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Bones
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
Can there be anybody, apart from inveterate racists, still in two minds about the deplorability of apartheid, or anyone, other than steel-plated sociopaths, who remain unmoved by the suffering of others? And can there be any effect more beneficial from a right-on production of a post-apartheid drama than to flatter an audience's politics? Bones, by the British playwright Kay Adshead, presented by Calypso, is a drama about exhumation, both literally and figuratively. Set in contemporary Johannesburg where Jennifer, a white Afrikaans woman played with great assurance by Susan Fitzgerald, cares for her terminally ill husband (or at least has her domestic staff tend to him), it centres on a guilty secret buried beneath her rose garden, first upturned in a local search for tribal ancestors, but soon revealing a much more shallow grave.
Written as a two-hander between Jennifer and her maid, Beauty (a bright and commendably unsentimental Evelyn Duah), the premise may sound like a collision course, but it plays more like an instruction manual for truth and reconciliation. No one could doubt that Adshead and director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh are emotionally engaged in the subject. We open with the spectral apparition of a beaten and bloody young boy - also played by Duah - strung up from a tree whose laments echo from the grave. But that emotional investment comes at the expense of critical rigour. The plotting, for instance, manages to be both straight-ahead and confusing.
Seduced at the age of 13 and married not long after, there is some reason to believe that Jennifer is astoundingly naive. But she is also casually contemptible, at one point throwing a dress at Beauty with imperious largesse (it is a gift). That she is taken in, then, by Beauty's claims to supernatural abilities, I can just about accept. That Beauty is actually a gleeful and opportunistic huckster, I whole-heartedly appreciate. But that I am expected to feel sympathy for a witness to appalling torture, because her marriage has been rather tough, or to swallow Beauty's later, un-ironic connection to the gods is next to affronting. The consequences of such a muddled tone, within an ostensibly naturalistic, political drama, run deeper. To err is human, to forgive divine may be a laudable maxim, and politically necessary for progress, but it's hard to square with recent human-rights abuses. Jennifer's complicity with such crimes cannot be easily exonerated.
Ní Chaoimh incorporates Tower of Babel, the musically adept multi-ethnic group, as a chorus, lining the periphery of Diego Pitarch's set and segregated by police tape. Their music, their occasionally seething Bantu words, and Solomon Ijigade's percussion offer frequent commentary.
Ultimately, though, the songs are asked to serve as a balm, easing the story towards conclusion and inclusion. Such harmony is certainly admirable, but Adshead's drama, neither convincing nor challenging, does not seem to earn it.
Runs until Sept 8
Peter Crawley
Southern Tenant Folk Union
St John's Arts Centre, Listowel
If there's one thing that sets bluegrass and old time American music apart, it's their inherent devil-may-care attitude, their defiant refusal to be constrained by the laws of physics that govern the rest of us lesser mortals. Odd then, that the Southern Tenant Folk Union should cut such a restrained shape on stage, corralling rather than unleashing their genteel ensemble sound.
St John's Arts Centre provided a welcoming backdrop for the Folk Union's first full tour outside of the UK. Granted, their genetic lineage owes more to south London than it does to the Deep South, but still, Pat McGarvey and his band of (not quite) merry men and woman would inject some much-needed vim into their highly original set list if they just gave themselves permission to loosen up and fly right, just as Mose Allison would've urged them, had he ventured in the direction of north Kerry on this night.
Eamonn Flynn's songwriting provides the Folk Union with a handful of superb calling cards, each one tapping into the deliciously esoteric inheritance left over by the Stanley Brothers, the Carter Family and Flatt and Scruggs. The Suitor's Lament cast a wry smile over the many amorous adventures of musicians ever-blessed, or cursed, by their chosen instrument, with, for once, the banjo player garnering all the laurels, while the Union's next single, Cocaine, was a fine study of the dark underbelly of the nose candy that's become a staple of dinner parties from Derbyshire to Doolin.
Overly reliant on vocalist and guitarist Oliver Talkes, who bears closer kinship to Don Henley than to Ralph Stanley, this Folk Union shimmies and sways at times to Frances Vaux's irritatingly self-effacing fiddle (at times barely audible) and Pete Gow's competent but reserved guitar and vocals. McGarvey's front-of-house duties salvage his decidedly shaky vocals, and he counters his easy banter with a well-targeted salvo towards apathetic electorates everywhere on Mesopotamia, surely the most politically-charged bluegrass specimen ever to raise a hackle either north or south of the Mason Dixon line.
Without a strong vocalist to navigate the high Cs so beloved of bluegrass, the Folk Union still managed to hawk some charming wares through a meadow strewn with bluegrass, gospel, soul and English folk. It was a mix 'em, gather 'em that whispered of some promise, if only they'd jettison a tincture of their self-possession and throw caution to the wind.
Siobhán Long
