Theatre review: Duets

The Stain, a three-women art troupe, certainly had on its mind expressions by two artistes in the creation of Duets. Conjugation, or the notion of it, is rife in Maude Davey's eight-member cast staging, although the raunchy production turns out to be a poignant portrait of the joys and pain of human intimacy.

Held together by a palette of ballads and abstract dance, for an absent plot, the work reminds us that behind a world saturated by preoccupations with sex is ultimately a desire for connection.

After a bitter break-up, (in a stirring group performance of Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know), a woman (Francesca Sculli) calls her lover (Jo Franklin), and attempts at reconciliation under apparent talk of rolling-pins and Crisco and nakedness.

A wildly distracted woman (exceptional Sarah Ward), her head in a television-box that she changes channels again and again, further fills the space with songs of longing and of loss. Despite achieving orgasm with inanimate objects she goes on to seek closeness with the audience in a gesture that suggests perhaps the inadequacy of physical gratification.

There is a powerful message inside what first appears to be a sleazy framework (replete with bananas and apples and fake penises) made more potent by Herbz's dim and hazy set design -- enveloped in murky sheets of plastic, so that one feels as if they are looking through half-closed eyes -- and a soundscape in which Gen Bernstein's guitar and Genevieve Fry's harp strum heart-strings as achingly as they do the airwaves. The lighting is noteworthy, too, creating pulse and motion, like electricity shaking up your nerves.

It is The Huxley's final rendition, however, that cuts most keenly. Joined from wearing separate costumes attached by a long, red fabric at each other's chest, Will and Garrett Huxley show and sing of how love is a beautiful condition that comes with the inherent risk of being hurt by actions of the conjoined party.

Still, Duets ends (as it begins; in fact, is interwoven) with a sense of hope through Paula Russell whose graceful ballerina movements, accompanying a choice musical number, leaves you satisfied, with feelings of promise.

An enjoyable afternoon that combines mind and body, science and art, emotions and flesh.

Theatre review: To The Naked Eye

What are the things better left hidden To The Naked Eye in Cerise de Gelder's play? Do they include the unhappiness within Clare's matrimony, something neighbour and single-woman Stephanie suspects? Is the unethical business dealings husband Adam is believed to be involved in one of them? And that Stephanie is alone because, decades ago, her three-week-old groom had been convicted of murder -- is this another? One thing is certain: none of these revelations makes any difference, even if the story ends with trailing possibilities.

We follow the lives of two suburban households, in which Clare finds herself repeatedly presented with gifts from a grateful Stephanie, whom she had helped in a car accident. When Adam becomes hostile to her excessive presence in their home, Stephanie attempts to convince Clare she could be better off on her own.

Meanwhile, the young house-maker, despite maintaining that she enjoys marital bliss, feels neglected by Adam who, himself nursing hurt from his wife's one-time infidelity, claims to be hard at work. Then, suspicious of Stephanie's untoward influence on their marriage, Adam divulges the secrets of her past, and accuses her of sinister motives behind the overtures of friendship.

Although the action of the tale lies in manipulation of power through exhuming skeletons in the closet, Gelder's drama infers truth may be worth less than one would imagine. As the narrative unfolds, we see that, because of circumstances, bringing things into light changes nothing. Characters seem to accept the impossibility of understanding why people do what they do. Given life must go on, the play leads one to think, it might be preferable for happiness to be uncoloured by pain.

Brenda Palmer's staging is brilliant, with the characters jointlessly segueing between soliloquy (as they voice their inner thoughts) and dialogue. In her collaboration with Harry Paternoster whose set deploys the space to magnificent effect, she uses long swathes of cloth to convey transience and a sense of deliberate, if languid, interference.

Performance, too, is tremendous. Stephanie Lillis is volatile and vulnerable as Clare, an attention-starved spouse, with divided loyalties, yet sure of neither. Carolyn Masson is nervy and defiant as Stephanie, a middle-aged loner determined to avoid a similar fate that met with the Sarajevo woman (she'd read) who had been so isolated she was discovered years after her death.

And Miljana Cancar is the returned spirit of that Sarajevo woman, the enlightened figure in red who, in spite of lurking in a corner, is an instructive voice inside Stephanie's head, while Robert Ricks is Adam, effectively suggesting a tormented soul behind the abrasiveness.

This is a profound meditation on idealism and pragmatism, dramatising the interface between self-interests, reality, letting go. What is not hidden To The Naked Eye, though, is that behind the fabric of every existence lies the bleak terror of loneliness.

Film review: Mia Madre

As our parents age impending bereavement from their death inches closer for some of us. Exploring how lives can be dimmed by the stress of this reality, Mia Madre is a gentle drama so melancholy and drawn-out its very air seems to have been sucked away by labour and gloom.

Filming a picture about worker-protests against factory layoffs, director Margherita (Margherita Buy) learns, alongside her brother Giovanni (in a beautifully tempered performance by Nanni Moretti, writer and director of Mia Madre, himself), that their eponymous mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini) is dying.

Giovanni is sad but calm and dedicates his time to caring for Ada; Margherita, on the other hand, exists in denial, teetering on an emotional melt-down, amid strains in her daily life.

Divorced, she has just initiated to break-off a relationship with a devoted lover. That her teenage daughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini), has apparently been nursing a heartache she until now knew nothing about is weighing on the guilt. And the leading-man, Barry Huggins (John Turturro), she has imported from America for her movie is proving exasperating and never remembers his lines.

Revealing very little about the bond between Ada and Margherita, despite hints of past fractures, this (curious) Cannes-award winner is largely suspected to be autobiographical; for Moretti was making his feature We have a Pope in 2011 when his own mother passed away.

If so, Margherita's favourite instruction to her actors -- "to stand beside your character when playing them" -- may not be that bewildering, after all. If each of us consists of an outer-persona (character-role) and an inner (our alter-ego), then Giovanni is really the inside-man of the film-maker who is Moretti acted out by Buy.

If so, it is a delicious conceit.

Only, the 106-minute account alights remorselessly on protracted  and iterative narrations about the way Margherita is (not) coping. Visits to the hospital are touching but dull. While dream sequences and recollections and a fascinating scene, in which she appears to come face-to-face with her younger-self, count like the equivalent of stream-of-consciousness in literature, the story feels like a book uninferent of progress.

Even Tuturro, by adding colour and raising tempo in his portrayal of the idiosyncratic star, cannot save the work.

Towards the end, we see how Margherita arrives at a better understanding of her mother, of herself, indeed of their startling contrasts.

"You don't like anything... that's the way you live," says her lover, bitterly. "People can have only small doses of you."

Well, in Mia Madre, she has been a flame-extinguishing dollop.

Theatre review: In Search of Owen Roe

Arcane ancestor-stories, amongst the most intriguing elements of self-identity, offer rich pickings for dramatists. And this play, written and performed by Vanessa O'Neill, in which she uncovers her Irish roots, certainly digs deep.

Voices in the head and insomnia and a restless consciousness take us back to the 17th-century when Owen Roe O'Neill fought an armed resistance against English rule. One of the most famous antecedents of the dynasty, the commander of the Ulster Army was remembered two hundred years after his death.

It is, however, her great-grandfather, who shares that weighty name eons later, whose life Vanessa desires to explore.

Only, she finds that the body of the man is interred under a bare patch of earth, unmarked, beside his 13-year-old daughter, while everybody else in the family has tombstones to their graves. Why, nobody appears to know.

In this crisp, 60-minute, one-woman show, the playwright tells of how she set out on her mission that has since involved poring over countless documents and trekking many times to her native Shamrock over the past 18 years.

Glynis Angell directs this compelling production that gives us in part a theatrical version of the inside of Vanessa's mind. Sounds of her thoughts come out of the air (in a haunting design by Darious Kedros) about our heads.

The stage is dark and intimate, with a sense of discontent, furnished by a map of Ireland on the one side, and the other a family tree that fruits as the narrative progresses with names.

At the centre, though, of this brooding agitation and persistent search is Vanessa's father slipping into dementia; and in his struggle for freedom and for dignity she recognises a mirror to her own fighting spirit, and indeed her son's emerging quality of independent thinking.

Albeit subtle, Vanessa's scalpel is uncompromising. She peels away one layer of time after another, alluding to idiosyncracies and strength of character that seem to have passed down the generations like breathing heritage.

At its best, the writing combines poetry and soaring images, as it frames the action with ghostly figures that blur the boundary between the dead and living.

But it is Vanessa switching effortlessly into and out of myriad roles -- her father, the great-grandmother, various Irish men she meets at the pub, her son, cousins, to name a few -- using artistic unities to fuse past and present that this staging really shines.

Yet, despite its acuity and tenderness, some parallels drawn across the genealogy feel somewhat elbowed into the account, and strains credulity.

Still, as revelations unfold and we come to understand perhaps why the title character was buried without a stone, and to speculate at his decision to calling himself Gary, In Search of Owen Roe, indubitably satisfies.

It is one of those memorable works that leaves you wondering about your own roots and their secrets and about the same vein that shapes lives today as they shaped them then.

Book Review: Pedro Paramo

I read Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo at a time in my life when strange dreams were invading my sleep and, perhaps for want of rest, long days were spent wrestling with old ghosts.

This second (and last) book by the Mexican author opens with the tale of Juan Preciado who, in fulfilling a promise to his late mother, travels to her birthplace to search out a man named Pedro Páramo, a father he never knew.

The Comala he finds is, however, nothing like the lively village of his mother’s nostalgia; today, the land is barren, and death inhabits houses without roofs.

And, Pedro Páramo, as he learns upon arrival, had died years ago.

The son, who had come in search of self-identity and revenge “for all those years he – [Pedro Páramo] -- put us out of his mind”, stays on, nonetheless.

We start to walk down the hot and empty streets with Juan Preciado, running into a variety of characters, experiencing them, and watching, before feeling with him, through Rulfo’s inimitable technique, the same spooky bewilderment each time we realise that those encounters had really been with the dead.

Like him, we begin to question the existence of those with whom we later meet, and try to cobble together from those conversations a story of what had come before.

Presented in fragments, with enormous silences within cut-scenes --  a pattern that is to pervade the whole textual fabric -- the first-person account that follows Juan Preciado’s journey is punctuated with lyrical recollections of his mother’s words.

Disoriented by the disconnect between what he sees and hears and what his mind (influenced as it is) thinks it sees and hears, Juan Preciado is himself eventually driven to his grave, if not by madness, then by fright.

Weaving through these fractured parts, too, is the (largely-)chronological biography of Pedro Páramo.

Born into a family of landowners now languishing in debt a young Pedro Páramo is thrust into the helm of the household when his father dies. There, through duplicity and violence, during the reign of President Porfirio Diaz that favours capital accumulation, his empire expands with little restraint.

Variously giving orders for people who get in his way to be killed, he also marries Juan Preciado’s mother, the heiress of his biggest creditor, to not merely wipe off their account, but usurp her wealth, only to send her away after he has exhausted her use.

In a novel that explores love and loss and retribution, though, Pedro Páramo has his own share of suffering. Despite a stature that opens doors into every girl’s bedroom, the woman the baron loves, Susana San Juan, a childhood friend with whom he remains obsessed until the end of his life, is herself consumed with passion for someone else.

In this, the second narrative thread, the third-person conventional voice is heavily dribbled with interior monologues in which the man who owns everything there is to have pines at every turn for a sweetheart whose emotions he never wins.

Then, in pioneering magic realism, that transformed him into a giant in Latin American literature, Rulfo takes us into the ground where Juan Preciado is buried, and lets us in on the dialogue he has with an old resident of the town, as they listen to the plaintive rhapsodies of other bodies resting close-by.

So, interspersed between the pieces of poetic prose that tell of Pedro Páramo’s progress through life, bribing his way out of the Mexican Revolution, dispensing with loyal servants of no more value, are luminous revelations from Susana San Juan’s restless corpse.

Subtly, she illuminates the subjugation of women in the late-19th, early-20th century Mexican society. Sexual violation by her father is hinted at. And there are plain suggestions of how Pedro Páramo manipulated circumstances to bring her to live with him. Finding herself in a period when women are regarded as chattel, she seeks refuge in delusions and delirium both before-death and after-life.

But if Pedro Páramo is a ruthless manipulator of circumstances, Rulfo is an unflinching manipulator of time. We know we are in the hands of a confident writer when the present tense juxtaposes with the past tense, often, and with ease, and on occasion even in the one paragraph.

Moving the clock back and forth, the story-telling master makes things happen at the same time, or at no time at all.

Meticulous with details swollen with meaning, this slim, yet intensely complex volume is in essence a study of life under the Porfirian regime that, in striving to modernise the nation, ended up distilling a medieval, mercenary society.

Women (including Juan Preciado’s mother), by and large, allowed themselves to be ravaged by the likes of Pedro Páramo who littered the land with countless children born out of wedlock.

And the church, for all the convictions it represented in a massively Catholic environment, seemed to offer redemption only to people who could afford it.

But most importantly, what the extraordinary novel highlights is how when innumerable Juan Preciados of the 1950s embarked on a quest for an understanding about the past, they were in fact trying to explain the absurdities of their own social order.

Maybe, as brazen as it sounds, I too can, by interrogating the apparitions of my history, grasp the amorphous order that governs my living.