For everything you need to know about all the Festivals visit www.list.co.uk/festival WOLF Engaging exploration of human/wolf relations ●●●●●
The audience heads into the Caves with a growing sense of trepidation. We’ve been told that the ‘wolves’ may want to touch, move or smell us. We’ve been told we should let them. We should also make ourselves comfortable; we’ll be standing throughout. Entering the damp and dingy
confines of the Caves, it’s clear that this atmospheric space is perfect for a show of this nature.
There’s no sense of following the (creative) pack here as a consummate ensemble explores the psychology and ecology of the human/wolf relationship, with an engaging, often playful script that toys with notions of mythology and fairytale, and freedom and individuality. Preying on the audience’s sense of containment, the wolves writhe, leap, grunt, pant and sing around us. Instruments are used to dramatic effect, and the actors don’t just use the space, they inhabit it. If there’s any criticism, it’s that in moving the audience around, it can occassionally be difficult to see the action but this is innovative theatre nonetheless. (Anna Millar) ■ Just the Tonic at the Caves, 556 5375, until 29 Aug (not 17), 12.15pm, £8.50–£9.50 (£7.50–£8.50).
POLAND 3 IRAN 2 Merhdad and Chris share the political football ●●●●● Iran’s narrow defeat at the hands of Poland in the 1978 World Cup serves more as punctuation than as the main text of this lecture-cum-barroom shaggy dog story. Lecture because its main visual element is a slideshow; barroom tale because it’s told in a tiny
Festival Theatre
Y A D T R E B O R
PENELOPE Enda in the ascendant ●●●●●
If ever there was an unlikely group of candidates for moral reclamation, it’s Homer’s Suitors, those odious, power-hungry freeloaders who installed themselves at Odysseus’ palace after he was presumed dead, intending to marry his wife Penelope, and thus assume his kingdom. And yet, Enda Walsh has done just that: Burns, Quinn, Dunne and Fitz, living out Greek myth from the drained, dirty confines of a modern day swimming pool, get to be heroes, just for one day.
they haven’t stuck themselves here for love of the unknowable Penelope, but for power. The opening dialogue is thick with the sort of amicable mistrust you’d find among contestants in the dying days of a reality television show: as these alpha (and beta) males bleat at each other that ‘the game is still on’ they wouldn’t be out of place on The Apprentice, and Penelope judges their efforts by CCTV camera beamed straight into her living room. It’s only when faced with the very real prospect of their impending deaths by angry husband that they’re forced to scan their souls for any last, tiny traces of humanity.
Walsh’s masterstroke is that he finds their Walsh’s characters have always been prone to
contemporary parallels in the sort of buffoons who propel themselves through life, and the business world, on a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ethos, although only one of them, the monstrous, Brylcreemed Quinn, resplendent in pink Speedos and an Elvis-black dye job, is honest enough to admit that. Despite the trappings of ‘romance’ that surround them: the corny love songs on the stereo, the heart-shaped balloons, lyricism, but here, finding grace notes even in amongst the self-deluded rantings of repellent men, he seems to be ascending to a higher plane. This is complex, beautiful and somehow very Irish writing, reminiscent of Synge or O’Casey: Enda Walsh, welcome to the Pantheon. (Kirstin Innes) ■ Traverse Theatre, 228 1404, until 29 Aug (not 16, 23), times vary, £17–£19 (£12–£13).
80 THE LIST 12–19 Aug 2010