Townsend is immersed in spellbinding display
Solar Bones Abbey Theare, Until Oct 29, E veryman Cork, Nov 2-4 ★★★★★
ONE-MAN plays are at their best when the speaker appears to be talking and listening to himself and not to an audience. It’s what you get in the soliloquies of Shakespeare and in this dramatisation of Mike McCormack’s novel, adapted by Michael West. Stanley Townsend inhabits the character of Marcus Conway so totally, that you never think of him just playing a role. It’s as if you’re intruding into the man’s mind. And it makes an absolutely absorbing 95 minutes.
From the start it’s not clear why Marcus is wandering around his house alone in Louisburgh, Co Mayo. The Angelus bell is ringing, it’s All Souls Day, November 2. Where are his wife
‘Marcus has had far too many run-ins to be dewy eyed about country life’
He conjures up a whole world of his life experience in small-town West of Ireland
and children? Everything seems to be in order but the emptiness is not just the absence of family.
As he muses on life and looks around him, he conjures up a whole world of life and experience in small-town Ireland: the vicissitudes and betrayals of family life, the local characters, the sounds, the intimate details that make up a family and a community.
And those intimate details construct the whole story of a life and its surroundings with its humour and
‘its rhythms and rituals holding up the world like solar bones.’
Marcus recalls his father repairing a tractor, where every tiny element is vital if the machine is to be complete: like the town itself, made up of every aspect of life that makes it a unit.
But this is no sentimental lookback at a rural ideal. As a civil engineer, Marcus has had too many run-ins with builders, developers and politicians to be dewy-eyed about country life. In his jokes, it’s the politicians who are the villains, from the chaos at the creation of the world to their insistence on always being around when there’s a photo opportunity to show their involvement, real or imagined, in the latest development.
One of most detailed anecdotes, drawn with a professional’s sharp eye, concerns the niceties of building on a new site where there’s a possibility of corruption.
A serious episode concerning his wife’s health, draws on a memory still too common in the West of Ireland, about the need to boil water contaminated by human sewage, returned to the population via the drinking water supply, complete with deadly cryptosporidiosis.
And beautifully complementing Stanley Townsend’s exceptional performance, is the way Lynne Parker directs with minimum movement that prevents the action being static yet never intrudes into the storytelling or makes itself obvious.
The spare set design and evolving atmospheric lighting provide their own sense of solar bones in a production that’s almost literally haunting.
■ There are 30 pop-up events featuring music, drama, singing and dance as part of Wexford Festival that runs until Nov 6. Events will be performed in various shops and businesses around the town. Performers will include members of the festival’s academy of young singers, and artists from the main stage programmes. Performances are also being streamed via the festival’s social media and YouTube channels. All events are free. Details of venues and performances at the Pop Up section on wexfordopera.com