PETER CRAWLEYreviews First Love at the The Helix and SEONA MAC RÉAMOINNreviews Rammed Earth as part of the Dublin Dance Festival

First Love
The Helix, Dublin

The nameless protagonist of Samuel Beckett's novella First Love prefers to take his lunch in a graveyard, to breathe an air faintly scented with corpses, while imagining his own droll epitaph among the headstones.

"Hereunder lies the above," he muses, "who up below so hourly died that he lived on till now." The grimly amusing quality of Beckett's story stems from this character's pathological revulsion from the stink of humanity, the chore of conversation and the desires of the body. What lifts it above sociopathic screed, though, is a mordant wit twisting through its often tortuous prose, bringing some nasty fun to its rejection of the living.

Gare St Lazare Players' austere production - for which the original text is recited in its entirety - astutely preserves that bone-dry humour without desiccating the animation of performance. That's no easy feat. The Beckett estate has always been cagey about "straight readings" ever since Beckett denounced an adaptation that sounded "like a pretty crooked straight reading to me". Nothing about Conor Lovett's excellent performance could be called crooked, but with utter fidelity to the text he discovers subtle nuances and discreet angles within the lines to uncover a character. The first-person narrator of a novel easily becomes an onstage monologist, but in the wrong hands Beckett's prose would sound inert. Lovett makes circuitous syntax sound like the hesitations of a neurotic speaker, his brow rising and locking as words slip or drag from his mouth; uncertain thoughts of family and love gradually taking shape.

There is a triumph of literary excavation here, where director Judy Hegarty Lovett and her performer have traced every thought within a tangle of prose, ideas and corrosive wit. Their efforts have made First Love's surface story more accessible - tracing its protagonist's attempts to understand his relationship with a prostitute that leads him, briefly, towards the clutter of emotions, a home and even the world.

Moving us from the peace of the graveyard to the unruly cries of birth - an unusual trajectory - Lovett's performance is both disarming and startling, carrying a singular, ironic achievement: the character may turn his back on the living, yet this performance brings rich new life to his words.
PETER CRAWLEY

Dublin Dance Festival: Rammed Earth
SS Michael and John, Dublin

When we enter a room, each of us takes in our surroundings in so many different ways. Dance is also a personal negotiation of space, and these two observations were perfectly aligned in New York-based choreographer Tere O'Connor's piece, Rammed Earth.

This was an engaging take on a site-specific work, in that not only the dancers used the wonderful, airy and imposing room of the converted church space with its vaulted windows to great effect, but we the audience are also involved thorough moving our chairs and literally shifting our perspective on the space and the movement. In the first phase, the chairs were dispersed casually around the room to create multiple angles and directions. The four dancers drifted among us slowly, then rhythmically gathered pace, creating brief wind tunnels as they breezed by our bodies. They intersected quickly but adroitly, avoiding contact but focused on a destination, in the manner of pedestrians on a busy street.

At other points we all faced in the same direction, concentrating on the width of the room, where the exposed brick wall gave the performers a canvas to work against, or divided in two, sandwiching the dancers and the space between us, before finally moving to the end of the room and allowing our eyes and the dancers' bodies to travel and exploit the sheer length of the space. Here, shadows of the geometric and architectural design blended with the human movement and gesture and subtle lighting and score.

Emotional or intimate connection between the dancers was casual and occasional, but when it happened, as in the final body embrace of Heather Olson and Matthew Rogers, it was intensely human and oddly touching.
SEONA MAC RÉAMOINN