Composer scales new heights with play
Directed by Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca, the play is about three characters “in very poignant situations,” says Ní Riain, who was born in Cork and now lives in the UK. “It’s about love, loneliness and not quite fitting in. It’s about trying to find the logic and the reasons for why things happen when they do. The grand objective of the play is a kind of epiphany but not one with bells and whistles. It’s a careful epiphany because I want it to last.”
The characters are Eamon, the tallest man in the world (played by Tadgh Hickey), Erin (played by George Hanover) and Phelim, Erin’s father (played by Dan Reardon). Erin has been searching for the tallest man in the world who, in her view, is her father.
“The actual tallest man in the world has loved Erin for a long time. He’s right next to her but she doesn’t see him. It’s a kind of a ménage a trios. It’s a play about wants and needs.” Despite her background in music, Ní Riain is very clear that the play has to be performed without a sound design. “I want people to witness it in a small darkened room with no set, no artifice and no music. It’s very important to me that it remains simple with just these people and their stories. The writing is overwhelmingly poetic and rhythmical. Because I’m a composer, I have this sense of how you can play an audience in listener terms. For example, I use alliteration and rhyming and building up a texture through words, whipping the audience into a frenzy. It’s all composed in my head. Coming into rehearsal, I felt that very much. I don’t have a vision for this play. I hear it. The three voices have very particular timbres and tempos. That might sound slightly odd language to use when talking about theatre.”
The play consists of monologues that are occasionally intercut by comments from other characters on what has been said. There is also some choral speaking.
“Part of the metaphor in the play is around an island where things happen. It’s an imagined island off the mainland of Ireland. The tallest man in the world is from there.”
Ní Riain has the characters philosophising in the play about bad decisions that they’ve made. “It’s about people who’ve had difficult experiences, sometimes at their own hands. Ultimately, they are people who want to get to the end of their journey as intact as possible. It’s a demanding play but not gratuitous. Everything in there is carefully sculpted. Sometimes, what the audience will be listening to will seem heavy. I’m interested in how human beings process what happens to them and how with maturity and experience, we see things differently. But some things don’t change. Most of us have a core that never changes no matter what happens to us.”
Fresh from the success of her play Desolate Heaven , which received good reviews when it was performed in London a few months ago, Ní Riain is enjoying working closely with Kiernan. “I have input when it’s needed. The script was in very good shape when rehearsals started but we had to make some changes. There are aspects of the script that are complex on first listening to them. Pat is very good at knowing how audiences are probably going to react. I welcome that because a writer can only have so much objectivity about their writing. I feel the play is in safe hands.”
* The Tallest Man in the World, TDC, Triskel Arts Centre, June 27-30. www.corkmidsummer.com
