As Dublin theatre festival makes a welcome return to its pre-Covid scale, Dead Centre’s Good Sex (★★★★☆) puts live performance and physical proximity under the spotlight. Written in collaboration with author Emilie Pine, director Ben Kidd’s production has fun with the risks inherent both in performance and in being intimate with someone else.
An intimacy director (Liv O’Donoghue) welcomes us brightly to her nightly experiment, in which two actors, who have not rehearsed, are invited to participate. On opening night, the two were Aoibheann McCann and Rory Nolan (both superb) who were fed their lines through earpieces by stage managers (Alexandra Conlon and Barry McKiernan).
The premise is that these two characters are a formerly cohabiting couple whose awkward reunion may or may not lead to sex. Standing between them, O’Donoghue directs movements and tiny gestures of hands and lips, while the crew whisk the moving parts of Aedín Cosgrove’s set around them. Despite ostensibly being in charge of what unfolds, O’Donoghue becomes involved in their story in absurd ways, breaking in and out of character and time frames, until it all seems to be sliding out of control.
Becoming a commentary on itself, involving the audience – do we give our consent? – and playing with expectations of reality and theatrical illusion, this feels dangerously live, unfolding with cleverly inventive wit.
In Eoghan Quinn’s Colic (★★★★☆), from Hatch Theatre Company, a new baby’s incessant crying strikes a pervasive note of disquiet in a play that shifts between mundane domestic realism and extreme inner states of mind. As Aisling (Kate Stanley Brennan) and Matt (Ekow Quartey) grapple with parenthood and exhaustion, they seem to be drifting apart. While their friend Tom (Colin Campbell) and Aisling’s sister (Liz Fitzgibbon) try to find solutions to the problem of the crying child, they reveal their own difficulties: Tom recovering from a serious breakdown and Jan struggling with addiction.
Designer Alyson Cummins’ sleek kitchen setting is transformed through lighting and a thrumming soundscape into a zone of malaise in which intercutting interior monologues reveal anxiety, anger and dislocation. Smartphones and online images offer them alternative realities, where hallucination, fantasies and violent dreams seem to seep into their waking lives. Strands of plot lines are left deliberately dangling, along with these atomised characters, in Annabelle Comyn’s strikingly unsettling production.
ANU Productions bring their trademark immersive style to a performance that takes James Joyce’s Ulysses as a starting point. Created with Landmark Productions, All Hardest of Woman (★★★☆☆) forms part of an ambitious multidisciplinary project, Ulysses 2.2, marking the centenary of the novel’s publication and set in Dublin today.
In this episode, the audience gathers at night at the National Maternity hospital and follows the cast through a series of corridors. We meet overworked junior doctors, a midwife, a porter and a father-to-be (Alex O’Neill, Ali Keohane, Matthew Williamson, Robbie O’Connor) who move through the clinic’s rooms, using dance and intense movement to express pressure and exhaustion.
Intimations of grief recur, whether for stillbirths, infertility or miscarriages. The performers burst into tiny rooms from one door, speak in whispers and leave from a different exit, so that the action is out of sight and not quite understood – as hospital patients often feel. Rather than using dramatic dialogue or narrative, this sombre piece relies on choreography and Carl Kennedy’s evocative sound design of bleeping and pulsing monitors, to create a sense of sadness and loss.
Dublin theatre festival continues until 16 October.
