Reviewed: The Tinkers Curseat The Venue Theatre, Meath and Roger Waters at The Point, Dublin.
The Tinkers Curse
The Venue Theatre, Meath
A country road. A tree. Evening.
A play in which three speakers deliver four monologues, shifting between evasion and elaboration, slowly unveiling a tragedy before the night's end.
Michael Harding's new play for Livin' Dred, with its form straight from Brian Friel's Faith Healer and its design, by Barry McKinney, straight from Waiting For Godot, creates more distractions than diversions. It tells the doomed story of a family of Travellers, persecuted both by settled society and, we are meant to believe, by the darkest phantasms of the supernatural.
As Delia Rattigan, Mary McEvoy is both a seer and a huckster, who, like Friel's Frank Hardy, has achieved some low level of fame for her "gift" and her willingness to corroborate with her politically insincere, hand-wringing employer in Cavan. "I know the spirit world," McEvoy says, her face distorted by ghost-story uplighting; later, "Some of us don't even know what tampons are for". The Tinkers Curse partly refers to a spell she places on Johnny Reilly (Andrew Bennett) in a rash moment, who, she surmises, has stolen delft from her employer's hotel, and, more to the point, has stolen her son, Mikey (Aaron Monaghan), into his embrace. "That delft will be here in the morning," she says ominously, "but maybe is as someone I know won't be." The horrifying lesson here is to always check your curses for ironic loopholes and proper syntax.
There is a lot to admire in the pungent poetry of Harding's text and its engaging delivery by three ferociously talented actors. McEvoy, a familiar presence to anyone who has ever owned a television, is almost unrecognisable, while both Monaghan and Bennett can be both earthily amusing and deeply haunted.
However, commissioned to write a play that would tour, Harding seems to have seized travelling as his broad theme, making either a helpless or hubristic association with Faith Healer, one of the most formally daring and thematically accomplished plays in Irish history. Where that story is distended and reshaped between Friel's successive speakers, here it largely repeats and meanders.
The more serious thrust of Harding's play - the lot of the Traveller in contemporary Ireland - is rather compromised by the stoking of superstition.
(If the set is otherworldly, why shouldn't we accept apparitions rising through the floorboards?). True, we are offered both psychiatric and forensic clues to explain the curse, but director Padraic
McIntyre seems to be in a bind. This may be why his space begins to feels like a cage, the actors moving in almost identical
patterns, from centre stage to a stool and back again.
Such confinement seems an inevitable - perhaps even fated - consequence of theme and form. Whether it is cursed or just constrained, the play has nowhere to go.
On national tour until May 26th. Peter Crawley.
Roger Waters
The Point, Dublin
That's one small step for a man, one giant, heavy legacy to lug around the world. As Roger Waters steps diffidently onstage clutching his trusty bass guitar, he knew he was going to have to once again try to recreate the massive sound of his old band Pink Floyd, on a smaller scale and budget, and without the other three. If there's anyone in the audience who's here solely on account of Waters's solo work, he or she will have to sit through a set comprising 90 per cent Floyd material.
Running over the same old ground he may be, but Waters bears his massive cross with a stiff upper lip, comforted by the knowledge that, by the end of the show, the rabble will realise that he is the one, true keeper of the Floyd flame. He claims to have conceived and written the bulk of Floyd's classic work; just so that we're in no doubt, tickets for the gig bear the legend, "creative genius - Pink Floyd".
Not that Roger Waters has anything less than huge respect for his audience - otherwise he wouldn't be going to so much trouble to give them the full Floyd experience, and he wouldn't be bothering to engage with the fans in such an affable manner.
As he points mock-accusingly to various sections of the crowd during opening theme In the Flesh?, his unending pride in his past creations is apparent.
Tonight's show is divided into two sections, the second half devoted to the centrepiece performance of Dark Side of the Moon, but there are enough Floydian trips in the first half to satisfy even the most rabid Pink-o. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Wish You Were Here and Have a Cigar elicit the expected response; songs
from The Final Cut - a Waters solo album to all intents and purposes - such as Southampton Dock and Fletcher
Memorial Home open the way for Waters to air the strong political views that have ruffled some sections of his American audience.
New song Leaving Beirut leaves no room for equivocation, being a direct, venomous stab at Bush, Blair and the Christian right who have orchestrated the invasion of Iraq. It's not a great song, but it does display Waters's penchant for the grandiose, eloquent statement. The first half climaxes with a real flying pig, no strings attached, this one adorned with anti-coalition graffiti.
It's during Dark Side of the Moon that Waters's band comes into its own, guitarists Dave Kilminster and Snowy White fluidly recreating Dave Gilmour's guitar solos, Kilminster and keyboard player John Carin handling a huge share of the vocals, synth player Harry Waters doing dad proud, and singers Katie Kissoon, PP Arnold and Carol Kenyon adding the "aaah" factor.
Of course, the 360-degree surround sound, lasers and giant, space-age screen visuals added to the overall effect, and Waters was sensible enough to turn down the pyrotechnics and just let the record speak to us. Kevin Courtney
