Festival fair by the Liffey
The weather forecast has proved wrong and on a glorious day I took a train to Dun Laoghaire and walked the coastal route to Joyce’s Martello Tower and on to Finnegan’s in Dalkey for lunch.
I had plenty to think about after a packed Dublin Festival Sunday: the return of Stephen Rea, a witty evocation of pop art, shaven-headed Bhuto dancers and those pesky aerialists from Oz, walking and running at 90 degrees to the flat projection of a video game projected on a huge screen in the George Docks.
Rea was part of a reading of Stewart Parker’s 1975 play Spokesong, set in a Belfast bicycle shop as the violence escalate outside.
What a wonderful actor Rea is, and what a wonderful play, renewed as a green pamphlet, almost, with Gilbertian songs, history and humour thrown in.
Someone’s bombed a pet shop. How could they do such a thing? Yes, but for one magic moment, it was literally raining cats and dogs.
Rea’s hero, Frank, is envious of where his girlfriend’s saddle’s been. This reminds me of the John Betjeman couplet, “I think of you and how I’d like/To be the saddle on your bike.”
Parker died far too young, in 1988. He wrote many of his plays with Rea in mind, but this was the first time the actor had played (or at least “read”) this role. Parker’s niece, Lynne Parker, who runs the trail-blazing Rough Magic company, staged the reading, and it was a thrill to hear it again; I’m proud to say we published the text in Plays and Players magazine when it first appeared in a production at the King’s Head.
Over a coffee with Jimmy Fay, the director of the new, updated Playboy at the Abbey, I am disappointed to learn that he’s not related to the famous Fay brothers who helped found the Abbey. But lots of Fays, including Jimmy and his non-relations, come from Longford, and he reckons that the actor William Fay looked just like his father’s grandfather.
Fay is part of the rising generation in Irish theatre. He founded the Dublin Festival fringe ten years ago, runs a new writing company called Bedrock and is about to serve a spell as the Abbey’s literary manager.
I am reliably informed that Edward Bond — who notoriously hates establishment theatre’s revivals of his work, and all who sail in them — liked Fay’s recent revival of Saved so much that he came back to see it a couple of times, as well as on the last night.
Those shaven-headed, white-powdered slow motion chappies in Sankai Juku’s Hibiki have gone down a storm. The company seems to come to Sadler’s Wells about twice a year, but this was their first visit to Dublin.
I think the audience thought they were somehow representing the suffering of the protesting monks in Rangoon.
I’d rather have Lindsay Kemp any day; well, once in a while, perhaps. The senior dancer resembles a heavily sedated Chita Rivera, though I don’t think he wants to be in America, and he doesn’t have any thigh slits in his long grey dress.
