In a Dublin theatre festival programme jammed with fresh perspectives and inventive productions, Safe House (★★★★★), a new collaboration between writer-director Enda Walsh and composer Anna Mullarkey, is a dazzling achievement. In the form of a song cycle, with one live performer on stage, the experience is one of sensory envelopment through film imagery, orchestral composition, rippling sound design and Kate Gilmore’s stunning performance. Following his opera trilogy with composer Donnacha Dennehy and his Lazarus musical with David Bowie, Walsh continues to explore original ways of bringing text and music together, working with his frequent collaborators, lighting designer Adam Silverman and videographer Jack Phelan.
Melding elements of torch songs, wispy folk and synthpop, Gilmore takes us into the mind of Grace, a young woman who grew up in the west of Ireland in the 1980s and early 90s. Filmed scenes projected on the wall of an abandoned handball alley reveal her past in fragmentary memories. In Katie Davenport’s playful design, images recur of small, safe spaces to crawl into. Episodes from a childhood overshadowed by alcoholism; miserable children’s parties, followed by small-town teenage isolation; escape to the city and attempts to numb out trauma – all are shown as fleeting impressions, underscored by Mullarkey’s velvety layers of electronica, strings and vocal ensemble. In this beautifully realised, multifaceted work, we watch Grace finding her own way to create a life, either by making peace with her broken past, or by turning her back on it.
Guest Host Stranger Ghost (★★★★☆) has to be light on its feet. Kate Heffernan’s play for Once Off Productions is performed on the stage sets of other festival productions, in theatres around the city. “Who can afford a set these days?” asks Maeve O’Mahony, introducing this clever, stage-surfing show before assuming her role as Deirdre. One of three characters sharing the house of an elderly woman who is in a care home, Deirdre fears that the owner could die at any time and they would have to move out. Drawing attention to Dublin’s housing crisis and the acute shortage of rental accommodation, Heffernan shows the toll taken by insecurity and short-term living arrangements with strangers.
When Deirdre and her friend John Paul (Finbarr Doyle) invite a fast-food delivery man, Fran (Shadaan Felfeli), to move in with them to help with the rent, they behave like squatters. Director Eoghan Carrick creates a tone of unease, as the three tiptoe in the dim light thrown by their phones and laptops, with an air of enforced passivity. Interrupted by the shrill ring of the owner’s landline, they avoid answering it, while a power cut leaves them sitting in the dark. Gradually we see the bond between them grow, yet it remains so fragile that one of them might just disappear, like John Paul’s boyfriend. Whether through avoidance, withdrawal or submersion in online distraction, ghosting takes many forms here.
The consequences of a young couple’s hasty decision to move in together play out disturbingly in Breaking (★★★☆☆), by Amy Kidd, for Fishamble theatre company. Tackling the subjects of coercive control and consent in an intimate relationship, Kidd’s script is an elaborately structured puzzle portraying the characters of Sam and Charlie first as two men, then a man and a woman, then two women, in different combinations. Deftly directed by Jim Culleton, the committed actors – Curtis-Lee Ashquar, Eavan Gaffney, Matthew Malone and Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle – each pick up where another has left off in a sequence of short, intense scenes.
While the setting of a sitting room with six doors suggests farce or comic opera, the intent is wholly serious here. By having the diverse cast swap roles and the characters swap genders, the audience are prodded into some self-examination. As the emotional manipulation of Sam by Charlie lays the ground for sexual and physical abuse, our assumptions are challenged. Patience is tested also, though, when at the halfway point Kidd takes a note from Pinter and reverses the chronological order – with diminishing returns. As one tearful apology or anxious demand for reassurance blurs into another, the dramatic impact of this ambitious debut is diluted.
Following The Lost O’Casey, Anu Productions return to Seán O’Casey’s work in Starjazzer (★★★☆☆), adapting this short story set in the Dublin tenements of the early 20th century. Bringing their customary visual flair to create an intimate, site-specific performance, writer-director Louise Lowe and designers Owen Boss, Ciaran Bagnall and Rob Moloney have staged this in a Georgian building, bringing the past and present together through two separate solo performances that overlap briefly.
As a married woman in 1923, worn out by childbirth, poverty and unrelenting domestic labour, Liv O’Donoghue (the “starjazzer”) takes a moment to stand outside in the tiny courtyard to survey the night sky and admire the stars. As she dances, fixing her eyes on the audience, the sense of a passionate life being wasted is intense and affecting. Upstairs in a sparsely furnished room, her young counterpart in present-day Dublin is also living on the margins – although in Ciara Byrne’s tentative performance of Lowe’s text, her circumstances are not fully clear. What links the two women across the century is a shared experience of deprivation, yet the suggestion of women’s victimhood being almost inevitable needs more elaboration than it receives here.
Language is pushed to breaking point in Forced Entertainment’s latest show, Signal to Noise (★★★★☆), marking the company’s 40th anniversary. On their third visit to this festival, the performers – Robin Arthur, Seke Chimutengwende, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor – give an unstinting display of the ever-curious, anarchic spirit that has made this ensemble so influential. Scurrying across the stage carrying pot plants and furniture with manic intent, they attempt to lip-sync to recorded lines created by director Tim Etchells using AI and text-to-speech software.
“Is this my voice?” each of them asks in turn. “Are we live? Are you alive?” another asks. Each of the performers attempts to outrun the insistent, disembodied snatches of speech that bounce from one person to the next and seem to be speaking through them. Beaming while talking about dystopian weather disasters, dancing through accounts of chronic illness, the bodies on stage and the recorded voices are behaving separately, out of sync, creating effects both absurd and surprisingly poignant. Pitting new technology against our instinct to express ourselves, this smart, disconcerting experiment presents a tussle between the human and the machine.
Safe House is at the Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 16 November. Guest Host Stranger Ghost is at various venues as part of the Dublin theatre festival until 13 October. Breaking is at the Everyman, Cork, on 9 October. Starjazzer is at the Royal Society of Antiquaries Ireland, Dublin, until 2 November. Signal to Noise is touring until 7 December.
