The Jesus Trilogy
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★★
At the beginning of JM Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus, the first part of his Jesus trilogy, travellers are carried by ship to Novilla, a place where all the rules are different. When they disembark, they are assigned new names, and their previous lives are forgotten. It’s a premise uniquely suited to theatre, where actors step into another identity and follow the internal logic of the stage. Hatch Theatre Company’s new play is a beautifully textured adaptation that captures all the sadness and mystery of Coetzee’s novels.
Adapted by Eoghan Quinn in collaboration with the director Annabelle Comyn, the play makes bold decisions. The chief obstacle to any adaptation of Coetzee’s trilogy is that its main character is a five-year-old child. Quinn’s solution is for the boy, David, to be a central absence, voiced by different actors onstage – an effective way of conveying his eerie solemnity and the power he exerts on those around him.
In the first act, Simon (Fergal McElherron) has taken charge of David and aims to look after him until he can be reunited with his mother. But finding her is difficult in Novilla, a strange socialist dystopia where everybody seems content with their insipid lives. Nobody has sex or eats meat. Irony does not exist. The trees in the forest are planted in symmetrical rows. Work consists of carrying sacks of grain to a storehouse where it will be eaten by rats. Tom Piper’s stark, industrial set design, with Arctic-white lights and smoke, does a good job of conjuring this act’s bleak, functional world.
A turning point comes when Simon and David meet Inés (Elaine O’Dwyer), a random woman who agrees to be the boy’s mother. The trio form a dysfunctional family unit. In the second act they flee to a nearby town, Estrella, where David enrols at the Academy, an esoteric dance school. The headmistress is the beautiful Ana Magdalena, and the janitor, Dmitri, is apparently in love with her.
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Piper’s design becomes more glamorous here, industrial wooden panels sliding away to reveal mirrored ballet rooms, and work gear swapped for evening wear. David fits perfectly into this more magical world. At his regular school in Novilla he struggled to count from one to four; at the Academy he doesn’t need to: he can perform an interpretative dance that expresses the secret essence of a number instead.
The central question that The Jesus Trilogy asks is how we manage to live in an inscrutable world. Simon is the ultimate Everyman, asking reasonable questions and getting riddles in response. When he struggles to understand he is met with derision, not least from David, who seems closer to the unfathomable secret of the universe despite lacking any practical sense. As the play draws to its conclusion, its many levels of allegory align to produce a devastating emotional and moral clarity. The only kind of knowledge worth having, it seems to argue, cannot be obtained through reason.
Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 19th
