Lisa O’Neill
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Field recordings of German forests and wire factories and talk of the tributaries of the Blackwater river frame Seamas Hyland’s deft and considered use of four accordions, taking us through polkas and waltzes – a perfect preface to Lisa O’Neill’s first night of her residency as part of the Gate Theatre’s Gatecrashes series. (Junior Brother will feature as support for her final two performances.)
Then O’Neill steps on to the stage and introduces us to a myriad of stories, cultural, political and social, unfurling the tale of Violet Gibson, the Dublin woman who shot Mussolini, armed with her “little rifle” and a rock, as O’Neill wryly wonders if she brought the rock “for support”. Gibson ended up in an institution in England, having been deemed a “madwoman” by society. The singer encourages us to think about who decides who is “good mad” and “bad mad”, suggesting that it is “never too late to correct someone’s legacy”.
Legacy and history are preoccupations for O’Neill, and being on the Gate stage inspires her to read a poem by the Donegal writer Madge Herron. A Prayer to St Teresa is stunning, O’Neill not only reciting but embodying it. It is a poem about Herron’s father, who was seen as a “disgrace” in their community, but not for Herron, who saw him as “all love” – revealing a similar impulse in O’Neill, who weaves threads between people and stories that history has not understood or been kind to.
Giving voice to the disenfranchised is something she does so well, with a particular affinity for women – “woman is powerful when not restricted”, she says. And she is emblematic of this, with a free singularity that can fold in difficult subjects, such as homelessness, on Homeless in the Thousands (Dublin in the Digital Age), and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, on All of This Is Chance, particularly his sense of the “starvation of the spirit”; “clay is the word, and clay is the flesh”.
Moving between banjo and guitar, and enriched by a great band, O’Neill has never sounded better, not least on Old Note, a song inspired by something the accordion player Tony MacMahon once said about how in Ireland we are governed by “the old feelings that rocks and rivers and mountains are inhabited by spirits” – and as she sings about “walking home half in the dreaming” it is clear that she is in the service of something beyond the transactional.
[ Lisa O’Neill: All of This Is Chance - Spectral, subtle and sublimeOpens in new window ]
It is there in Rock the Machine, about Dublin’s Docklands, its majesty and its decay – “machine has eaten up my job, my meaning, my cause” – and it is there on her cover of Bob Dylan’s All the Tired Horses, in which her repetition of “all the tired horses in the sun, how am I supposed to get any writing done?” makes the meaning climb and grow. It is coaxing but weary, defeated but not done – a feeling that resonates long after the show is over.
