Abbey Abbey Abbey!

Today I spent a lovely day at the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland. There is so much history surrounding the Abbey-- I won't go into it now--but check out the Wikipedia article!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Theatre

I did an all-day voice workshop with Andrea Ainsworth, the Abbey's voice director. We spent a lot of time working on vocal production, and also did some work with voice and text, mostly with Shakespeare. It was a lot of fun! There was a decent amount of overlap between Andrea's technique and my vocal lessons, which was very comforting and helpful. During lunch, I talked to Andrea more about voice training and Irish theatre in general. She agreed to meet for an interview later in the week so I could ask her even more questions. Additionally, she was helpful in pointing me towards the resources available at the Abbey Archives, which I will visit later in the week. I also spoke with a friendly older gentleman and a woman who was his daughter- they were doing the workshop together (how nice is that?). The two are very involved with amateur drama in Kerry where they live, and I spoke to them about that for a while. The woman's brother runs a pub in Cork- she gave me his name and assured me that if I go to his pub, "he'll give you a pint and take care of ya."

In addition to lunch, the workshop fee included a ticket to that evening's performance of "Bookworms" by Bernard Farrell. The play was a comedy of manners surrounding the antics of people in a suburban book club during the recession. It was very funny, although the beginning had some clunky exposition, the bits about the recession were heavy-handed, it probably could have been 45 minutes shorter, and the ending was too let's-just-tie-everything-up-in-a-nice-pretty-pink-bow-thanks.

I thought the set was interesting, with its tacky furniture, a flatscreen t.v. from which the couple's daughter phoned in on Skype from Australia, and of course, a fully-stacked bar. The acting was generally strong and energetic, although the characters at times were a little one-dimensional.

Despite its flaws, I'm grateful I saw this play. The dramatic trope of the "story," the unreliability of the story and storyteller, the capacity for the story (the lie?) to redeem and heal more powerfully than the "truth," which figures so prominently in Martin McDonagh's work, was crucial to Farrell's vision in this play. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trope that's particularly important to Irish playwrights in general (or maybe just playwrights in general). I look forward to investigating this further over the next couple of weeks!