall in Dublin’s Leeson Park, watching a rehearsal for Pan Pan Theatre’s new piece, Eliza’s Adventures in the Uncanny Valley.
The show is about the anxieties we feel living in the world today. I started writing it with Gavin Quinn, the artistic director of Pan Pan, about five months ago. We send our subject Eliza to spend time in a hotel room with four other subjects who may or may not be artificial beings.
Eliza is looking for help. She is being tested or she is testing the others. They spend time together like it is an asylum as they strive to find some kind of way through the chaos of the modern world.
‘The uncanny valley’ is the name coined for the dread we feel when confronted by machines who look human. They remind us they are immortal and that we are going to die.
So can Eliza keep it together in the uncanny valley? Can she maintain herself as the power struggles and insanity start to get out of control? It’s a classic dramatic situation. Stick characters in a room that they can’t get out of and see what happens. But the treatment is surreal and darkly comic. Like a David Lynch movie. What’s important is tone, transitions and tension.
Gavin and I began the project by discussing the themes of the show in detail and Gavin fed me docs and books on the subject. Then we produced dozens of scripts and have whittled them down to a mere 12. This process helped me connect with the unconscious part of my mad head. I’ve been doing a lot of screen-writing in recent years so it was fun to throw off the shackles of strict plotting and linear story. You latch on to an idea or image and fire away and see what happens. I had worked with Pan Pan for the first time last year and was eager to repeat the experience.
In the summer of 2017, I was deeply browned off as two film projects I had spent three to four years of my life on both went belly-up within a month of each other.
I disappeared into the world of Pan Pan and a show called The Good House of Happiness, and it was a life-saver. We were working with a mostly amateur Asian cast, including two Mongolian accountants who were champion pole dancers, a Chinese PhD scholar and Ashley, a talented Chinese actress. The show rescued me from wallowing in self-pity and gave me renewed energy to take back to the screen-writing world.
Back in the Methodist hall, rehearsals continue. This year’s show is more ambitious. The subject matter is bigger. There is more to play for. With a week to go, we are at the business-end of the process so there is constant repetition and small details are focused on, tinkered with and re-set. There’s a banana skin gag to get right.
Gavin cajoles and suggests. He can be playful and irreverent. He takes the work very seriously but is not self-serious. The cast respond. There are no scourges. Nobody wants to talk the thing to death. Everyone is willing to jump up and try things. Everyone is open. Si Schroeder’s brilliant, atmospheric, multi-layered score elevates but never takes over the scenes. Aideen Cosgrove (who founded Pan Pan with Gavin 25 years ago) has designed a brilliant hotel room set that seems to mirror itself.
Actor Andrew Bennett, whom you can see in the famine movie Black ’47 , is playing a character called Marvin, who is telling us how he approached a sleeping man and assassinated him with a knife.
Andrew seems to be enjoying himself. Not as much as he enjoyed Limerick win the All Ireland this year, but he likes the show, which is a good sign. He is an old hand with Pan Pan. He and fellow cast member Dylan Tighe have done seven or eight shows each. The other three cast members, Jane McGrath, Amy Molloy and Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, are all Pan Pan first timers.
Maybe they really do feel they’ve entered an asylum for the past four weeks. That they have joined some kind of strange cult. That they really are in the full throes of the uncanny valley.
Genevieve as Eliza looks on the edge of sanity as she quietly says: “If I were to call my mother now, what would I say? I’m afraid my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going.”
Jane plays the mysterious Mrs H, who believes in the possibility of a future which most people would call delusional.
Actors’ lives are very unpredictable. Other jobs have to be chased up. At the tea break, Amy learns lines for a film audition. Thankfully they all have stuff happening once they emerge from this uncanny valley in two weeks’ time.
Andrew and Dylan are touring Europe with Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play. Genevieve tours the US with Louis Lovett’s show They Called Her Vivaldi. Jane has appeared in two movies this year, Rialto and Vita and Virginia. Amy is just back from New York with hit play Cypress Avenue and will be seen in the forthcoming film Animals.
But first there’s the hectic Dublin Theatre Festival schedule next week, the tech for lights and sound and the six shows. It’s on in the Samuel Beckett in Trinity. It’s one of only three totally new original works in this year’s festival. So come and take a walk into the weird and wonderful world of Eliza’s Adventures in the Uncanny Valley.
‘I disappeared into the world of Pan Pan and it was a life-saver’