Dublin Theatre Festival reviews: The Great Hunger, and To Be A Machine
Peter Coonan and Niwel Tsumbu in The Great Hunger, at IMMA for Dublin Theatre Festival. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
The Abbey’s promenade production around the grounds of IMMA is the only live show to survive the dreaded Phase 3 Covid-19 protocols at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival.
It divides the 14 stanzas of Patrick Kavanagh’s titular long poem between individual performers, with troubadours leading the small, masked audience through the autumn evening.
We set out between two lines of illuminated trees, lured the stark, unmistakable voice of Lisa O’Neil. Then, Liam Carney appears between the potato drills: old Patrick Maguire, the peasant farmer, clay made flesh. “He stayed with his mother till she died/At the age of ninety-one.”
By then, “he was sixty-five". This is his tragedy; through it, Maguire personifies in Kavanagh’s indictment the poverty, conservatism, and sexual frustration of the rural Ireland he knew.
While the satirical target might not be as obvious as it was when Kavanagh wrote The Great Hunger in 1942, the poem lends itself to dramatisation, thanks to Kavanagh’s deft portraiture and his ability to conjure a telling scene.
It also, of course, speaks to the universal. Lines like “Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight” or “something was brighter a moment” have a sudden poignancy now.
Meanwhile, of the performers, Derbhle Crotty in particular shines in an intimate, captivating scene. Her aliveness to the words, her movement, her expressiveness are a wonder – a reminder of the great hunger within us all for the kind of moments only theatre can deliver.
Last year, Dead Centre gave audiences an empty stage for their “ghost play” Beckett’s room. This time, things are reversed: an actor is present, but the theatre is empty.
Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson is the man in the room, playing the writer Mark O’Connell in a faithful exploration of the ideas in his acclaimed book on transhumanism, To Be a Machine. The framing of the show gives ample scope for playful echoes and illustrations of O’Connell’s themes.
To begin with, for instance, we are asked to upload videos of ourselves in advance of the performance. We see them on the night: electronic, disembodied versions of ourselves on individual tablet screens where the audience would be.
No better way, then, to discuss such things as the US company Alcor, which preserves its customers’ disembodied heads in the hope of reanimation; or “whole brain emulation” and the philosophical questions such a technology would raise.
