Review of "Heroin"

Posted by Zara at 1:51 pm Performance Reviews, Reviews No Responses »
Oct 072011

Heroin, directed by Grace Dyas (THEATREClub)

@Smock Alley Theatre, Oct 4th-9th 2011 (Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival)

 

Heroin was first staged as part of ABSOLUT Fringe 2010, and shown again in March of this year in axis:ballymun Arts Centre. It’s essentially an overview of an epidemic – a history of the social, political and economic factors that contributed to the spread of heroin addiction in Ireland.

 

Photo by Barbara Cieslar, via dublintheatrefestival.com

The cast erect the set around themselves throughout the play, as though building themselves into a simple but restrictive frame of reference. Very soon it becomes hard to recollect that there was ever a “before”: the dingy flat they now occupy was surely always there, and will always be there, just like an addiction. The intensity of the cast’s interactions ebbs and flows, from a gentle indifference to one another’s existence to a desperate physical struggle, all grasping hands and gritted teeth. They talk over one another, evoking the clamour of eager, bitter, guilty, pleading, angry voices in a troubled mind. The repetition, the anxiety, the bargaining; perhaps it is impossible to truly identify with an addict’s experience unless you’ve been there, but if you’ve ever felt desperation, grief, any self-destructive impulse, you’ll feel enough here to make you very uneasy.

 

The first time someone shoots up in front of the audience, the scene is given all the time and space and silence it needs to impress itself as a solemn ritual, like Holy Communion. Insights into one person’s mottled personal history are given wider context as each passing decade is given a morbid Reeling-In-The-Years obituary, and somehow, with all the bright lights and spit-flecked urgency, it seems not only plausible but inevitable that the Irish football team’s performance in the 1990 World Cup led directly to this man injecting into the webbing between his toes. The show is not about logic, there’s no logical solution because it’s not a logical problem. It’s not about the simple ratio of detox beds to junkies (and what the hell is a “junkie” anyway? Most drug users recoil from the term, it’s dehumanising). It’s a wide-ranging, deep-rooted problem that requires all of us, all of society, to engage with it and demand its resolution.

 

****************

 

There can be something uncomfortable about a production like this that deals with difficult social issues. The rawness of the subject matter aside, there is is the queasy sense that it relies on exploiting the people it claims to represent, the realities of whose lives seem a world away from this theatre and the well-heeled people attending. It’s the moral question of whether you can ever really tell someone else’s story. By processing your reading of someone else’s experience, and turning into a product that you then sell to the public, are you raising awareness or merely commodifying pain?

 

Ultimately, most of us would agree that art should attempt to address social problems, whether or not the artist is speaking from direct personal experience. But of course it depends how you do it, what your goals are, and whether you attain them. Good intentions alone are not enough.

 

This particular play was developed with the involvement and support of staff and clients of the Rialto Community Drug Team, and rehearsed in St. Andrew’s Community Centre, which houses, amongst other things, a methadone clinic, meditation classes and counselling services. The structure of the show – the timeline of drug addiction in this country – is drawn from a talk by Graham Ryall, one of the Drug Team members, who took part in a post-show discussion panel this week with writer/director Grace Dyas and THEATREclub co-founder Shane Byrne.

 

When THEATREclub first approached the Rialto Drug Team with the intention of researching this piece, the staff were understandably reticent. The people who use their services, already so vulnerable, are constantly under scrutiny by reporters, government bodies, researchers and filmmakers, who despite what their intentions may be, do very little good in return for their intrusions. It took a lot of time and persistence for Grace and Shane to build relationships with the staff and clients and secure their trust. Feedback from staff and former users who have seen the show has been generally positive; not surprisingly, some found the experience unpleasantly intense. That, more than anything a critic could say, speaks to the truth of the production.

 

I talked to Shane Byrne briefly about the show, and asked him what he hoped the show would achieve. He said simply that he hoped people would have a bit more empathy. There are so many misconceptions about heroin and the people that use it. People don’t recognise the strength it takes to recover; many of the things that people assume are the result of drug abuse may in fact be the effect of treatment. The services that recovering patients need go beyond mere detox treatment: they need emotional support, a social network, a way out of poverty, a connection that makes them feel a part of the wider society, and a way to make their voices heard. Much of the dialogue in the show is drawn directly from conversations with clients of Rialto Community Drug Team; this is their story.

Info and booking here.

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Review of "Twenty Ten"

Posted by Zara at 7:32 am Blog, Performance Reviews No Responses »
Sep 182011

Twenty Ten directed by Grace Dyas and Doireann Coady (THEATREclub)

@Project Arts Centre, Sep 10th – 15th & Sep 17th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

 

THEATREclub

A script compiled of people’s anonymously submitted personal thoughts and reflections during 2010, should, you’d imagine, make for pretty grim reading. Admittedly, for most people it was a bad year. The show, however, is less bleak than you’d expect.
This might partly be because even expressions of grief or bitterness read as black humour when flanked by the cheerful or trivial. Items of shining sorrow rolling by on a conveyor belt of the mundane just seem absurd; a passing focal point, like the cuddly toy in The Generation Game, and you find yourself laughing at something that was probably written in sincerity and pain. More often than not, there isn’t time for it to sink in. Occasionally, however, the cast use some deliberate technique to slow everything down – staging an intervention to alter the atmosphere, if only for a moment, to force or allow reflection. A pause, a repetition, a tense silence, or some unexpected physical gesture breaks the momentum.

 

There’s quite a bit of falling over and flinging pennies around. People move to the front of the stage, climb on chairs, walk off and reappear from different doors. Now and again, these things can seem slightly gimmicky, as if their function is simply to make the show more obviously a theatrical production and less like a book reading, but most of the time they’re effective and useful for breaking up the torrential flow of information.

 

Short stories, expressions of loss, hard-earned advice, bursts of ecstasy, neurotic confessions, private fears and glimmers of madness rush together like some biblical flood that steadily fills the building, as a bell like the ‘ding’ of a rising elevator marks each day already swallowed. Submersive viewing.

 

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In Rehearsal with THEATREclub

Posted by Zara at 10:08 am Uncategorized No Responses »
Sep 032011

Twenty Ten is a project that has been in the making since 2008. It was one of the first ideas that the members of THEATREclub came up with when they founded the company and it has finally come to fruition. It’s a hugely ambitious undertaking, which involved asking dozens of willing participants, on a daily basis, one simple question via email: What have you learned today? People could submit their response anonymously online, and a year’s worth of responses were compiled into a script that will now be performed over several days, from September 10 – 17th 2011, as part of ABSOLUT Fringe.

Grace Dyas, one of the founding members of THEATREclub (along with Shane Byrne and Doireann Coady), explains the process of editing the script. “The only criteria we used were: is it truthful, how well are they responding to the question, and would it harm or hinder anyone else to have it in the show?”

It seems that those who initially signed up to be part of the project, produced in assocation with Project Arts Centre, were people already on the THEATREclub mailing list, or were friends of the group on Facebook – in other words, there was already a relationship there. As word about the project spread, the number of participants grew. Every day, each of them would get a short, encouraging email reiterating the question and perhaps thanking them for their continued support or sharing some titbit about the company’s activities that week – a reminder that the contributions they were making were received and appreciated and that they weren’t just yelling down a well. A trust developed, and it means that this show really couldn’t have been made by anyone else. Even if someone else copied the idea, and had the determination to carry it off, it would be a completely different entity, not only because this work is so utterly of its time but because the relationship between the company and its public is rather special. There are direct references to this dynamic in the show: many of the respondents address THEATREclub directly, voicing their hopes and fears for the project, their nervousness about the exposure, debating questions of authorship and community and art itself.

Some of the cast of Twenty Ten. Photo via Fringefest.com

 

Shane, Barry, Lauren, Conor, Natalie and Louise are running through lines. And there are a hell of a lot of lines. Not only that, but there is nothing intuitive about the way one line follows another – this is not traditional dialogue, the only logic threading these snippets together is the chronology in which they were written. Now and again I get a clue as to how they’re pulling off this formidable feat of memory: when someone is struggling to remember a line, they mutter a series of a disparate words (that resemble nothing in the script) until at last they arrive triumphantly at the image they need, like someone kicking down a door. It seems the last word of the previous line is linked by some visual or verbal association to the first word of the next. “They’re calling them ‘connections’,” Grace smiles, and gives me an example that someone’s using, to link a bit about airports to one about unsociable drinking, and I’m left wondering if there’s a separate, tiny play happening inside the head of each of the actors in between every line in the script.

 

No wonder they look tired. The table is littered with plastic cups, mugs, 7up cans, tubes of vitamin supplements and general detritus. They might have been nesting here for days. I sit down at the end of a table next to Gabriel, stage-manager and keeper-of-the-script, and settle in to listen as an unending torrent of small, human dramas spills across the table. What have you learned today? The answers vary from the flippant to the kind of honesty that makes you flinch. The marathon nature of the show and its physical demands aside, it must be emotionally exhausting for the actors to perform this piece. The whole range of human experience is here. From simple aphorisms and trivial facts to rueful anecdotes about work and relationships, and the tone is constantly changing from joy to disgust to optimism til I feel I have some kind of empathy whiplash. I can’t digest it quickly enough. It’s a bit overwhelming.

 

I realise I’m trying too hard to linger on every image the readings conjure up. Every little vignette has some poignancy, some resonance I want to savour. Even when the line is quite sparse – an abrupt declaration of regret or expression of fear – it suggests a richer context and I’m wondering about the person who wrote it, the impetus that led someone to give these words up to be swallowed by a computer screen somewhere. It doesn’t take long, however, for me to let go of my own anxiety and begin to appreciate the bigger picture. To fail to take in the effect of the whole would be to miss the point entirely, like obsessing over the fate of individual figures in the Bayeux Tapestry but never standing back to look at the whole thing or what it represented.

 

For a start, it’s an incredibly rich historical document. More than any snapshot, any newspaper headline, any clip of footage that might be hauled out in the decades to come to illustrate the Irish people’s experience of 2010, this script encapsulates, in livid and loving detail, not only the surface tension of contemporary society, but the language, the slang, the technology, the trends and the prevailing mood. But it’s also a testament to the universality of human experience. It’s evident that what concerns us most now are the same things that always did and always will: love, friendships, fear, loneliness, and chronic self-doubt. It is a revelation to realise how many of us think we’re barely coping with the responsibility of just being a human being. So many people fret about being socially incompetent, about caring too much or too little about other people, about being stuck in a relationship or stuck not-in-one. It’s incredibly moving to see “everyone feeling the same thing at the same time,” as Grace puts it.

 

Another heartening reassurance is that this is still a country of writers. Many of the submissions are crafted with such eloquence, lyricism, bravery, wit and heartbreaking beauty that even here, in a rehearsal space on a Friday evening, as the actors rush through the lines, the words remain incredibly powerful. Grace and I speculate about whether THEATREclub were just incredibly fortunate in the sort of people that decided to take part or whether most people are simply far more articulate when given the space and time to write than we might be face to face. As Grace points out, the project took place over a whole year, which gave people lots of time to get comfortable and get in the habit of writing daily. Some people perhaps took most of the day to consider what they were going to write, “thinking: how am I gonna phrase this?”

And any single page of the resultant script is such a rich seam of imagery and ideas that it could form the basis of a play in itself, surely? “Oh yeah,” Grace answers, “but we were really not interested in changing it into anything other than a recital of what’s there.” Was she ever really disturbed or worried about anything that was confided by the participants, offering up secrets like pieces of flesh? She considers. “There was nothing too serious,” she says. “And I think people got what they needed just by taking part.” It’s not hard to imagine that even if what they were expressing was quite painful or shocking, the act of sharing it was probably cathartic in itself. To see that aim fully realised, when the whole thing goes public, book your tickets now for any of the 6pm stand-alone shows during the week starting Saturday Sep 10th, or for the omnibus edition on Saturday 17th, from 11am. Don’t miss it.

 

To read about what the company felt about working on the project, you can check out their blog, or for more details on the Project Arts Centre’s programme, click here.

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