An engrossing prince of sorrows
Dublin Theatre Festival Gate Theatre, Dublin
Dublin’s annual theatre festival must rank as one of the best programmed, and most civilised, in the English-speaking world. It entails none of the bingewatching, wallet-busting behaviour that tends to go with the territory at the Edinburgh festival. You can visit for a few days, sample world-class work, and actually enjoy the city.
The main “event” thus far is the Gate Theatre’s Hamlet, directed by South African director Yael Farber and boasting the gender-blind casting of Ruth Negga in the title role. The Ethiopian-irish actress is quasi following in the footsteps of Fanny Furnival, an English actress who moved to Dublin in 1739, seeking better roles, and wound up playing the great Dane.
Negga is blessed with the most wonderfully expressive eyes – when subtly widened, they can look like they’re ready to collect with tears. Suited and smart, she suggests a crophaired androgyny, soulful femininity combined with essence of little boy lost. Indeed, her palpably distraught Hamlet is so engrossed in the sorrows of the opening soliloquy that the prince doesn’t notice the watching gaze and quiet caress of Aoife Duffin’s sidelined Ophelia.
The production carries many of Farber’s hallmarks (razor-sharp lighting, swirling haze, rumbles of sound) while somewhat lacking her signature flourish of perspectiveshifting innovation. What’s forcefully communicated all the same is a sense of Elsinore as a place of entombment: the set’s a catacomb of coffin-black doors. Claudius delivers his abortive confession to a priest while the bowler-hatted gravediggers look like they hail from Waiting for Godot. Plastic sheeting, signifying the flimsy dividing line between life and death, forms a chilling final curtain, the slain rising up behind it in a spectacle of futile carnage. It’s as if the only way out is via the grave.
A similar bleak sentiment possesses the latest remarkable piece from ANU. This local company specialises in immersing its audiences in worlds of social deprivation, and The Lost O’casey takes its cue from Nannie’s Night Out, an almost forgotten one-act play by Sean O’casey – staged once at the Abbey in 1924, about a poor, drunken tenement-dweller.
In this quest to find the modern equivalents of O’casey’s lost female soul, small parties of punters are guided through north Dublin streets, splintering as they go, before winding up in a condemned housing estate.
Casually confiding passers-by prove integral to a storyline crowded with broken dreams. There’s a young drug-addict (also called Nannie, a bloodied, blistering Sarah Morris) who can’t wean herself off her failed boxer boyfriend; a mother still mourning the man who deserted her years ago; a group of lads found oblivious in a boozy, druggy reverie, escaping, like us, the moment when real-life has to resume. Louise Lowe directs an hour of warts-and-all perfection.