Samuel Beckett called Galway a “grand little magic grey town”. At the Galway International Arts Festival, Druid Theatre have returned the compliment with a revival of his apocalypse in one act, Endgame, that is both very grey and mesmerisingly assured.
Centred on a hulking, faux-concrete silo, Francis O’Connor’s design is dominated by “light black from pole to pole” (to borrow Clov’s limp stab at a synonym, after the put-upon servant tires of repeating the word “grey”). Yet that bleak palette contains rich tonal nuances as well as a few clashing flourishes, which lend Garry Hynes’s staging at the Town Hall Theatre a playful, contemporary edge. Aaron Monaghan’s Clov wears a pair of white-striped Adidas tracksuit bottoms and even dons a bright green anorak at the end.
That spirit of gentle innovation infuses the vibrant double act at the heart of Hynes’s Endgame. As Hamm, the blind, immobile patriarch, Rory Nolan gives a commanding yet textured performance that veers between exasperation and stoicism, flattery and fearful pleading, caustic barbs and sentimentality. By the time he runs out of painkillers, we feel genuine sympathy for the humbled anti-hero, who emerges in this portrayal as a rounded human figure rather than a vengeful, degraded tyrant.
Alongside, Monaghan invests the role of Hamm’s amanuensis with weary yet unmistakable solicitousness. To see his Clov wheel Hamm around in his battered recliner is to behold two squabbling old friends who owe more to Laurel and Hardy than to Caliban and Prospero.
Trapped in the dustbins, Bosco Hogan’s Nagg and Marie Mullen’s Nell similarly exude the jaded familiarity of an authentic couple. When Hogan stumbles through the story of the world and the trousers, Mullen’s pained expression at once conveys the tedium of the worn-out joke and sadness at her husband’s decrepitude.
“Nothing,” she says, “is funnier than unhappiness.” But in this Endgame, we laugh with the characters rather than at their misfortune as they try and fail to tell stories to stave off oblivion. Without mitigating Beckett’s cosmic pessimism, Hynes’s staging shows us that there is still fun to be had, even amid all-encroaching greyness. ★★★★★
While Beckett’s characters suffer from confinement, the family in Mark O’Rowe’s new play, Reunion, is blighted by a lack of social and emotional moorings.
This 100-minute 10-hander, directed by O’Rowe at the Black Box Theatre, opens with the arrival of a middle-class Dublin clan at their holiday home on an island off the west coast. Led by Cathy Belton’s recently widowed Elaine, they have gathered to mourn her husband (though he is seldom mentioned). Amid much banal chatter about the weather and an outing to the local pub, little at first portends scintillating drama.
Tensions start to rise when they receive an unannounced visit from Ian-Lloyd Anderson’s Aonghus, the ex-boyfriend of Valene Kane’s Marilyn, one of Elaine’s three adult children, who are all accompanied by their respective partners. Aonghus protests a bit too much about his newfound happiness as a husband, father and published poet. But Reunion still seems, at this point, like a humdrum family saga.
O’Rowe then begins to mine the fissures within the children’s relationships, which in turn reopen old cracks between the siblings. Taken individually, each of these conflicts would yield only a minor crisis. Their cumulative effect is akin to a nuclear chain reaction as the entire family swiftly descends into splenetic vituperation.
What ensues is a sharply observed and neatly structured portrait of galloping narcissism and neurosis in an atmosphere of material comfort. The very absence of genuine problems here is what seems to tear everybody apart.
Amid strong performances all round, Belton and Venetia Bowe (as Elaine’s youngest daughter, Janice) negotiate the shift from sweetness and light to profanity-filled invective with particular dexterity. Stephen Brennan also supplies a droll counterpoint as Felix, a laconic old codger whose emotional constipation becomes an unlikely source of moral authority. ★★★★☆
A similar contrast between repression and impulsiveness animates two 15-minute sound installations by Enda Walsh. These are housed in The Shed, a site-specific venue in Galway Harbour.
In Changing Room, we sit inside a rundown seaside changing room and listen to a diffident middle-aged man (voiced by Marty Rea) describe how he came out of his shell and found companionship following the death of his overbearing brother. Dining Room offers a more emphatic tale about a high-strung B&B owner (voiced by Aaron Monaghan) who exacts revenge for a negative Tripadvisor review of his establishment. While the first installation feels a bit ethereal in the absence of live performance, the format lends itself well to the vivid, grand-guignolesque fantasy of the latter. And the juxtaposition of low-key redemption and antic mania ultimately yields a rich psychological weave.
Paul Fahy’s hyper-detailed design is crucial to both works. The scruffy solitude of the titular changing room is permeated with a ghostly maritime aura; in the dining room, a surreal tower of mutilated furniture gives arresting shape to the subject’s mental breakdown. ★★★★☆
Whereas Beckett, O’Rowe and Walsh all linger over individual torments, Tania El Khoury’s Cultural Exchange Rate has a broader sociopolitical focus. Located in the University of Galway’s Aula Maxima, this 50-minute interactive work explores the quandaries of migration, statelessness and war through the prism of El Khoury’s family history in Lebanon and Mexico.
A series of small boxes, arranged as if in a bank vault, contain video installations and artefacts such as old coins, emigration cards and a lock of hair. These evoke eternally frustrated longing for stability and certainty. There is also a room, where we are invited to exchange a nominal sum for one of El Khoury’s father’s now worthless collection of Lebanese banknotes. Though framed as a gesture of symbolic solidarity, that device emphasises the stark gulf between spectator and subject.
Most poignant of all is El Khoury’s account of her struggle to find an ancestor’s birth certificate in Mexico that could transform her entire family’s destiny. We emerge with the sense that art, for all its emotional power, can do little to tackle even the most basic practical problems. ★★★★☆
Festival continues to July 28, giaf.ie
