Rosita Boland is used to making do with terrible theatre. But once in a while an unforgettable production comes along . . .
Programmes for arts and theatre festivals are often deliberately and unhelpfully vague. Essentially, they are all about selling shows, and therefore they try to make those shows appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
Sometimes there are clues - a famous company name, a famous director, actor, playwright or creator - but the truth really begins to emerge only when audiences leave the theatre and start discussing what they have seen. Word of mouth is still the most powerful publicity.
This year two shows emerged instantly as jewels of their festivals, loved by both critics and audiences. The gorgeous Junebug Symphony, by the French genius James Thiérrée, was the imaginative heart and soul of Galway Arts Festival. The Far Side Of The Moon, by the multitalented Quebec man Robert Lepage, played the same role at Dublin Theatre Festival.
When I read the notes in the festival programme for Lepage's show, which he wrote and directed for Ex Machina theatre company, I felt the usual mystification. "A simple resonating idea, staged with such beauty and warmth that the result - sensual, emotional and intellectual - is breathtaking. Lepage's obsession with geography, inner exploration and the place and purpose of technology has led him to investigate the ultimate dream of our time: the voyage to the moon." Hmmm. Not much wiser.
But once the show opened people started raving about "the Lepage". Oddly, in conversation, nobody seemed able to describe it to me any better than the programme notes: all they insisted was that it had to be seen, that it was unmissable.
Such a promise was enough to get me into the theatre on a Saturday afternoon, expectations hopeful.
My reactions to experiences at the theatre go roughly as follows. If it's terrible (far more often than you'd think) I never clap, and I tell people afterwards to avoid it - about as uselessly subversive as it's possible to get as a member of an Irish audience. Five bad minutes in the theatre last much, much longer than five minutes anywhere else; an entire evening of bad theatre makes me feel downright evil.
If it's good (scarce enough) I remember disconnected bits of it, mostly in a visual way, as if I'm seeing it again but with the sound down.
If it's brilliant (rare) I remember it in scenes that return as perfect vignettes. But I also recall exactly the excitement it made me feel, an indefinable connection that ignites like a match between what's happening on the stage and the watching audience, something being simultaneously created afresh and witnessed afresh in real, shared time. I don't know how other people store theatre in their memories, but that's what happens to me.
For me, and many others, The Far Side Of The Moon created that unforgettable excitement. The crudest description is that it is a one-man show, supported at times by puppeteers, that runs for two and a quarter hours without a break. One performer, the extraordinary Yves Jacques, plays two brothers, who are baffled by each other, often to the point of dislike, but who are drawn together at various points of their lives; this time, by the death of their mother.
One, Philippe, is a drifting failed scientist obsessed with space: it tantalises and eludes him in many forms, notably in his failure to complete his PhD on the subject. As a result, his life literally can't get off the ground. The other brother, André, is a successful television presenter; they live, as the saying goes, in different worlds.
It's how those worlds are presented, their various collisions and drifts past each other, both in Jacques' superb performance and in the wonderful set, that make the compelling theatre of the piece. A fabulously imaginative set of curved mirrors and sliding screen is crucial to its success: like an eye set into it, a glass porthole alone transforms into a washing machine, a goldfish bowl, a camera lens, a portal, the moon, the world.
Possibilities in a life are everywhere - and often found in the most unexpected places, Lepage keeps reminding us as the images keep coming. Puppeteers work unobtrusively at intervals, silently illustrating the script in a way nothing else could have done; we thus literally saw what was going on inside Philippe's head. Yet nothing about this show or its technically brilliant set is tricksy or there for the sake if it; everything works perfectly, simply and only because it's right.
It is rare for Irish audiences to have the opportunity to see a show like this, one in which the staging and set are as integral and vital to the success of the whole as the script is. We're good - sometimes brilliant - on our narrative-driven plays, but in terms of staging we're in the Dark Ages. Staging such as that used in The Far Side Of The Moon casts light and shade on a show in a potent and devastatingly effective way that words alone cannot.
The final haunting image of the show: Philippe earthbound as ever, yet miraculously floating. I almost didn't clap, but that's because I was still mesmerised.
