Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin
Oscar Wilde’s 1892 fairytale,
The Birthday of the Infanta
, is a curious thing – an escapist story about the inescapable. It luxuriates in regal fantasy and exotic depiction, trailing a series of bullfighters, zither-playing Egyptians and African snake-charmers through a birthday party at the Spanish court. Yet at its centre is a 12-year-old princess who can only play with children of her own rank – which means no one at all – and a naïve dwarf blissfully unaware that his appearance earns him courtly attention but imprisons him in its disdain.
It is a satisfying combination, smooth and prickly, in a story where roses bear not only thorns, they also pass nasty comments. In her elegant and lively new stage adaptation, director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh sculpts the narrative to make it playable, introducing characters while dropping others, extending elements of the text into imaginative themes, treating innocence with a knowing wit and lending it the bright interaction of a pop-up story book.
Jill Murphy’s princess has been taken out of the hands of her original guardian, Wilde’s dry narrator, and put into the care of a governess, brightly played by Natalie Radmall-Quirke. In some respects, Wilde was more protective, speaking for her in cooling ironies (“Although she was a real princess . . . she still had only one birthday a year”). Now delivered as a personal complaint, such words contribute to a parody of spoilt narcissism.
Murphy defuses it shrewdly, her po-faced commentary never alienating the audience, while Radmall-Quirke indulges her with amusingly tight exasperation.
Nothing endears a character to us like advance ridicule, so when a dwarf is summoned to entertain the princess he is advertised as “a little misshapen thing that Nature, in some humorous mood, had fashioned for others to mock at”. A spirited Oscar Hernandez Rodriguez secures our sympathies, even before his doe-eyed performance peeks out from beneath a padded hunchback and tousled wig.
Entranced by the princess, the dwarf returns to the palace (via a cleverly enacted and deeply judgmental flower bed) where his downfall awaits him in the distorted shape of his own self-image. It’s a cruel awakening to see oneself through the eyes of others, and here it is the sting in the tale.
Somehow, though, despondency is not the final note of Ní Chaoimh’s charming work, where Miriam Duffy’s elegant set and costumes, sumptuously lit by Moyra D’Arcy, and the limber performances of the cast soothe the meaning without compromising it. It may be a story of heartbreak and heartlessness, but here it is told with great heart.
Runs until May 1st
