Theatre in various forms reviewed today.
Call Cutta In a Box
We Are Here festival,
Custom House Quay, Dublin
Call Cutta in a Boxis a participatory installation of sorts facilitated by Dutch performance trio Rimini Protokoll as part of the Dublin Docklands' We Are Here festival. It is set in an empty office, where individual audience members are invited to take a river-side seat and relax and wait for the telephone to ring. It does, you answer and the experience begins.
"Hello? Can you hear me? This is Calcutta calling." It is a tentative start, but with these words, Basundhara tells me, the play has begun, and my response has just started scene two. My guide is Basundhara Ghoshal, a 24-year-old Bengali woman, who is taking time out from her call-centre duties to befriend me. She asks after my health, inquires about the weather, asks me to imagine her and write my vision down.
With the help of some clever technology, she makes me a cup of tea, plays me some music and asks me to dance. Finally, we meet each other, not quite face-to-face. Neither of us looks like the other expected, but we exchange e-mail addresses and promise to stay in touch.
The idea underlying Call Cutta in a Boxis communication and the mediation of relationships through time and space. "What is lost," Rimini Protokoll ask us, "when our lives are conducted through technology? And what," they want us to question, "might be gained?" The answer is an unrepeatable personal experience that is actually more real than performance-based.
However, after sharing yourself with your caller and the empty room, there is something rather unsatisfying about the aftertaste, when you start questioning your own contribution. You decide to e-mail your new best friend, Basundhara, for reassurance, but the postmaster delivers the e-mail back to you.
It turns out that this relationship, just like her e-mail address, is a fake. What might be gained then? It seems nothing.
Until July 26, hourly, from 2-8pm
SARA KEATING
In High Germany
Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin
In one way, Tilt's production of Dermot Bolger's short monologue could not have come at a less appropriate time. The desperate fervour it captures in one man's loyal traipse through Germany, in support of Ireland's 1988 European Championship campaign, doesn't anticipate the euphoria, entitlement and disillusion of the next two decades, or sit comfortably in the ashes of a recent tournament from which Ireland could only take vicarious pleasure.
In another, far more important way, though, Bolger's depiction of emigrants in search of home has a still-searing effect that time has not diminished - here given fresh force by John Delaney's commanding, taut performance.
When we first meet Eoin, circling a train station bench in Hamburg with frustrated rage, the aftermath of defeat spurs him not so much towards post-match analysis as the beginning of a national identity crisis. Measured out in memories of train stations, Eoin's recollections include countless stop-offs en route to international matches, as well as the frequent homecomings of his father, a man who made sacrifices so his son "would grow up under an Irish flag". Various playwrights have used football as a dramatic device: Paul Mercier to express working class camaraderie, Marie Jones to address cross-cultural intolerance and Sebastian Barry to reveal ugly domestic truths behind its distraction. Bolger seizes it as a vehicle for a complicated, splintered sense of nationalism.
When Eoin recalls his boyhood duty to pledge his life's blood to Ireland, Bolger doesn't consider it ironic that devotion to a country should funnel into devotion to a team. "I'm not a bleedin' professor of Irish history," Eoin complains when quizzed on football trivia, yet Bolger carefully entangles his identity with that of Ireland, his displacement infused with our national game of inheritance and dispossession.
Economic exiles whose only sense of belonging exists in a terrace chant, their dilemma is overstated - a coda, as sumptuously written as it is superfluous, suggests Bolger the poet gets the better of Bolger the playwright - but Donal Courtney's intense and affecting staging connects with the rootless souls of a nation with something to prove; whose impossible dream for themselves as much as their team is simply that they qualify.
Until July 26
PETER CRAWLEY
Rum and Vodka
Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin
Playwright Conor McPherson is colonising Dublin's theatres at present. The Abbey has just bid farewell to his award-winning new play, The Seafarer, while the Gate is enjoying a successful revival of his hugely successful earlier work, The Weir. Joining this McPherson maelstrom, Bewley's Cafe Theatre, better known as a lunchtime venue where you can catch a short play along with your soup and sandwich, has now opened its doors at teatime to host Rum and Vodka, an early monologue from the now internationally acclaimed writer.
Rum and Vodka, performed by Chris Gallagher and directed by John Delaney, is a compact piece of work and a clever choice of material to showcase new talent, requiring just one actor and no particular set. But while McPherson's broad, rambling tale - of three lost nights in a pugilistic haze of alcohol and regret - may not saddle a young company with exorbitant production costs, it does demand a performance of maturity and subtlety, albeit that the central character is in his early 20s.
Gallagher and Delaney, both former students of the Gaiety School of Acting, approach McPherson's bleak catalogue of alcoholic stupefaction and emotional and sexual confusion with great energy, ripping through the first couple of hours of the character's lost weekend when, in need of a drink and release from his desperate frustration and self-loathing, he hurls his computer through the office window and embarks on an alcoholic adventure.
It is when the story begins to sink into the morose territory of a vicious, self-annihilating hangover, with its accompanying sense of utter failure and loss, that the production seems to let the play slip out of its grasp a little. Nonetheless, on the whole it is a confident and well-executed show, and one would hope that it will engender an audience for the theatre's new slot. On these monsoon evenings a gentle libation and a cautionary tale spliced with mean humour could be just the shelter to while away the lost summer.
Until July 26
HILARY FANNIN
