An act of remembrance is inevitably one of distortion. If you read this review but haven’t seen the play, you’ll remember what I wrote instead of what objectively happened. In time, you may not remember if you saw the production or not, but were someone to mention it, it may ring a bell and you may say, “Yes, yes I think I saw that. Wasn’t it about memory?”
Dublin-based Malaprop Theatre play mind tricks on us. In three discrete scenes, John Doran, Breffni Holahan and Maeve O’Mahony interrogate ideas about faking history, questioning absolute certainty and curating cultural memory. In each, they pick at a nugget of a conversation – their own or one remembered – smoothing the bumps of memory and creating a thin new film of fiction over fact. A stage manager bustles around the set, manipulating the story.
Malaprop’s deeply layered meta-theatricality dances a step ahead of the audience, teasing and probing. Claire O’Reilly’s direction is clean until it’s messy, the scenes make sense until they don’t. Under the intellectual knots of ethics and philosophy, the company’s trademark wit remains, and there is a current of absurdity running through each scene.
The third scene features auditions for the role of Rasputin for a music video. Dressed in heavy robes, the three actors fall. Poisoned. Shot. Drowned. In that order? Wasn’t he shot twice? As their bodies twitch, words lose meaning and chaos – assisted by Brian Fallon’s sound design – reigns. A camera captures it all, its eye unblinking.
Everything Not Saved is cynical though not accusatory. Nintendo told us it would all be lost on the quit screen. If Malaprop have their way, when flesh has melted and brain cells are scattered, the only things saved would be a pixelated image of the photo you don’t think looks like you and a crude Powerpoint presentation, asking how James from row five’s twins are. Is this what the apocalypse is supposed to look like? Did they say? Do you remember?
- At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
