Everything Falls
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
When you notice something new you might begin to see it everywhere, according to the explanation that the writer and performer Shaun Dunne gives at the beginning of Everything Falls, which he has created with Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan. An experience can psychologically reroute the brain: the phenomenon known as the frequency illusion.
That’s also what can be hoped of Dunne’s theatre, which has told overlooked real-life stories and, in recent years, merged testimony with urgent music and movement. In a sense that makes him a peer of Cannon and Keegan, the Brokentalkers directors, who have long used a bricolage of devices to shake up familiar cultural narratives, as if they could be looked at anew.
In this harmonious collaboration, Dunne appears as the facilitator of a creative-writing class who asks his students to respond to prompts. One of them, reflecting on a period when their grandmother lived with them, recalls a book about the Roman goddess Cura (who name means “care” in Latin). Having created the first human only for other gods to try to take him away, Cura becomes protective: “But he belongs to me.”
From there the production moves into a postcard picture of suburbia. A married couple dance together, spinning each other, as the husband asks questions about their history. “Am I good with the kids?” he asks, played by a gently disarming Charlie Hogan. “Of course you are,” she replies, in the charismatic form of Lauren Larkin.
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In Eddie Kay’s startling but sensitive movement direction, we begin to see the early signs of long-lasting illness. Moving between the utilities of Ger Glancy’s impressively assembled house set, Hogan’s man halts during daily routines, moving out of step, his arm tremoring while putting on a jacket. A new reality of family care is represented by subdued sequences such as one in which the husband and wife are in bed, lying down and rising up daily without intimacy.
What’s impressive is the portrayal of illness without judgment of ill people or their carers. Instead there’s a sense of an irreconcilable situation: “I feel like time is getting away from me,” says Larkin’s woman, transformed into a carer for her husband, and trying to prioritise personal time by attending the creative-writing class. During one argument about her missing class, he says: “It’s a lot harder for me than it is for you.” Each are allowed their frustrations.
Rather, it is the world they find themselves in that feels oppressive, shaken by cruel circumstance, while the testimonies of carers remind us of a community feeling unsupported. The chamber pop of the composer Seán Miller (welcomely reunited with Brokentalkers after eight years) feels cyclical and spectral, incorporating the goddess’s words into its mournful lyrics.
Given the creators’ polemical undercurrents, you might expect the overall effect to be a little like a lecture. Instead, Larkin’s woman is finally allowed to read her prose aloud, as if trying to push the artificiality of contemporary theatre towards sincere emotion. What will make people care about carers? Maybe art can.
Everything Falls is at Project Arts Centre until Saturday, November 23rd, then at Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Tuesday, November 26th
