“Everyone rose to their feet... to applaud... But I could not help thinking that this was the sound of a mainly middle-class English audience having their cultural stereotypes confirmed rather than questioned.” Sean O’Hagan was writing in these pages last week about the response of a London audience to Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman. Take away the word “English” and the description fits a lot of the work I see, including Druid theatre’s production at the Galway international arts festival of Mark O’Rowe’s 2003 Crestfall (the programme gives the title’s meaning as “the fall of power, the death of beauty, the collapse of society”).
Such productions signal situations to audiences’ presumed homogeneous assumptions. Often, though, these situations are not fully worked out dramatically. Characters become examplars for particular attitudes; a bit like Victorian melodramas, but with more sex and grime. Here, we have three women, poor but emotionally honest; victims of their love of men and children (a sort of revisionist reworking of the Madonna figure as victim without choice, unto whom things are done). The assumption is that, as the programme puts it, they are “caught in a trap of society’s ills” – yet no particular society is presented in the play. Dressed in knee-length white shifts, the women sit, stand, lean or lie on the bare, corrugated interior of what looks like a shipping container.
Over 70 minutes, each delivers a monologue that vividly evokes, from her own perspective, the events of one day. These bizarre and cartoon-stark events are located in an unspecified dystopia. Fantastical elements dislocate it from any known reality. The women’s accents and vocabulary suggest a low-income area in Ireland. Each in turn graphically describes being subjected to extreme degrees of physical and emotional violence by men; each subjects others to emotional violence. As far as credibility of plot and social commentary go, it feels as probable as a pumped up, urbanised, pulp fiction version of Midsomer Murders.
The three monologues are written with a pulsing rhythm and in rhyme – this intensifies the images (which we paint in our own imaginations). It also, as it swoops and dives to fit words to rhymes rather than meanings, highlights the self-conscious artificiality of the piece.
What gives the production traction is the cast. Kate Stanley Brennan (no relation), Siobhán Cullen and Amy McElhatton are riveting. Using only the resources of their bodies and their voices against the harshness of Aedin Cosgrove’s simple set, they play rhythms and cadences. Under Annabelle Comyn’s direction, their gestures and tones add facets and shades to this two-dimensional construct. In this sense, O’Rowe’s piece does connect with the real world – it uses women’s flesh to embody a male vision. The acting is what pulls this up to three stars.
