Theatre Review: Pals: The Irish at Gallipoli

National Museum of Ireland

ANU theatre company’s latest piece re-enacts the training of soldiers from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who, 100 years ago, were sent to the carnage of Gallipoli during the First World War.

Director Louise Lowe channels the horror while also subtly grappling with the socio-cultural factors that informed the soldiers’ lives.

The show focuses on four men, three of a middle-class background, and a fourth, a working-class fellow who “only signed up for the boots” and to placate his wife with the “separation allowance”.

That the piece is set in Collins Barracks — today the home of the National Museum, but 100 years ago the very site where the Fusiliers trained — adds an undeniable power, and much of the action is in one of the original dorm-rooms.

Switching from realism to stylised intervals, we observe the banal horseplay of the men’s training, but also glimpse the insanity of the Turkish warfront.

Inevitably, the show can’t entirely reinvigorate images of war with which we are so deeply familiar.

Yet it is the small, but telling, touches that make Pals something to savour, be it the sudden tossing of a rugby ball that fizzes with class tensions, or the unruly disruption of ‘official history’ at the show’s beginning.

As ever, meanwhile, the unpredictable possibilities of immersive theatre pack their own punch, as when, by chance, three giggling teenage girls, their smart-phones held aloft, obliviously pursue the performers as they march away to ‘war’ at the show’s end.

You could not invent a more poignant image of time and history gnawing upon one another.

Until April 30