Review The End Of Hope/Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against A Brick Wall

Peter Barker relishes two very different one-act plays about romantic relationships, both stylishly directed and performed.    

The End Of Hope
by David Ireland
Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against A Brick Wall
by Brad Birch

Coupling
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

An evening at the Orange Tree Theatre sees the revival of a pair of intense two-handers - a comedy by established Belfast playwright and actor David Ireland and a poetic drama from young writer Brad Birch. 

The End Of Hope charts a night of casual sex between Dermot (Rufus Wright), apparently "Ireland's greatest living poet",  and Janet (Elinor Lawless), a supermarket worker with low self-esteem about her looks.

This is set against a Northern Irish backdrop and, yes, there is a Catholic and Protestant element but the focus is on an unlikely romance between a man and a woman with a dark, comedic twist.

Janet hides herself behind a mouse mask, even if she proves eventually to be a ballsy personality  and disclosures about a past relationship reveal a bizarre secret.

Ireland’s script is witty, outrageous, surreal and inventive, providing an entertaining and sometimes shocking hour of theatre on an effective simple set, a bed in the middle of the space, from designer Max Dorey.

Wright and Lawless have terrific chemistry, commanding the audience's attention as an odd couple -  atheist, Protestant, former Catholic, mouse impersonator, married man.

Ireland's play can be tricksy, as well as entertaining, and director Max Elton confidently handles the pacing, laughs and tricky changes of tone from jokiness to threat and back again.  All in all, a play and production meriting a green light.

Brad Birch's play, first seen at the Soho Theatre in 2013, is a far more serious drama, but not without moments of wit.

Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall has a serious intent, examining the emptiness of modern life. However the playwright's bold ambitions are undermined by a hackneyed scenario.  

We are drawn into the mundane lives and thoughts, through soliloquies, of Him and Her, a young city worker couple (Orlando James and Georgina Campbell) utterly disillusioned with their stale, flat and unprofitable worlds.

This is a play from a young writer about 20-somethings, ruled by the clock, technology, bills and everything else that makes up modern life.

However, for those who remember it, there is a feel of Reginald Perrin territory, admittedly with more swearing and less middle-aged, in the rebellion against their repetitive, corporate-driven life: "This isn't reality, this is the f****ing office".

We are given their diurnal round -- waking, eating, travelling, working, drinking, sleeping played out on another strikingly effective and ingenious Max Dorey set.

Two benches are the only furniture serving as desk, bed, barricade, office. The two rebels grasp the eye-catching splash-of-colour orange props waiting for them on hooks hanging from the ceiling.

Under director Hannah De Ville’s focussed, rhythmic direction , there's enough momentum to allow us to accept the artificiality of the the characters breaking the fourth wall relaying their innermost thoughts. 

However this piece's structure, rather than the direction,  after establishing with energy its questions about modern life, lets the play down. The ending feels downbeat and unsatisfying after the previous pace and exuberance and it's an amber light.

These two plays, with lighting by Stuart Burgess and sound by Richard Bell, form part of a Directors' Festival  showcasing directors on  the Orange Tree Theatre and St Mary's University Theatre Directing MA.

Judging by these productions, it's well worth grabbing one of the £7.50 tickets and seeing any of the plays before the festival ends on Saturday, July 29.

Alongside the pieces I saw, the run includes Albert's Boy by James Graham directed by Kate Campbell, Misterman by Enda Walsh directed by Grace Vaughan and Wasted by Kate Tempest directed by Jamie Woods.

Review Everything Between Us

Everything Between Us
by David Ireland

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love And Understanding?
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Actually there's quite a lot that can be darkly and ironically funny about professed peace, love and understanding after years of violence (don't ask us to explain a situation which has mutated over hundreds of years from Plantation colonization to now Brexit adding a new complication to a twisty history).

Northern Ireland. Yes, we're talking about Northern Ireland. As we've seen previously, playwright David Ireland (yes, it really is his name ...) charges in like the proverbial bull in the china shop, but something real and universal emerges when he refuses to glue together the pieces as if they were never broken or even to pretend that he can't see the cracks.

But enough of cryptic metaphors. Everything Between Us is a two hander. Sandra (Lynsey-Anne Moffat) has become part of the Stormont establishment, a seemingly outward looking politician who is helping facilitate a peace and reconciliation commission under the glare of the world's press.

Yet the proposed peaceful opening of the conference is disrupted, in almost reverse Dr Strangelove-style, by a wildcard in the shape of Sandra's long-lost violent sister,  blonde rock chick Teeni. She fans the flames of old hostilities, intransigently inventing new battles, albeit with occasional lapses into moments of reflection.

Everything Between Us has the trajectory of a cathartic play. However,  it never supplies any closure of or easy answers to a stand off which has different incarnations in many countries riven by civil war atrocities for whatever reason, bringing destruction, maiming and death to often innocent citizens.

While some of the references may be immediately recognizable to many as indicating which side of the Northern Ireland divide the sisters are on, the Protestant unionist side, it's left until nearly at the end for us to fully understand the siblings' affiliation.

Indeed, despite the clues laid down, the glamour of Teeni beside her more frumpy sister almost also seemed to reflect the romanticized image of the IRA successfully promoted throughout the world during The Troubles.

Is it a successful play? Well, this is an unusual review in that we don't know whether it needs to be. Dramatically it feels flawed.

Teeni pours out both venom and occasionally more perceptive, if clouded by a gleeful rage, insights for most of the play before Sandra belies her more conservative demeanour with her own hocus pocus.

The jokes are hit and miss - not so much because they're not funny but some do feel thrown in rather than emerging from character. But there's a lot that is thrown and sticks.

This applies especially to how legal structures such as tribunals and commissions after the formal end of hostilities refuse to countenance the contradictions involved in themselves.

Acoholics Anonymous becomes a metaphor for the addiction to both violence and then confessions with sponsors just as compromised as those whom they sponsor. All reflecting a world situation when a commission narrows its focus down to itself and one country rather than the global affiliations which often helped the violence continue.

It's a play that maybe doesn't fit all the jigsaw pieces together - angry, cynical, raw, jagged where political and  media-friendly vested interest smooth over the wrongs to construct an artificial right.

Neil Bull directs with a sure hand, maintaining the momentum over seventy minutes against a dishevelled backdrop of  a basement filled with now disused metal filing cabinets, trailing cables and flickering lights designed by Laura Cordery.

But it's also very clearly a play that's also a fantasy. It's difficult to imagine such a confrontation between the sisters in these circumstances. Indeed even their attitudes feel awkward for women.

And maybe there's the nub of it - Ireland the playwright has chosen two women to channel and front the very male-dominated worlds in which each of them live. And it's a strength that this seems an awkward fit because it forces us to think about what these conflict resolution processes really are.

It's a green light for a deliberately uneasy and stimulating one act play which keeps us in the room with problems we may not want to, but need to, consider.

Review Cyprus Avenue

Cyprus Avenue

By David Ireland

The Orange And The Green

www.royalcourttheatre.com

There is a Buzzfeed meme making the rounds of the internet at the moment asking "What percentage Jeremy Corbyn are you?" Well, Eric Miller (Stephen Rea), the Protestant Loyalist protagonist of Cyprus Avenue would surely point indignantly at his grandchild as one hundred percent Gerry Adams.

Notwithstanding that she's a peach of a girl and barely five weeks' old and brought to the Miller's Cyprus Avenue household by daughter Julie (Amy Molloy).  

This tragicomedy, written by East Belfast playwright David Ireland and directed by Vicky Featherstone, tackles with black humour the entanglements of an older Belfast Protestant generation. 

Despite a dangerous, searing subject and the Gerry Adamification of the granddaughter, it almost falls into the category of a conventional psychiatric-consulting room based play, if it were not for two things. David Ireland's understanding of his home city and Stephen Rea's performance as he turns and considers the issues simmering in his mind before they boil over into violence.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, for before that there are the  flashbacks  and  the psychiatrist Bridget (Wunmi Mosaku) to talk to. See what we mean about a conventional play?  

The title mirrors that of a Van Morrison song,  but Cyprus Avenue, where Eric lives with wife Bernie (Julie Dearden), is apparently also a leafy upmarket road, almost a Bishop's Avenue of Belfast (see Page 27 of link).

This seems at odds with the confused but strangely logical deductions  of Eric, which rightly or wrongly one associates with the working class,  as he repeats to himself why he is British. Yet it's not at odds with the strangeness of this play.  

It also occurred to us the playwright, without knowing if he is Catholic or Protestant, thankful his surname is a geographical fact rather than a partisan nationality, may have rehearsed the British/Irish arguments in his own mind for many years before writing this play!

It's a dangerous, edgy piece which plays around with conventions of playwriting as well as sectarianism. 

For all that, weaker points sometimes peep through.  A pivotal encounter with a Loyalist gunman Slim (Chris Corrigan) exposes the political language hiding harsh reality seeping more and more into the play as it progresses but uses mundane stand-up jokes less successfully.

And the slightest of niggles is that this would perhaps work even better as a movie where the psychiatrist's explanations of identity in a world context at the beginning of the play would feel less expositional. 

But the effective theatre-in-the-round plain white carpeted design  by Lizzie Clachan  with its few pieces of furniture almost works as a green special effects (no pun intended!) screen. The Protestant/Catholic divide is definitely Belfast but the trip to London brings in foreign exchange and hints of other eras.

The ending is not for the fainthearted but it's a play that knows it can't put a step wrong even if the characters are in the wrong. A green light for a disturbingly funny but tragic play.