Hopeless vision of the future on Spike
SPIKE Island is the eerie location for Far Away
– a dark, nihilistic drama staged as part of Cork’s Midsummer Festival.
It’s a balmy night as we chug towards Ireland’s Alcatraz – the historic fortress-cum-prison smack in the middle of Cork Harbour.
Caryl Churchill’s unsettling vision of the future stars Pauline McLynn, Judith Roddy and Manus Halligan.
We go from seeing a young girl witnessing human trafficking to a future where a global inferno has set nation against nation. Even the animals and the elements have taken sides.
Years later, a grown-up Joan constructs hats for manacled captives shuffling to a Holocaust-type doom. In the final scene, the chaos resembles a Narnia gone mad: ‘The elephants have gone over to the Dutch’ and ‘the cats have come in on the side of the French’. Even the elements have taken sides. ‘The Bolivians are working with gravity but we’re getting further with noise and there’s thousands dead of light in Madagascar.’
In Far Away, the Corcadorca Theatre Company has again brought a whole new meaning to ‘the great outdoors’. Ably directed by Pat Kiernan, with Mel Mercier’s disquieting soundtrack and lighting design by Aedin Cosgrove and Paul Keogan, it is Spike Island itself that steals much of the show. A vast wasteland of roofless buildings, ancient stone walls and massive gates that incarcerated so many thousands at the height of colonial rule.
n In a no less historical location, the venerable Everyman Theatre presents the Irish premiere of Futureproof, by Lynda Radley. Reuniting the writer with director Tom Creed, this award-winning drama stars Gerard Byrne, Amy Conroy, Michael Glenn Murphy, Gillian McCarthy, Gina Moxley, Karen McCartney and Julie Sharkey. Set around a travelling circus ‘freakshow’ threatened by dwindling audiences, the boss Riley hits on the ruse that patrons – tired of the abnormal – might pay to see his ‘oddities’ become more like everyone else. Futureproof charts their various makeovers – and the emotional price to be paid for such transformations.