REVIEW: Mens Rea (Green on Red Gallery, Dublin)
The main pleasure of Spectacle Theatre Company's new production is its location, in the two interlinked rooms of the Green on Red Gallery in Fitzwilliam Square. Theatre companies too seldom seem to seek out unexpected venues, and setting is often permitted to remain a dumb element in a production.
The stage for Meris Rea, a small, low catwalk, with a ladder at one end and a minute platform at the other, is crammed into the gallery space with just enough room for two rows of seats. The audience is kept hard by the stage, forced to encounter this angular meditation on seeing and believing, familial relationships and memory in a very direct, intimate fashion.
But while the odd location suggests a taste for the unexpected, the drama does not live up to such hold inventiveness. The piece - directed by Karen Egan, played by Mary O'Driscoll and Derdriu Ring and "devised by the company" - is at present unwieldy, shapeless and dull. Its greatest problem, however, is a fatal dependence on recycled ideas.
The piece's opening line: "When my father died, it was like a whole library had burnt down," is "devised" from a text by Laurie Anderson; Mary O'Driscoll's talking cat seems to come fairly undigested from Nick Park's Creature Comforts; one section features Ring flipping into Rowena Banks's perpetulant child character from the TV series Absolutely and a speck of verbal play about the language of legal contracts is hugely reminiscent of some patter from A Night At the Opera. All of these, reference points turned up in just the first few minutes.
It would be nice to think that his busy intertextuality indicates that members of Spectacle Theatre Company are the Quentin Tarantinos of fringe theatre, but this hardly seems the case. The stepping stone references - if indeed they are references - do not suggest a path, so much as lead the audience to the middle of the river only to abandon it.
The stage for Meris Rea, a small, low catwalk, with a ladder at one end and a minute platform at the other, is crammed into the gallery space with just enough room for two rows of seats. The audience is kept hard by the stage, forced to encounter this angular meditation on seeing and believing, familial relationships and memory in a very direct, intimate fashion.
But while the odd location suggests a taste for the unexpected, the drama does not live up to such hold inventiveness. The piece - directed by Karen Egan, played by Mary O'Driscoll and Derdriu Ring and "devised by the company" - is at present unwieldy, shapeless and dull. Its greatest problem, however, is a fatal dependence on recycled ideas.
The piece's opening line: "When my father died, it was like a whole library had burnt down," is "devised" from a text by Laurie Anderson; Mary O'Driscoll's talking cat seems to come fairly undigested from Nick Park's Creature Comforts; one section features Ring flipping into Rowena Banks's perpetulant child character from the TV series Absolutely and a speck of verbal play about the language of legal contracts is hugely reminiscent of some patter from A Night At the Opera. All of these, reference points turned up in just the first few minutes.
It would be nice to think that his busy intertextuality indicates that members of Spectacle Theatre Company are the Quentin Tarantinos of fringe theatre, but this hardly seems the case. The stepping stone references - if indeed they are references - do not suggest a path, so much as lead the audience to the middle of the river only to abandon it.
posted by luke clancy at 2:42 PM
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