Max McGuinness on some dodgy monologues and a solitary sublime show
After
last year's The Walworth Farce, Enda
Walsh has returned with another dose of nostalgia-streaked Technicolor blarney
-- The New Electric Ballroom. Some of
the best Irish acting talent around cannot rescue Walsh's incoherent and
dramatically uninspired script. The play features what I surmise to be three
sisters -- with a standout performance from Rosaleen Linehan as the eldest --
reminiscing in bog gothic tones about disappointing amorous adventures outside
the eponymous ballroom.
Every so often, a male fish monger enters, inexplicably
dumps a bucket of plastic fish into a hole in the floor, and rambles on about
being lonely in his underpants. Eventually he strips down to these underpants
and puts on an Elvis costume.
The New
Electric Ballroom is indicative of the overwhelming influence of the
monologue in contemporary Irish theatre, as the piece is essentially made up of
a number of soliloquies inexpertly stitched together. What is missing is drama
and the play sags throughout. Walsh is also determined, like most of his peers,
to wallow in the misery and clichés of pre-Boom
I cannot fault Simon Stephen's Pornography for being out of date. Set during the week of Live8, the successful bid for 2012 Olympics, and the 7/7 bombings in London, I entered the auditorium with high hopes of a pacy, intelligent, and well-researched state of the nation piece. Instead, we get a similar collection of ropey monologues and disjointed subplots.
What has an incestuous affair between a brother and sister got to do with Islamic terrorism? Go figure. Or how about a lecherous old university professor making a ham-fisted attempt on a former student? There are three excellent performances from a narky schoolboy whose mum is getting beaten up by dad, from a bitter and lonely widow, and from an eerily cheery suicide bomber. Yet the fact that the latter does not mention even once his motivations for carrying out this atrocity speaks yards about the ultimate shallowness of this play.
I know that all these unconnected monologues
are trying to make a point about the atomisation of British society but the
role of art is elevate rather than subjugate. Portraying the boring solipsism
of modern life in this way is just, well, boring.
And so to Matt Hartley's The Bird at the Underbelly. There is the
germ of an intriguing story about a mathematically-gifted Russian immigrant
whose mother works as an extremely-busy prostitute. Jakob -- so named for being
born (and consequently crippled) feet first in a back-street clinic --
eventually blackmails one of her customers, the Minister for Transport, to give
him a job where he wreaks havoc messing around with the nation's traffic
lights. But (I think I'm beginning to detect a pattern here), the play drags
because the protagonist spends most of his time talking to the audience rather
than the other actors, which eliminates the potential for drama.
Monologues are perhaps the hardest
theatrical form of all to master yet because they are relatively cheap and easy
to stage, they have come to dominate the theatre component of the Fringe. The
only one I have genuinely enjoyed is Itsoseng
by South African Omphile Molusi. Initial omens were not promising. The
audience enters the Pleasance Dome to find a stage strewn with bits of rubbish
and little else -- nothing screams amateur theatre like clutter. But Molusi's
hour long account of the dashing of the dreams of the post-Apartheid era in
Itsoseng township is moving and politically canny -- expertly charting the
disappointment of revolutionary ambitions and satirising the ANC's adoption of
its own idiosyncratic brand of political waffle. Yet, despite telling the story
of a young man's unrequited love for his childhood sweetheart who later becomes
a prostitute, Itsoseng is strangely
silent about the AIDS epidemic ravaging
Last night, the plague of monologues
finally lifted when I saw
Max McGuinness's play Up The Republic! is at the Hill Street Theatre, Edinburgh until August 25th at 9.30PM
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