Day 6 in Dublin (Dublin Farewell)

Program for The Wild Bride

Saturday, October 15

The world premiere production of Colm Toibin’s powerful play TESTAMENT provided rich grist for the talk-back mill. One of Ireland’s foremost novelists, Toibin has fashioned a rich, dense, muscular, one-woman show that has its roots in Greek theatre.

The unnamed protagonist, in exile at Ephesus, tells us of events that happened in Jerusalem 40 years earlier. She is being hounded by writers to tell the version of the story that falls in step with their mission-driven gospels. She has turned her back on her cultural heritage, she rejects the message the writers claim will redeem the world, and she has discovered her belief in ancient Greek multi-deism.

Her testimony, her version of the true events of the story, is at once a threnody, a passion play for one voice, and refutation of her son’s disciples. It is also the story of people whose country is under the dominion of an imperial power, who have experienced failed revolutions, and as such it has deep resonances for an Irish audience. The radical reinterpretation of the events presented by Toibin would almost certainly prevented its production in a country with as strong a Roman Catholic tradition as Ireland until recently.

The text has the feel of a Greek tragedy, complete with choruses, although all of it is delivered by one actor. Many in our group were curious to see a copy of the script (which has not yet been published) to see what format it takes, including verse forms.

A recurring theme in the week’s plays is the relationship between how we make stories and how stories make us. Saturday afternoon we were off to another adaptation — this time of a Grimm’s fairytale, THE WILD BRIDE.

After the performance we gathered one last time at the Abbey’s Peacock Stage rehearsal rooms, as we would be off to the airport early Sunday morning. We were met by a surprise guest, Andy Hinds, who was rehearsing at the space that afternoon, and he joined us for our last TalkBack.

THE WILD BRIDE provided an upbeat ending to a rich week of theatre-going. Kneehigh, the 30-something year old theatre company from Cornwall in England has developed a unique brand of physical theatre that also incorporates liberal use of music. Their production of BRIEF ENCOUNTER was a hit on Broadway in the 2008-9 season.

THE WILD BRIDE tells the story of a foolish farmer who sells his daughter to the Devil, and her journey to love and redemption. Much of the TalkBack focused on the combination of two folk traditions, the Northern European traditions of the Brothers Grimm and the rural Southern American traditions of the Devil at the crossroads (made famous by the Robert Johnson legend). The result is the magic and horror of the German tales told using the blues, bluegrass and jazz traditions of 1940′s America.

Another aspect of the talk-back centered on the difference between texts that are playwright driven and those that are complied through workshop, making use of the skill sets of the company of actors.The three actresses who portrayed the Bride were: an accomplished violinist from Poland, a singer who had worked with Cirque Du Soleil, and a Hungarian choreographer; the Devil played a mean guitar. Building the production around their talents resulted in a show that was endlessly surprising, inventive, irreverent, funny and magical.

At the end of talk-back, we said our goodbyes to Andy, and broke up onto smaller groups for dinner. Sunday morning we would leave the Gresham bright and early to begin our journey back to Western Massachusetts. And so, another wonderful CTC Theatre Tour came to a satisfying conclusion. Hope to see you on the next one.

Day 5 in Dublin

The ruins of St. Mary's

Friday, October 14

The site specific nature of THE LULU HOUSE, a production set in the James Joyce House, the setting for his short story THE DEAD, prompted a lively discussion at our Friday TalkBack. The usual relationship between audience and actors was completely changed as we trooped upstairs and down, from room to room, for each scene of the multi-media work which featured, film, dance, and live performance.

The piece, inspired by Wedekind’s Lulu plays and GW Pabst’s brilliant film PANDORA’S BOX, starring Louise Brooks as Lulu, explores the many facets of obsession. The audience members become detectives trying to contextualize clues imbedded in the events unfolding before us — a story that shares elements with John Fowles THE COLLECTOR. As the title implies, THE LULU HOUSE, like a fun house or haunted house, is the place where the Lulu event takes place — and we will make discoveries that force us to keep rethinking the true nature of the event we are witnessing.

After the talk-back, we took the DART train up to Howth, a charming fishing village nestled at the north end of Dublin Bay. On our stroll down the quay to look at the fishing boats, we were rewarded with a glimpse of one of the harbor seals.

In Irish myth, seals may be selkies. A female Selkie is able to discard her seal skin and come ashore as a beautiful maiden. If a human can capture her skin, the selkie is forced to become a fine, if wistful, wife. However, should she ever find her skin, she immediately returns to the sea, leaving her husband to pine and die.

After a superb quayside lunch at Ivan’s, featuring the freshest oysters, chowder, sea food and an excellent white wine, we set about exploring the town. The ruins of St. Mary’s, a 14th century church were especially picturesque, while the grounds of the Martello Tower provided an excellent view of the entire harbor.

Walking the length of the windswept breakwater quay overlooking the Irish sea left some of us with the urge to put out to sea in one of the many small sailing yachts moored in the harbor. Instead, we took the DART back to Dublin with prospect of a stimulating evening of theatre in front of us — the world premiere production of Colm Toibin’s TESTAMENT, directed by Tony and Olivier Award winning director Garry Hynes.

Day 4 in Dublin

The Formal Gardens, Royal Hospital Kilmainham

Thursday, October 13

Andrew Hinds, Artistic DIrector of Classic Stage Ireland, joined us for our JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK TalkBack, giving us a window into this classic Irish play from the point of view of  an Irish theatre practitioner. JUNO has bee produced 45 times in the 75 year history of the Abbey, so clearly it is an iconic Irish work.

The thematic portion of the discussion centered on the social and family disfunction produced by the short but very ugly Irish Civil War (JUNO was written and produced in 1924, in the war’s immediate aftermath). The play was radical in its time in that it presented tenement life on the stage of the national theatre, supplanting the heroic and mythic works by Yeats and Synge.

O’Casey believed that the period from 1916-1923 had failed to produce a successful independent state — that more energy had been spend ridding the country of its English dominated past than thinking about its future. Without clear aspirations for the country’s future, the men became lost, the women became caretakers of the men, and factions continued to fight bloody little battles of vengeance.

Talk-back was followed by a trip to the west end of Dublin and two stunning experiences.

First was the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is housed at the former Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Like London’s Royal Hospital Chelsea, the RHK was built to house army pensioners, not patients. And like Christopher Wren’s Chelsea work, the RHK is a masterpiece. Often considered Dublin’s foremost work of seventeenth century architecture it makes for an unusual yet completely satisfying home for modern art. Here’s a link to photos of the RHK, which do not do it justice.

A lovely post-lunch stroll down a tree lined allee brought us to an entirely different type of experience, the Kilmainham Gaol. The prison which served as the film set for THE SINS OF THE FATHER and MICHAEL COLLINS was built in 1796 and closed in 1924 with the emergence of the Irish Free State. Eight years earlier it had been the site where the British executed the leaders of the Easter Uprising. It is grim, dark, terrifying and every inch is suffused with history, occupying the same place in Irish political history and myth as the Bastille does in French. As grim as it is/was, the mid-19th century gaolers had a problem on their hands — the Famine made the daily meals an attractive alternative to life in the streets. The prison was overrun by petty criminals who’d let themselves get caught and convicted in the hopes of sustenance. Here’s a link to a view of the Victorian Wing of the prison.

Thursday night took us to the James Joyce House (the setting for his short story THE DEAD and the location for John Huston’s film adaptation) for THE LULU HOUSE, a site specific multi-media event inspired by Frank Wedekind’s LULU plays and GW Pabst’s film PANDORA’S BOX, which starred Louise Brooks as Lulu.

Day 3 in Dublin

Program for Juno and the Paycock

Wednesday, October 13
THE SPECKLED PEOPLE provided rich fodder for our first post-play talk-back. In addition to discussing the issues of language, home and memory, we spent a good deal of the session talking about the challenges of adaption for the stage.

THE SPECKLED PEOPLE was originally published as a memoir, a form that has very different characteristics than those required by the stage. How does the playwright take material that is highly episodic and distill it to make a satisfying drama? How do you reap the benefits of unity of time and action when the source material spans an entire childhood?

While there was much that was moving in the evening, which included a brilliant performance from Julika Jenkins, a German actress playing the mother, it seemed that Hugo Hamilton, who did the adaptation of his own material, still is more familiar with the novel and memoir form than the play form.

In the afternoon, we were off to the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National Theatre, for a performance of Sean O’Casey’s modern Irish classic JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK. The production featured an all Irish cast, starring Sinead Cusack and Ciaran Hinds, directed by English director Howard Davies.

The play, which was written and premiered in 1924, tells the story of a Dublin tenement family, trying to survive in the immediate aftermath of the Irish Civil War of 1922-3. It is a play that is, by turns, comic and tragic. We look forward to having Andrew Hinds, Artistic Director of Classic Stage Ireland, with us at the Thursday TalkBack to share his perspective on the play.

Day 2 in Dublin

Program for The Speckled People

Tuesday, October 11
Tuesday morning we had our first talk-back in a very theatrical setting: the Abbey Theatre’s Peacock Stage (second stage) rehearsal rooms. CTC Artistic Director Byam Stevens led off with a review of his New Paradigm for the Theatre, which encourages theatre goers to forego the critical paradigm (sitting in judgment) and replace it with a paradigm that focuses on engagement.

Elms College Professor Robert King talked about the challenges and rewards of seeing each production with a fresh perspective, particularly when reviewing a play that one has seem before, i.e. not comparing productions but considering whether each production succeeds on its own merits and aspirations.

After the talk-back many of us headed off to The National Gallery. The museum is undergoing extensive renovations, so many of the galleries are closed temporarily. To cope with the space shortage, the museum has staged a “Masterpieces from the Collection” exhibition.

Among the treasures is Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, a stunning image executed with incredible technical proficiency. The dominant feature in the painting, the black armor of the soldier taking Christ into custody is both magically illuminated by moonlight and a powerful symbol of militaristic oppression. The painting also features a self portrait of the artist — the man carrying the lantern in the upper right hand corner of the painting.

There’s also a gallery devoted to highlights from the museum’s collection of works by Irish painters, which includes a haunting work by Sir John Lavery: his wife costumed as the Irish heroine Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Executed in pale blues, greens and grays, it features a frame within a frame, and Kathleen gazing out at the viewer with her arm resting on a Celtic harp (the symbol of Ireland).

Tuesday night we went to the famed Gate Theatre, founded by Michael MacLiammor, for the world premiere production of THE SPECKLED PEOPLE, by Hugo Hamilton, based on his best selling memoir of the same title. It tells the story of a young boy growing up suburban Dublin in the postwar period. His mother, a German national, speaks German, his Irish father speaks Irish and forbids English to be spoken in his house — “walking out the door onto the street was like a daily migration into the English language.” As the boy is forbidden to speak English, he is an outcast in his peer group, and because he speaks German he’s bullied for being a “Nazi.”

The play raises provocative issues about:

1) the meaning of “home” — is it a place, a group of people, a cultural language construct?

2) the connection between language and identity

3) the way in which children develop contexts for ever increasing comprehension of the world around them.

A wealth of topics for our Wednesday talk-back!

Day 1 in Dublin

The National Photographic Archive, Dublin

Monday, October 10
We arrived in Dublin on a blustery, misty Monday morning and were checked in at The Gresham without incident by 9:30. After a robust Irish breakfast we retired to our rooms for a quick round of shut-eye.

In the early afternoon, we headed over the river Liffey to the Temple Bar area, home to the National Photographic Archive, a branch of the National Library. The archive has a collection of over 630,000 images, and their exhibitions are never less than fascinating. Last year’s exhibition, POWER AND PRIVILEGE: Photographs of the Big House in Ireland, 1858-1922 was a stunner.  It traced, in images, the life of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the servant class that waited on them. The current exhibition small lives: photographs of Irish Childhood 1880-1970 was equally impressive.

Memorable images included Aran island children in the 1930′s and a very self-possessed girl at a prayer with her father, turning to glare at the photographer for intruding on their privacy — imagine a 12 year old Glenn Close. The gallery space is intimate, with space for about forty images, so one can really devote time to each one without feeling overwhelmed.

The NPA sits on the north side of Meetinghouse Square, which is bounded on the south by the Photography Gallery and the Irish Film Centre, an imaginative re-use of industrial space that now houses, screening rooms, exhibit space, a good book and DVD shop and a cafe. The entire square is, in effect, devoted to filmic images.

The evening was, as per our custom, given over to our Welcome Banquet, a delightful dinner in the intimate surroundings of the Gresham’s Restaurant 23, preceded by cocktails in the Writers’ Lounge. The Gresham has a truly European style hotel lobby with deep cushioned armchairs and couches grouped around coffee tables, a bar and a large and welcoming tea room that serves an afternoon tea renowned throughout Dublin. It’s like the neighborhood living room, with friends dropping by for tea or a beer throughout the day. It made a warm setting for our cocktail reception. We were joined for dinner by Andrew Hinds, Artistic Director of Classic Stage Ireland, who will be our TalkBack guest on Thursday morning.

Day 7 of the London Trip

A KNOT OF THE HEART at the Almeida

Day Seven — our last morning in our private meeting room at the Swan — for the Talkback on the world premiere production of THE KNOT OF THE HEART. We attended the second preview performance, so no critic has yet weighed in to influence our responses to the play. Nice to approach a play with a true tabula rasa.

The play tells the story of a young television show host, her descent into drug addiction, and the profound impact it has on her family. This is territory that has been covered before, but playwright David Eldridge bravely strides out into the minefield and emerges with a harrowing, complex tale of multi-dimensional characters. He wrote the play for Lisa Dillon, who plays the protagonist, and we feel that she is sure to be nominated for an Olivier Award.

Lucy’s journey is many layered — a journey to integration and self-awareness, a journey to adulthood (learning to take responsibility for her actions and not blame others) and a journey away from the mire of self-delusion.

As the play progressed, one sensed that the characters were evolving organisms in a ecology of dependent relationships.

As the Talkback wound up, groups broke out to make plans for the balance of the open day — some went to matinees, to the watercolor exhibition at the Tate, to the exhibit on the English language at the British Library, Covent Garden, Portobello Road, Greenwich, etc.

Before going their own ways, the group thanked tour leaders Bob King and Byam Stevens for another great London Tour. See you next year!

Day 6 of the London Trip

Anish Kapoor's SKY, at the Kensington Gardens

Day Six launched with our Talkback of Danny Boyle’s production of FRANKENSTEIN, the hottest ticket in London, and a production that takes full advantage of the National’s prodigious stage technology.

The play opens with the birth of the Creature and his first efforts at coordinated movement, first steps and first words. The extended sequence is intended, we think, to invite the audience to see the action through the Creature’s eyes — to experience both the beauty and the terrors of existence.

Some of us thought the technology created a spectacle that was distancing, while others thought it captured the sensory overload experienced by an innocent, an engineered baby on an accelerated learning curve. FRANKENSTEIN explores a time when the romantic imagination turned its focus to science, the mystery of the life force (Galvani trying to animate a corpse with electricity, etc.). Mary Shelley’s novel is subtitled THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, which implies the pursuit of knowledge at huge cost. Dr. Frankenstein also gets swept up in the pursuit of perfection through engineering (interesting that in 2010 life was created in a laboratory for the first time).

Mary Shelley was 18 years old and pregnant by a man she was not married to when she wrote the novel.  This set of circumstances gave her first hand knowledge of being an outcast, a quality that successfully transferred to the stage version of the Creature’s journey.

After three plays that were intensely language driven, it was a refreshing and stimulating change to have an image driven production. No surprise, perhaps, given the identity of the director, an Oscar winner. The play proceeded by dreamlike segues instead of the cause and effect chains of language.

After Talkback some of us proceeded into Kensington Gardens, directly across the street from the hotel, to checkout the Anish Kapoor sculpture installations.

The evening found us up in the north London neighborhood of Islington for the Almeida’s world premiere production of the KNOT OF THE HEART. Tune in tomorrow for a report.

Day 5 of the London Trip

Program Cover for JOURNEY'S END

Day 5 started the usual way — with a Talkback, in this case, JOURNEY’S END. This acclaimed production of R.C. Sherriff’s classic play about life in the trenches of World War I won the 2007 Tony Award for Best Play. It’s been on a world tour and has just returned to England. The wonderfully designed production vividly recreates the claustrophobic, terrifying subterranean world of the trenches. The play is packed with tension, the fears of the men and their sometimes desperate coping mechanisms.

There’s a superb use of stage time as we, like soldiers everywhere, try to pass the anxious periods between moments of terrifying chaos. We feel the tension build as the last great German offensive of the war approaches. The play ends with the opening of what, at that time, was the largest artillery barrage in history — 1 million shells in five hours. It must have seemed to the participants like the end of the world. The British lost 38,000 men that day. The curtain call is a striking and moving tableau of the cast, frozen in position like the statues that grace every village green in England, with a list of the dead on the backdrop. Many a tear was shed by our patrons.

Sherriff had served in the trenches, and the verite of the script was radical for the time. The grim subject matter kept the play from finding a producer for years. Once it found a stage, it was quickly mounted in countries across the world.

The play is in many ways about the death of illusion; it provides a window on the huge impact that war had on culture — the widespread substitution of cynicism for faith in politics, religion or leadership.

After the Talkback we dispersed to our various activities, with a number of us attending THE HERETIC at the Royal Court Theatre, home to much of the new writing in English Theatre. The play deals with the trials of a climate scientist and university professor, played by the brilliant Juliet Stevenson (who we’d seen on the 2009 London Tour in DUET FOR ONE), whose views on global warming run counter to the accepted orthodoxy on the subject. The play raises intriguing issues about academic politics.

Thursday evening we were off to the National Theatre for the smash hit production of FRANKENSTEIN, directed by Oscar winning director Danny Boyle.

Day 1 of the London Trip

Byam Stevens and Susan and Gordon Josephson await the opening curtain for JOURNEY'S END (With real live English schoolboys behind them)

For those who’ve been wondering how we started with Day 2, here’s a brief account of Day 1:

Checked into the four star London Lancaster in record time — all 40 patrons in under 10 minutes due to a new hotel procedure — pre-printed registration forms complete with room keys attached — all we had to do was fill in addresses and passport numbers, return the form, and go to the elevator bank. A much appreciated innovation by the weary overnight travelers!

A quiet day for most of us, as people caught up on sleep or took walks in delightfully snow free Hyde Park, which is directly across Bayswater Road from the hotel. The highlight of the day was a superb welcome banquet in our private room overlooking the park.

The CTC Board Chair gave the official welcoming to the gathering, and Artistic Director Byam Stevens gave a brief talk outlining the coming attractions for the week. Everyone retired to their beds warm, well fed, and smiling.