Running with the rough crowd

The Boys of Foley Street whisks its audience through Dublin’s inner city, says Pádraic Killeen

MIDWAY through the Dublin Theatre Festival, and there has been much to relish. The highlight is The Boys of Foley Street, the third chapter in director Louise Lowe’s social history of the Monto, an infamous sector of inner-city Dublin. Improving on last year’s Laundry, The Boys of Foley Street never lets up. Whisked through a world of violence, drug abuse and prostitution, you witness the marginalisation of a community. Not that you have time to think about it. There’s only time to feel. And the things you feel are fear and horror. There’s some warmth, too, thankfully. But there’s also shame.

Shame is an important element of The Boys of Foley Street, and it’s handled much better than it was in Laundry, where the audience was given the trite task of learning off the names of girls from the Magdalene Laundry. In The Boys of Foley Street, you feel ashamed for looking. You are shoved into a small bathroom and told to look through a peephole. But you are soon indicted for your voyeurism. By the end of the show, you realise that you have not been a privileged spectator at all but that you, too, have been at the centre of a network of ‘looks’.

Admirably, while The Boys of Foley Street is a call for justice and for civic engagement from its audience, it also acknowledges our huge disempowerment. The call for political engagement is a recurrent motif in contemporary Irish theatre, but it’s seldom handled with such nuance.

Politik, a playful conceptual piece by The Company, addresses political disengagement, too, but the results are mixed. The show’s strategy is to empower the audience by having us devise elements of the narrative. As Tanya Wilson, one of The Company’s four charismatic performers, says, everyone in the room is part of The Company. The improv is often amusing, the audience contributing inspired silliness, but if the lesson is that we all have a part to play, that we are the body politic, then that seems a little banal.

On the other hand, the final image — in which audience members replace the actors onstage and inherit their divisions — is one that might be read pessimistically. The audience (i.e. society) is hereby doomed to re-enact these divisions. That is a more potent thought.

The visit of The Wooster Group, a New York company renowned for shredding the boundaries of theatre, caused considerable excitement. Their mad but irresistible idea, in Hamlet, is to re-enact a televised recording of a famous stage version, which starred Richard Burton. Though challenging, the production’s reclamation of theatre from film is a fascinating spectacle, and it also offers a wry meditation on gesture and the essential ghostliness of the stage.

Holding their own against The Wooster Group, Irish company Pan Pan also use Shakespeare to mount an esoteric, enjoyably intractable work. Everyone is King Lear in his Own Home defies summary. The would-be Lear (Andrew Bennett) has his diaper changed. Songs by The Velvet Underground repeatedly blare out at us. And a mouse — rolling around the stage in a plastic ball — threatens to steal the show. Yet the nuttiness of it all, as well as Pan Pan’s inevitable self-indulgence, is integral to a provocative treatise on the fragility of concepts such as humanity and subjectivity. Re-energising the Bard’s dialogue, Pan Pan remind us that we are all Lear-like, all of us fated to wrestle with “the mystery of things”.

In Have I No Mouth, another stalwart Irish company, Brokentalkers, offers an honest attempt to wrestle with just these mysteries: with the contingency, the beauty, and, alas, the simple injustices of life. Onstage are Feidlim Cannon, his mother Ann, and their psychotherapist, Eric Keller.

Also onstage — if only by allusion — is Feidlim’s father, who died following a medical botch-up. The piece doesn’t linger on that sad fact, although Cannon’s anger about it is palpable.

Rather, it reckons with the father’s absence and the emotional residue this man has left behind him, his presence felt in everything from the image of a pint glass to the family photos that bear his own, weird authorial stamp.

By the end, the likeable psychotherapist will take on the part of the absent father, his head entirely wrapped in bandage so that he resembles a mute, inscrutable mummy.

The stage, as ever, proves itself a home for ghosts, then, and the ghost, as in Hamlet, only requires of us that same old thing — justice.

* Dublin Theatre Festival runs until Oct 14