Starjazzer
Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Dublin
★★★★☆
There’s a scene in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, the fourth volume of Seán O’Casey’s autobiography, in which friends drag the writer, revolutionary and self-styled “green crow” away from a pub conversation between an Éamon de Valera-denouncing flower-seller and a suitor slyly attempting to unbutton her blouse. He likes his friends, he explains, “but they were never themselves”.
The two characters who populate Starjazzer, Louise Lowe’s inventive, impactful adaptation of O’Casey’s elegant short story The Star Jazzer, are precisely and poignantly themselves.
Lowe’s script translates O’Casey’s earthy poetry from the third person to the first person. “That was the bell of St George’s chiming twelve o’clock pushing another Tuesday up against the pile of Tuesdays that she had put behind her” becomes a careworn cry for Liv O’Donoghue’s overworked tenement mother.
The brute who holds her down and tells her to “Keep quiet for a few moments, can you?” in O’Casey’s tale does not appear in this production. It falls to the committed O’Donoghue to re-create the horrors of marital rape without a scene partner.
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Long before that awful moment she conveys the traumas and inequities of her daily existence in an unbridled interpretative dance. At times her breast-beating desperation reddens the performer’s skin as she spins around an intimate courtyard area, often centimetres from the audience. A song taken verbatim from O’Casey’s text – “I met a man and lost my head and him I wed: he gives me bread” – becomes a desperate howl.
Lowe’s Anu productions are multidisciplinary and socially conscious, a marriage of attributes that ensures creative use of the unusual theatrical space of the Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland, on Merrion Square: the audience is divided into two groups for overlapping performances; upstairs from O’Casey’s put-upon heroine, we find her granddaughter, played by Ciara Byrne.
With clever notations on intergenerational patterns of abuse, Byrne’s skilfully calibrated character echoes her predecessor’s folk Christianity and stargazing rhythms.
Her story effortlessly reworks The Star Jazzer from the perspective of a contemporary domestic-abuse survivor. She circles a bed manically as a rehearsal for her daily routines: walking around the city centre without money, trying to avoid anyone who might recognise her.
Both women emphasise the repetition and deprivation that define their lives. Both women work at night to avoid the rush. One waits to fill her bucket from the pitiful dribble of water afforded her tenement; the other lives precariously from her suitcase and does her laundry at night.
The diptych structure means Rob Moloney’s sound design can intrude between the performances. Oddly, rather than distract, this reinforces the project’s ideas about inherited trauma.
Be advised: audience members are asked questions and required to climb stairs and move around the grand Georgian house. And bring a coat: part of the performance is outdoors. It’s well worth braving the elements for this affecting and innovative production.
Continues at the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 19th
