Wrapping up Midsummer fun: Confessional theatre, communal sing alongs and spoken word
A look at some of the highlights from the 2019 Cork Midsummer Festival.
Where the peepshow meets the confessional
A booth outside Cork Opera House hosts one-person plays, for an audience of one person at a time. Each piece is about five-minutes long.
Admission is free, and no ticketing is required — just join the queue.
Imported to Ireland by Landmark Productions and Octopus Theatricals, the idea was originally conceived by American theatre-maker Christine Jones, who realised that this intimate one-on-one experience totally changed the dynamic from the usual public theatre performances.
Depending on your own pursuits, the booth may remind you of a confession box, or a peepshow. Jones researched both.
She finally got her Theatre For One built by Danny, the guy who had actually made many of the peepshow booths in Manhattan.
Inside the ergonomically-clever space, you’re surrounded by the type of red velour fabrics Danny probably bought by the mile.
You sit in a surprisingly comfortable chair, and a partition slides back, bringing you face-to-face with the performer.
All six pieces were specially commissioned for this project. The plays are constantly rotating, so after seeing one, you exit and can queue again to see another.
Those involved include a sprinkling of A-listers of the Irish theatre world, with Derbhle Crotty starring in Mark O’Rowe’s piece; and Sean McGinley appearing in Marina Carr’s.
One of the two I saw was Bait, from the dream-team pairing of Eileen Walsh and Louise Lowe.
Cork native Walsh will be familiar as the mad friend Kate from Channel 4’s Catastrophe, and numerous other roles.
Playwright Lowe is one of the principals of Anu in Dublin, a company renowned for their site-specific tales of Magdalene Laundries and inner-city life that shed light on worlds a long way from the middle-class milieu of Irish theatre.
The partition draws back, exposing a dishevelled Walsh, who immediately asks you for help zipping up the back of her dress.
Twenty seconds in and this is already a markedly different and more intense theatre experience.
With a flawless Dublin accent, and a naggin of vodka in hand, Walsh eyeballs you as she relates her character’s sorry tale of struggle and abuse.
It’s uncomfortable and affecting. As it’s designed to be.
Most definitely. The intimacy of the situation won’t be everyone’s cup of theatre, and not every piece can have Lowe/Walsh involved.
But even the most jaded attendees will probably emerge from the booth with that tingle of having felt something new.
In terms of overall experience, it’s a winner.
Sing along with Broadway and Danny Boy
A one-word title gave an idea of what to expect at the second of three Proms concerts at Cork Opera House.
The evening was a tribute to Broadway’s golden age from the 1930s to the 70s featuring a varied selection of two dozen songs from ten shows ranging from Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim.
It was good old-fashioned stuff, in the best sense of the word delivered with pace and style in a slick production that went down a treat with the full house.
The ‘promenading’ happened on stage as the six-piece ensemble of actor-singers deftly emerged and dispersed delivering their numbers with lightly choreographed movement.
It was a luxury to hear show tunes delivered by the 23-piece COH Concert Orchestra under Cathal Synnott, placed on stage against a glitzy backdrop evoking Sondheim’s Follies.
The mood alternated between big-band pizzazz and soulful ballads when glorious solo string and wind timbres shone through.
Amid the prevailing gaiety, there was darkness to Naoimh Penston’s powerful rendition of Sondheim’s, Send in the Clowns and Ladies Who Lunch.
There was fine work too from Claire O’Leary and Charlotte McCurry.
The guys had the best comic moments. Michael Grennell and Shane Morgan made a convincing double-act in Brush Up Your Shakespeare.
Michael Joseph hit his stride as Nicely Nicely Johnson in ‘Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat’.
The amplification of the vocalists was on the heavy side particularly in the ensemble numbers.
There was a comfort in hearing familiar golden oldies so delightfully delivered.
For the many children in the audience, it was as good an introduction to the breadth of Broadway as you could wish for.
Sunshine on Saturday gave way to Sunday downpours and what better way to spend a rainy afternoon than a communal singalong.
Having amassed a fan base on YouTube, the Toronto-based singing group Choir! Choir! Choir! arrived in Cork with a challenge of teaching an audience a new arrangement of the Frank and Walters’ hit anthem, ‘After All’.
Armed only with a guitar, Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman in an amiable, self-deprecating style, coaxed and cajoled a largely female audience of circa 500.
The best moment came towards the end.
Calling for a volunteer to sing Danny Boy, Rosemary emerged from the balcony and was joined by Liam from the stalls on guitar to lead us in the Victorian music hall tradition of audience singalongs so appropriate for this venue.
Bringing Brixton to Cork
Linton Kwesi Johnson brought a bit of Brixton to Cork on Friday for the first event in the Crosstown Drift literary strand of the festival.
Johnson is probably best known as a reggae star from a series of albums in the late 1970s/early ’80s, but his dub poetry works even without the backing of Dennis Bovell and co.
Having moved to the south London suburb from Jamaica as a child, LKJ chronicled the tumultuous era of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Sick of racism from the police and wider society, the sons and daughters of West Indian immigrants in various areas rose up and rioted in the “great insohreck-shun”.
It’s obviously not a period that has yet mellowed into nostalgia for LKJ, and you can still feel the anger in his belly as he talks of the injustices of the era, and the fact that his own grandson is still regularly stopped and searched.
Among the audience are a number of Cork’s own ex-Brixton crew, drawn there in the late 1980s by the lure of jobs, excitement and cheap rents (or even free squats).
A good-natured cheer greets the introduction of ‘Inglan is a Bitch’, and we also heard a more tender side of LKJ with poems about his late father and nephew.
The warm-up acts at St Lukes suggest that spoken-word verse is in a healthy state in Ireland at the moment, with diverse accents and outlooks from Cork and beyond.
On Saturday, the likes of Emilie Pine, Kevin Barry and Conal Creedon provided readings in locations such as the Crawford Art Gallery, Nano Nagle Place and O’Mahony’s pub in Watergrasshill.
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