Safe Harbour review: Cillian Murphy and Max Porter shine at Cork events
Cillian Murphy and Max Porter at the Q&A for All of This in Unreal Time, at Triskel in Cork, with Danny Denton and Mary Hickson. Picture: Brid O’Donovan
Cillian Murphy can be said to have perfected the stride, an actorly device he used to menacing effect in the television series Peaky Blinders and now deployed again in All of this Unreal Time, screened at Triskel in Cork as part of the Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival. Murphy, dressed in a black coat and hood, strides throughout, traversing the wet streets of an anonymous city as he recites a grim monologue scripted by English author Max Porter (Grief Is The Thing With Feathers).
In the 23-minute film, Murphy plays an everyman character, a self-described “bastard, squeezing sensitive bits of life and finding them senseless, empty, disloyal… gone.”
As he tramps through the night - to a soundtrack composed by Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner of The National, and British producer Jon Hopkins - he reproaches himself for a lifetime of bad behaviour, before reaching a sort of accommodation with his ghosts as the dawn breaks through towards the end.
No one would dispute that Murphy is one of the most prodigious talents of our times. Just as his recent turn as the nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer demonstrated his ability to capture the larger than life, so does this more humble role in All Of This Unreal time confirm his mastery of cadence and his gift for charming the camera.
At the Q&A after the film’s Irish premiere, Murphy praised the “magic” of Porter’s script. Porter himself spoke of the shock of seeing his composition brought so vividly to life. What he imagined was an expression of gratitude for our very existence felt more like a suicide note, he said.
Porter returned to a Cork stage a few hours later for what was billed as a “one-night-only” performance of his recent novel Shy, at the Pav, with mystery musical accompanists who turned out to be none other than festival headliner Feist and her band.
Despite the forbidding subject matter – Shy is an institutionalised 16-year-old delinquent on what might be the last night of his life – Porter seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. Known for the economy of his language on the page, he breathed fresh life into it in his performance. At times, he could have been declaiming poetry, such was the relish with which he enunciated his words. But then he’d ramp up the tension, and the recitation became more like chanting, or a tirade.
Underlying it all was a tangible compassion for the character of Shy, one of those whose fate it is to always be at odds with his parents, his peers and his environment.
The improvised musical score was never less than dynamic, reflecting Shy’s love of drum’n’bass, though space was found for some jazzy interludes, such as the double bass intro to the second act.
Max Porter presents Shy was yet another intriguing and artistically fruitful collaboration from Sounds from a Safe Harbour, a festival that – thankfully - has become a place of refuge for the avant garde.
