Along the way I realised there is a story to be told about where older gay people go, because the gay “community” is largely pub- and club-based, which is really not ideal. I believe there are many older LGBT people who feel excluded and isolated.

In the light of President Mary McAleese’s admirable project to encourage old men to feel more included in Irish society, I think we should begin to put our own shop in order, and follow her example as a community. For example, the Irish gay rugby and soccer teams could follow the GAA’s example and reach out to older gay people specifically.

So I am happy to publish this press release here, and can’t wait to see the final product, as I missed it the first time around.

Critically Acclaimed Show Returns!
Silver Stars
Now Auditioning

“Silver Stars”, an innovative song cycle based on stories from older gay Irish men, is now casting.

Performers with passion required.
There are at least 4 central roles and places in the choir. Seniors and first-time performers are especially welcome.

Open casting session will be held on the following day:
Wednesday July 15th; 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Casting Venue: The Abbey Studio (TEAM Building), 4 Marlborough Place, Dublin 1

The Workshops will take place on Monday the 20th and Tuesday the 21st of July.
Times to be confirmed.

Rehearsals: 3 evenings a week from August the 24th through to September the 26th.
Time; 7.00 to 9.30 pm

Songwriter Sean Millar has been gathering stories of honour, exile, spirit, survival and love from older gay Irish men and transforming them into powerful and evocative songs. Theatre innovators Brokentalkers have created settings for each song.

The original run of the show was part of the spring 2009 Bealtaine festival. The show was a great success, playing to full houses every night. This current production is in association with the Abbey Theatre and the Dublin Theatre Festival.

The show will be performed in the Cube at the Project Arts Centre and will run from Tuesday the 29th of September through to Sunday the 4th of October, 2009.
SPREAD THE WORD!!!!!

Important
If you are interested then let us know!
Pre-register your details by emailing us at brokentalkers@gmail.com

It is right and fitting that he should be invited to direct Wilde at the Abbey, and An Ideal Husband is an intriguing choice. It’s not Wilde’s best work, but nevertheless it still makes for an entertaining evening.

The first act, a party set at the home of the Chilterns, was a delight – we entered a superbly staged world of a decadent society, the women resplendent in high fashion, the players displaying almost a Commedia dell’Arte physicality, jousting in a heightened Berkoff-esque wordplay that seemed faultless.

However, the darker themes of the play soon become apparent: blackmail, insider dealing, political hypocrisy, honour and character, love and betrayal, redemption and forgiveness. They are too personal for lightweight comedy; or, perhaps, Wilde’s unhappy end reminds us that they are, in truth, no laughing matter. As a result, the flippancy and sparkling irreverence of the play’s opening act is hard to follow.

The set-up is for Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising star of the political firmament, to fall, brought down by the scheming Mrs Cheveley, who can prove his entire career and wealth was based on selling a government secret.

Derbhle Crotty is outstanding as the blackmailer, seductive, sinister and passionately self-serving. Lord Goring, an old lover of hers and a friend of the Chilterns, is, on the surface, a determined, frivolous dandy. He proves to be a man of real substance and character when tested, and becomes a formidable match for Mrs Cheveley, and a reliable friend in need, the catalyst to enable the Chilterns to forgive each other their human weaknesses, and move on.

Lord Goring: All I know, Gertrude, is that it takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love.

Mark O’Halloran is as perfect a Lord Goring as one could imagine. He brings a sense of being a “wise old soul” to the part, as well as impeccable comic timing, and at times he reminded me of one of my favourite English actors, Leonard Rossiter.

The costumes were sumptuous, and the lighting in particular was excellent (by Chris Davey). I was confused by one aspect of the production, however: the set. Although set and costumes were both the work of the same person, Bartlett’s long-time collaborator Rae Smith, they did not feel like they were in the same production at all. There was no expense spared in the costumes; they were stunning in every detail. The set, however, looked like it would be serviceable enough in a fit-up company in the fifties, on a regional tour; painted plywood boards everywhere, a sort of designer shabbiness, with a post-modern self-consciousness; we see behind the sets to the bare walls and doors, we see the braces and stage-weights, the chandelier has an ugly electric plug showing half way up the chain. The red velvet curtain that falls between acts is bedraggled and torn, but only covers half the wide Abbey stage. I could easily imagine this production working very well in a severe black box, with no pretence at period detail; on the other hand, a decent attempt at a subdued but quality set that allowed the actors to shine would have done no harm at all. But this was neither fish nor fowl, and was distracting to me. Perhaps I expect more from the National Theatre; yet I am usually more than happy to support a production that confounds a certain bourgeois expectation that classic period plays should have gorgeous sets. The sets should never be the point in Wilde; perhaps I am just old-school enough to believe they shouldn’t attract my attention at all.

However, this production is well worth a visit; well-paced, witty, snappy, and passionate. I’ve rarely heard such uniformly crisp, crystalline English accents on an Irish stage, and even though I saw the show in preview, the ensemble acting was as tight as a drum. The dialogue between Sir Robert and his wife, when they are torn apart by the prospect of ruin, is as relevant now as it was then; the corrosive effects of idealization in a marriage, indeed any relationship, and what happens when someone falls off the pedestal on which their partner has placed them. But I was curiously unmoved, as their love was tested; perhaps it’s because in the cynical 21st Century, it’s hard to accept undiluted moral outrage that a politician has a guilty secret. Neither of the Chilterns is easy to warm to, but I don’t believe that is the fault of the actors. Perhaps, in their exchanges, Wilde was safely playing out the many conversations, imagined and real, he had with his loyal wife, Constance, over his own secret life, which would have been incendiary and heartrending. Had the real issues of Wilde’s marriage been addressed in this play, it would have been electrifying. But of course that would have been impossible at the time, so in a sense we are reading between the lines.

Wilde was being blackmailed himself, at the time he wrote this play. The storm clouds were gathering, and he was arrested for gross indecency during its first run. By sailing so close to the wind in his emotional subject matter, but distancing himself from the real matter in hand, perhaps he lost perspective. It is purportedly a comedy, in that it plays around with appearances, illusions and reality, but, at its heart, it is a neutered tragedy. Perhaps a sense of superstition prevented him from cataloguing his hero’s downfall. Maybe he was refusing to tempt fate by presaging his own destruction. Life imitates art; perhaps he believed, or hoped against hope, that by creating a story with a happy ending he could avert the inevitable, and keep the circling wolves from his door. As Wilde would have been very well aware, wishful thinking, as played out in the eventual happy resolution of An Ideal Husband, is antithetical to great art. That Chiltern doesn’t fall, that his corruption does not get exposed, is a happy ending of sorts; but his last words are insecure, self-doubting. It is neither a comic nor tragic story. It is human, but not as dramatic as real life.

The tense exchanges between former lovers Lord Goring and Mrs Cheveley are richly satisfying; and there are elements of pure farce in the final scenes which are timed to perfection. Goring, happily, finds his playmate in the end, in the chirpy Mabel Chiltern, (played delightfully by Aoibheann O’Hara), and they all, seemingly, live happily ever after; a bittersweet backdrop to the real tragedy that befell Wilde, which he must have known was coming. I would give anything to have been in the audience watching this play in 1895, the night the news had been broken that the playwright had been arrested.

All in all, an interesting play played with relish by an excellent cast; like a beautifully accomplished portrait of an imperfect subject, showing its best qualities. Pity about the cheap frame.

Romeo and Juliet pitched at the bebo generation is a risky proposition. Ever since Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film for the e generation, theatrical productions which aim to give this teen tragedy a contemporary feel, and reach new, younger audiences, have a hard act to follow. But, given the power of this play, it should survive most attempts to give it a make-over, if the text is respected, and the actors aren’t daunted by the language. Too often in Irish theatre, Shakespeare productions suffer because of a clumsiness or self-consciousness with the verse, that interferes with the fluidity of the story-telling.

Happily, in this production by Jason Byrne, (the first time the Abbey has ever staged this play), the actors are, in the main, in effortless command of the narrative. In particular, the stellar Gemma Reeves brought a moving simplicity and heartache to the role of Juliet, in a way that caught me by the throat. Her mother, Anita Reeves, playing the nurse, was also powerfully affecting, funny and human. As for Romeo, Aaron Monaghan helped make the famous balcony scene with Juliet one of the most gripping I’ve ever seen – risky, funny, and full of the adrenaline-rush of adolescent infatuation. I’m not sure, however, that his leggy laddy physicality was quite right for Romeo. But then, that part is one of the most difficult parts to play in Shakespeare (I know, I’ve played it) because there’s a spinelessness, a haplessness to his personality, as evidenced when he changes his mooning affections from Rosaline to Juliet in a conscienceless flash. In his scenes with the Friar Laurence, his immaturity and sheer gormlessness become apparent, almost to an irritating degree. Frank McCusker, as the friar, gave the most satisfying performance of all for me, in a way, because it was so surprisingly menacing, worldly and dark.

The dance sequence, in which Romeo catches first sight of Juliet, was just a bit too rich and self-consciously contemporary for me stylistically, with Amy Winehouse providing the backing track. But I loved the overall look of the piece – the design ideas that influenced designer Jon Bausor are available to look at on the show’s bebo page – and the stunningly stormy set piece at the end of Act I, with superb lighting by Paul Keogan, was filmic and exciting.

The naturalness of the speaking style in this production extended to allowing actors to use their own accents, which worked largely successfully, but contributed to a disjointed loss of place at times. And I felt a little bit uneasy at a couple of the scenes where there is a collective weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over yet another death; sometimes, grief restrained is more affecting.

However, it’s Juliet who carries the play, and Gemma Reeves’ truly harrowing distress at the end left me wet-faced and shaken, as if I’d never seen this timeless tragedy before. And that, for me, is the mark a truly contemporary production; Amy Winehouse, and all that jazz, is but icing on the cake.

In order to begin to answer them, one first has to ask what a national theatre is for. Yes, that question, again, and again, and again. It always has to be asked, because the answers to it have to change from generation to generation, from year to year, from season to season, because the Irish people pay for it, and it is supposed to be more than just another subsidised theatre.

However, the Abbey is no longer the centre of cultural life it once was in the formative years of the Irish state, when it used to prompt searching debates on social, political and political identity, because theatre has been largely superseded by radio, cinema, television and the internet. Perhaps only with Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show has a similar platform been evident in Irish life since.

On principle, I am opposed to museum theatre, by which I mean the production of plays that are not dramatically compelling in themselves, but because they have a place in history that merits their regurgitation every now and again to please the tourists, who expect to see an O’Casey or a Synge, for a whimsical sentimental experience of “real” Oirishry. However, I realise of course that museums can present their archives in a way that is contemporary and relevant, both educational and exciting. And, if done in the right way, surprising. It is this quality of surprise that I experienced when I was at this show.

One thing leapt right out at me, and spoke to me in a way that touched me personally- this is a play about what it means to “inhabit the hyphen” of being Anglo-Irish. In my own life, with my grandfather who was a courier in the British Army at the Somme, and my great-grandfather on the other side of my family ready to shoot at him when he was called back to put down the rebellion of 1916, I know a little bit of what that hyphen feels like. Even before I moved to England, my accent was always suspected to be English, but once in England, it was always recognized as Irish. Having spent half my adult life in England, I found Robinson’s interrogation of the oil-and-water quality of the relationship between the Irish and English as relevant today as it was in 1926.

The play is a vivid portrait of a time when the English ascendancy was on the retreat, and is a sympathetic treatment of the inhabitants of one Big House in Cork, and the workings of the disintegrating feudal society around it, in a time of rebellion and civil war. It begins on Armistice Day, and although the play seems alarmingly creaky initially, with a quasi-pantomime drunken Irish butler, it begins to become more interesting when the daughter of the house, Kate (played with a shining exuberance by Lucy Gaskell) bursts on with a misleadingly idle-rich bunch of flowers in her hand. Slowly it becomes apparent that the play’s central themes are to be played out primarily through Kate Alcock, as intelligent, passionate and independent a character it is possible to imagine; the play is primarily about her struggle to make sense of her hybrid inheritance, the daughter of a kind Irish landed gentleman father and an English mother (Deirdre Donnelly, the epitome of pained hauteur) whose martyred sufferance of rural Irish living was rooted in a sense of profound but never expressed alienation and fear. The fact that this dread was well-founded and premonitory is evident in the play’s climax.

This is a curiously self-referential piece, in an almost post-modern way. St Leger Alcock, the lord of Ballydonal House, chides a visiting English soldier not to “enjoy us as if we were a comic story or a play”. This is as relevant today as it was then, the painful/curious way the English see the Irish as in some way amusing; after all, it was not too many years ago Eastenders went to Ireland for a couple of teeth-clenching “light-hearted” episodes.

Kate, practical, hard-working, resilient and resourceful, proud that she has “no April moods” and doesn’t “go from tears to laughter in a moment”, states quite matter-of-factly that she hasn’t cried once in ten years. With a fierce stoicism, and a deliberate refusal to wed, or to accept comfort, sympathy or nourishment, this is a woman who commands respect, on her own terms. She learns Irish because it’s part of her make-up, but says she doesn’t much care for politics. The English part of her seems “swamped”, and yet in the second scene it’s brought home to her how much of an outsider she is seen to be by local Irish people. Despite of her awareness of the gulf between her and them, she “threw a bridge over it and ran across it”; but when it came to the crunch, grieving for her nurse, shot dead by the Black and Tans, she became aware of something “deeper, something that none of us can put into words, something instinctive, this ‘them and us’ feeling.” Robinson’s self-consciousness as a writer is ever present, referencing frequently his struggle with the limitations of the form. Kate at one point declares “This is County Cork, not third-rate melodrama”. After her return from living in London for a while, she reflects how everything there seems like fuzzy “sentimental play-acting” – she relishes the return to “real things” in Ireland. Her mother reflects bitterly that if sentiment was something Kate sought, she’d find the essence of it in Ballydonal; and Kate retorts drily that her mother would die for that sentimentality: “it isn’t fuzzy to die”.

When the “realness” that Kate seeks manifests in the destruction of everything real she has ever known, in the last scene, she makes sense of it in one of the least sentimental or expected arguments I’ve heard on stage. She ruefully comments that at least they weren’t ignored; that her family, her Big House of a home, mattered, even if it was at the receiving end of hate. “Say it with petrol” she remarks, blackly, and with that line Kate leaps to take a place in the list of the most interesting protagonists in Irish theatre, male or female.

The play is far from perfect, however. There’s a supernatural element that seems dated, unintegrated, and sensationalist; despite the subtleties of Derry Power’s performance as the drunk Irish butler, the character sticks out like a sore thumb, because it’s a lightning rod for the wrong sort of laughter from the audience, which doesn’t get challenged or transformed into anything meaningful. There are, despite Robinson’s conscious efforts, elements of melodrama, and we are used to a more sophisticated way of storytelling now. Stripped of its history, I would not find this play engaging enough; but one cannot strip this play of its context, in the same way that the Abbey cannot – nor should not – ignore its past.

This is a seriously fascinating evening, for all its flaws. Self-reference, in the Abbey’s case, is no mere narcissism. I am encouraged to know that back in the twenties, such a play was so popular, because it was tackling earnestly what it meant to be English/Protestant in Ireland, and perhaps it wasn’t until Frank McGuinness wrote “Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme” that this theme was tackled again, with a similar degree of respect.

As, finally, there is peace on this island, with real signs of mutual trust emerging, based on honouring profound and often baffling differences between the two traditions, this long-forgotten evidence that the Abbey was once home to intelligent, passionate reflection on the theme is welcome, and deserving of its five-week run. History is not dead; museums can come to life.

Thanks to Lisa Coen for her company, insight and knowledge.

The beginning met my sombre expectations, and I braced myself for a long, worthy night – although the superb new shape of the auditorium happily banished many dreary memories of feeling disconnected from the Abbey stage. A candle flickered into life in the dark, and we were faced with a grey abstract monolithic box, walls like slabs, and a huge overhanging girder, giving the space an oddly anachronistic industrial-era resonance. I doubt one could create a grimmer, more alienating set. The darkness receded under a horizontal shaft of cold white light, to reveal a body laid out in front of us like a corpse. Men and women, dressed in monochrome, brought a pale semblance of life to the stage, as they fretted about the inexplicably comatose girl, Betty Parris, and what she and her friends had been doing in the woods together the previous night, to leave her in such a state.

The bleakness had a strong effect on me – I found myself starved for colour, for warmth, for signs of vitality, for some relief. The girl’s father, Peter Hanly’s Reverend Parris, a neurotic ferret of a man overwhelmed by a terror of witchcraft rumours spreading, set the uneasy tone of the times for us: tense, volatile, unhappy. A queasy helplessness dominated, a lack of ability to be rational, grounded, sensible. We heard the story of Ann Putnam, a simple woman failing to make sense of the pain of having had so many of her babies die in her arms, and how she had arrived at her deeply flawed conclusions, that set in train the events that were to destroy so many people’s lives. Intense grief can warp our rationality, and once I had connected with that, through Marion O’Dwyer’s goosebump-raising performance, it began to be clear how magical thinking could flourish in that community, like a pale and sickly growth mushrooming overnight on rotting wood, and I knew that I was in for a gripping night of theatre.

The frenzied hysteria gathered momentum, and took on a frightening life of its own, and accusations of witchcraft flew around, ensnaring dozens in a cruel double-bind: confess to witchcraft and name others who have walked with the devil, or face a guilty charge, and death. The story became a simple but moving one: how each person struggled to retain their integrity in the face of irrational hate and fear. The Reverend John Hale (Peter Gowen), a witchcraft expert, called in to investigate the girls’ disturbing behaviour, led by the manipulative Abigail Williams (Ruth Negga), began by impressing with his calm rationality but he, too, got swept up in the storm, as the cases snowballed and went to trial. A farmer, John Proctor (Declan Conlon) and his wife Elizabeth (Cathy Belton), whose marriage was already frosty due to his having had an affair with Abigail, found that their private troubles became the business of the courts, as they too found themselves accused, and betrayed. Another farmer, the eccentric and wily Giles Corey (played to comic perfection by Tom Hickey), moved heaven and earth to obtain justice for his accused wife.

The simplicity and fluidity of this production by Patrick Mason (even though I saw it at first preview) was deeply impressive, because at every twist and turn the emotions of the characters were available to us and instantly understandable. The audience tittered with nerves when the young girls’ collective hysteria was at its most disturbing and creepily infectious. When we heard what unhappy fate befell Giles Corey in the last act, so much had he endeared himself to us, the effect was devastating. The strain in the Proctors’ marriage was achingly familiar, and the thaw in their relationship, when it finally came, brought tears to my eyes. John Proctor’s character, so flawed and passionate and heroic, is proof alone of Arthur Miller’s genius as a playwright, but Conlon and Belton’s superb performances brought immediacy and heart to his words.

This was ensemble acting at its best – clear as a bell, accessible, taut, generous, not a weak link in the chain, not a false note struck in the entire evening. It seemed utterly right that the accents were Irish, unforced, natural. By the end of the night, I found myself still hating the mechanical oppressiveness of the set, the accusing, interrogative, blinding light of each scene change, a hint to force us, perhaps, to question our own capacity to be swept away by hysteria. But I liked the fact that there was no reference to the 1950s and the McCarthy era; the psychological truth of The Crucible is timeless. However much as I disliked the greyness of the environment, the humanity of each character seemed even more palpable as a result. This production worked for me because it didn’t have an angle, the director had no high-concept axe to grind, his sole interest and achievement was to allow his gifted actors to tell a great story well. Sometimes we need the plainest of settings to enable us to see gems at their sparkling best.

Listen:

Update: I reviewed the show with Dave O’Mahoney of Film Ireland on The Kiosk with Nadine O’Regan on Phantom FM on 9th June, and we both gave this production 5 stars.

Was, very kindly, invited to the opening night of Homeland by Paul Mercier at the Abbey Theatre. I enjoyed the energy of the play and the subject matter, the performances were great, and I hope the loyal Passion Machine audience throngs the National. I found some scenes very inventive and funny, but I wasn’t moved as I would have liked. I think there’s always a danger when a writer directs his own play, a necessary dialogue doesn’t happen.

What was surreal for me was that people from my former life as an actor were everywhere in the audience, and if I name them here it would make this blog into a different sort of online diary, more gossippy and name-dropping than seems right. Some lovely people, most of whom I had not seen in fifteen years at least. A few people commented on my lack of hair – I had long curly brown locks back then. A couple of people said they’d read my book, which threw me, I wasn’t expecting that.

I remember the carefully disguised hysteria of opening nights, the furiously casual but serious networking, the simmering collective anxiety about whether the evening was a success or not. I stood there, in the bar afterwards, just watching for a while, as everyone was doing the cross-pollination dance, like bees to flowers. I was aware of a strong nostalgia for the excitement of it all, remembering shows I used to be in, being part of that wonderful collaborative effort that is theatre. But I’m glad my career/income/life doesn’t depend anymore on making the right connections at opening nights, such as last night. ]]> http://bonhom.ie/2006/01/abbey-theatre-homeland.html/feed 2