I went to a lunch time performance of "Songs of Joyce" at Bewley's Cafe Theatre on Grafton Street. Bewley's holds a regular lunch time performance series where your ticket includes a bowl of soup and bread (both of which were very good).
The show featured two women who performed a cycle of songs featured in Joyce's work. They would take turns playing piano and something that sounded like an accordion (but I don't know what is was exactly) while singing as well. My personal favorite was the classic "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" (check out the rendition by Celtic Woman on youtube).
The show had a nice physical shape, as the women donned different hats and utilized a few props to create each scene. I was also impressed by how many looks they were able to get out of a pretty bare-bones light plot (I counted 9 lights in the air plus a few birdies that were placed as footlights on the stage). Overall, it was refreshing to see two actors not taking themselves too seriously, having fun as they created each vignette-- a great way to spend lunch.
Afterwards, I went on the Historical Walking Tour of Dublin. The tour guide was a History graduate of Trinity, and he gave a disclaimer at the beginning that he was going to try and cover all of Irish history in 2 hours, which is a pretty bold undertaking to say the least. As a result, the tour was kind of all over the place, jumping from century to century, forwards and backwards in time, but it was incredibly informative and invaluable to helping fill in the gaps of my Irish history education.
One of the stops was Dublin Castle. A lot of the original castle was teared down and replaced with this courtyard.
The dome inside Dublin City Hall.
Christ Church Cathedral.
The Four Courts.
In the evening, I went to a show called "The Early Bird" at Project Arts Centre. It was really weird. The play consisted of two people, a husband and wife, inside a plexiglass cube. They had headsets so we could hear them, and they basically just acted out and recalled the events surrounding their daughter being taken from them / running away. The author dropped subtle hints as to whether or not the girl was kidnapped, whether the parents had been abusive, etc. The cube was actually effective in this regard, for during several key moments you could see the actors' reflections in different parts of the glass as they reflected on the situation.
If Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis had a bastard love child play, they would have named it The Early Bird. Although the actors were clearly giving very emotionally rich performances, I thought the text's lack of a cohesive narrative was off-putting. Part of the problem, I think, was that the playwright tried to replicate the frenetic chaos of the moment of losing a child through the structure of the play, but did so in a way that was uninteresting to me as an audience member. By contrast, in a play like Copenhagen you may have a narrative that is difficult to follow in which many questions remain unanswered, but the search for the answers is fascinating, as you watch the problem being worked out moment to moment. I think that's what this play was missing, but nevertheless, I was happy to see that artists in Ireland are making bold choices, like putting people in a cube.
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