Girl on an Altar

by Marina Carr

seen at the Kiln Theatre on 1 June 2022

Here we are at Aulis for the second time within a month as Marina Carr's new play Girl on an Altar has its world premiere at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn in a production in partnership with Dublin's Abbey Theatre. It is directed by Annabelle Comyn with Eileen Walsh as Clytemnestra, David Walmsley as Agamemnon, Kate Stanley-Brennan as Cilissa (a serving woman, daughter of an Amazon), Nina Bowers as Cassandra, Daon Broni as Aegisthus and Jim Findley as Tyndareus.

From the cast list alone it is clear that this is very different from Age of Rage (reviewed recently), the expansive elaboration of the tangled story of the House of Atreus devised by Ivo van Hove. With Iphigenia and the other children only referred to here and not seen (and the young victim described as only ten years old) the revolting act of sacrifice impinges on the audience through the filter of her parents' reactions: Agamemnon's angry self-justifications and Clytemnestra's appalled feelings of betrayal and loss.

Again ten years are elided and we soon witness Agamemnon's homecoming from Troy, but the play pursues a sharply different narrative from the usual: the king and queen live in tense hostility as he knows that Clytemnestra has had an affair with Aegisthus - there is even a child - and she seethes with resentment and horror at what Agmemnon has done, while still occasionally falling prey to a visceral physical attraction to him. This proves to be a startlingly effective and powerful means to explore the dynamics of a ghastly situation at both the personal and political level. Agamemnon appears to think that present necessity overrides past misdeeds - 'tell me what will make it right between us again?' - while Clytemnestra is trapped in her grief and rage. The situation proves impossible to maintain; when Clytemnestra is banished to the living death of the palace harem rebellion is fomented by Aegsithus and her father Tyndareus, while yet another confrontation between the central couple leads to a shockingly familiar outcome - at which point the play finishes.

The set, designed by Tom Piper, features an enormous bed in an otherwise featureless room. When Clytemnestra is the favoured woman there is a rich brocade cover, but Cilissa eventually has to strip the bed and provide more austere linens when Cassandra is promoted to the premier position. Huge wooden-slatted screens at the back are occasionally pushed aside to reveal further vistas, but much of the action takes place in this suffocating domestic space, The actors not only speak to one another but also tell us directly what they are thinking and what they observe one another doing. It's a curious device which eliminates implausible speechifying while still transmitting vital information about their interior lives; at first I thought there was no direct dialogue at all, but then I realised that conversation and observation were profoundly intermingled, allowing all sorts of nuances and instabilities to flourish.  

The cast are excellent, Eileen Walsh in particular giving a towering performance as Clytemnestra, ably matched by the masculine swagger of David Walmsley's Agamemnon. This is a completely refreshing (though hardly consoling) investigation of a story now millennia old, proving once again the extraordinary dramatic power of these ancient tragedies.

Aristocrats

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 August 2018

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Brian Friel's 1979 play about the decaying O'Donnell family, unusually Roman Catholic denizens of a 'Big House' in Ballybeg, County Donegal (most 'Big Houses' belonged to Anglo Protestants).

The house has seen better times - repairs are outstanding and there is virtually no money to keep it going - and the family in the 1970s is not what it was either, having descended from Chief Justice to sausage factory worker in four generations. The senescent father (James Laurenson), principally present to us through his rambling diatribes overheard through a baby monitor, still holds sway over Judith (Eileen Walsh), the daughter dutifully caring for him, and can still strike terror into is wayward son Casimir (David Dawson) when he is visiting from Hamburg, but he seems to have less effect on Alice (Elaine Cassidy) visiting with her husband Eamon (Emmet Kirwan) from London, and the youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus) still living at home but about to be married.

The family has in fact gathered for Claire's wedding, but Tom Hoffnung (Paul Higgins), an American academic, is also ferreting around the house and taking notes about family anecdotes as part of a research project. The situation is thus ripe both for peculiar revelations and for some sociological theorising and analysis, and at times both seem a little forced. However, it is not so much that there are skeletons in the closet (as might be expected from the dramatic set-up), but rather that the siblings - apart perhaps from the determinedly practical Judith - are deeply strange people: Alice losing herself to drink because her marriage has soured, Claire veering between the highs and lows of manic depression, and Casimir holding himself together with inexhaustible nervous energy. When Eamon remarks to Tom that the family half believe that Casimir's German wife and three boys are a figment of his imagination we are left forever unsure of how to take anything that Casimir says, and his palpable shock when Tom presents him with incontrovertible evidence that one of his family memories is impossible only strengthens the impression that he is lost in daydreams.

Though there are weirdly comic moments, much of what we see instils an atmosphere of debility and even despair; the similarity to Chekhovian ennui is increasingly obvious, reinforced by the country house setting, the faded gentility of the family, and the eventual collapse of the means to keep the whole enterprise going. But the style of this particular production makes it hard to grasp the tone of the piece, with the result that it takes more time than it should to settle into the world we are witnessing. Rather than creating a realistic setting, Turner and designer Es Devlin have designed an almost featureless pale pastel green acting space with a model of a house standing in for the real thing, and stage directions at the beginning of each act read out to set the scene. Where such a model was a powerful symbol in The Inheritance here it looks a little contrived, and the constant presence of the cast hovering in the background when not required to be on stage, so masterfully effective in Matthew Lopez's play, here makes the action more difficult to follow.

This is a pity, because the individual performances are often very good, and David Dawson in particular is brilliant as Casimir; and the concluding mixture of melancholy and hope is quietly affecting.

Little Eyolf

by Henrik Ibsen

seen at the Alemida Theatre on 17 December 2015

The play is directed by Richard Eyre, in a new adaptation by the director based on a literal translation by Anne and Karin Bamborough. It features Jolyon Coy as Alfred Allmers, Lydia Leonard as his wife Rita, Eve Ponsonby as his sister Asta, Sam Hazeldine as Bjarne Borgheim, Eileen Walsh as the Woman (the so-called 'Rat Wife'), and Adam Greaves-Neal (in this performance) as Eyolf (the son of Alfred and Rita). The set is designed by Tim Hatley and lit by Peter Mumford.

At eighty intense minutes, played without a break, this is a distillation of an already comparatively short play in which a married couple, drifting apart in unhappiness and recrimination even before the catastrophe which concludes the first act, are stretched to breaking point by the accidental drowning of their crippled young son Eyolf.