A List of Things I Thought During The Eurydice Project
-Wow -This is magnificent -This is so big and ambitious and exciting -This is a beautiful set, I love the giant moon, I love the griddish metal with screens on it -Thracia = America under Trump? -In light of the interview in which Joanna said that they're correctively writing Eurydice as a bolshy unapologetically awkwardly uncompromising Hamadryad, I'm finding this dance sequence very very sexualised and gender normative. -Michael David may be a million feet tall and India may not be, but she could totally take his weight at SOME point -Like she probably wouldn't die like -Their spoken scenes are better, MD and India sparring such that they both get to be sparky and clever and not as gender tropey -Alex Motherfucking Petcu is rocking this cool little continuo-y chug+pentatonic-y motif thing -Éanna Brennan is rocking the registral shifts up and down an octave, funny little written-in echoes, like they're in a cave/UNDERWORLD, FORESHADOWING?! -Barry McKiernan might just win a fight with James Woods for best Hades -Why are these people even together? I'm not sure I buy their loving let alone liking each other, which has serious ramifications for the Stakes(™) of this play -I feel like there's a touch of cynicism = depth to this, as though people being spiky and elliptical – without compelling or even apparent reason – is automatically more profound than their seeing eye to eye even occasionally, with further implications for the Stakes(™) -Also the script is leaning heavily on archness, which I don't think works as we – the audience – don't have a clear enough sense of the world's rules for the characters' ironising about it to read -As in you get that they find it funny/emotionally charged but do not yourself find it funny/emotionally charged -On the one hand it's Mythic Greek World and on the other they have mansplaining and echo chambers and smartphones -Meaning we can't know what an action means, meaning it can't impact unless unpacked for us -Which is only a problem for me because the 4th wall is firmly in place, implying this is to be read as a real world in some sense, rather than a self-consciously messily Told World where the madness comes from the Telling so deal with it, work out why we the tellers are superimposing these cultural frames and what that implies for the whole production's area of inquiry -Basically I think this would work much better if the performers were allowed know they were performing, gestures to that effect by BarryHades aside -I'm really really enjoying the horrible synth blasts -I find the musical irony of major-key-but-horrible-timbre synth more affecting than shrill harmonic-y strings + bowed percussion + octave shifted speech as used for Eurydice's 'death' -I'm really really enjoying Hades hosting the Jerry Springer show -I wish I could see Rachel [Ni Chuinn] doing her droney music with that string-operated theremin-yoke better, because I love the theatricality of live music, sound emerging from gesture -I wish I could see where that angular bassline is coming from, assuming it's coming from anywhere -That last bit was really beautiful -And MD and India and Barry did stellar work across the board -I'm not sure that I think it effected any synthesis between the many many constituent strands -But all of the strands were really good, taken by themselves, independent of one another -I don't think it proved whatever Joanna was hoping to prove about the ethical/aesthetic bankruptcy of Irish theatre, specifically monologue plays, because fuck them as far as she's concerned as far as I can gather -Because while this was really beautiful I don't know that I thought it was provocative or insightful -But it was, unquestionably, beautifully designed and choreographed and scored and acted Dylan for DRAFF The Eurydice Project by Joanna Crawley/White Label runs at Project Arts Centre until 1st April. Image: Graeme Coughlan
Posted: 24th March 2017 |