Monday 12th September
It's not really surprising that I slept in until almost 11am today as I was exhausted, which meant that I missed out on the hostel's free breakfast and lost part of the day, but woke deeply refreshed and ready for a big day.
It began with a quick breakfast (a smoothie and a cheese & ham bagel for those who like to know the minutae of my life) and then a visit to the Dublin Fringe ticket office to grab tickets to my first three shows (of which the promo artwork for one is pictured above). Then I headed off for a guided tour of Dublin's Trinity College, whose alumni include the likes of writer and wit Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Our student guide was casutic, witty and extremely entertaining as he pointed out various buildings, commented on college traditions, and showed us such landmarks as the two great trees growing on the college lawns, their roots buried deep in the graveyard of the old monastery which once stood here...
The tour ended outside the Old Library, which is the home of the remarkable illuminated bible known today as The Book of Kells. After viewing the book and related manuscripts of a similar age (I think there must be a series of old manuscripts tourists have to view, like swapcards, while they travel through Ireland and the UK - such as one of the four remaining copies of Magna Carta which I saw in Salisbury Cathedral - collect the set!) I wandered upstairs to the Long Hall - and my god what a library! Spiral stairs, busts, rare manuscripts, ladders leading to the topmost shelves, and a whole second tier of books towering above you on the second floor. And yes, it is indeed a lonoooooong hall, as the above link will show you.
Thereafter I cruised about the campus for a little while - cruised being the appropriate word. Let's just draw a discrete curtain over what happened after I made repeated eye-contact with a rather cute young red-headed student who turned out to have a room on campus, shall we?
Ahem.
Next I strolled, smiling and feeling delightfully relaxed, down to a nearby park where a suitably languid statue of Oscar Wilde has been erected, opposite Wilde's birthplace and family home. I bowed in homage to the great man, who is one of my personal saints, and raised a glass (well a can) of cider in his honour that I'd put in my bag especially for the occasion. This despite the fact that drinking was forbidden in the park. Oh, I'm such the rebel. ;-)
Thereafter I meandered back to Trinity and purchased a ticket to The Dublin Experience, allegedly the ultimate multimedia exploration of Dublin's history. Cobblers. It was a naff collection of slides using almost no original source material or footage, with a series of voiceovers linking it all together. While some of the early history about the Viking settlement of the city was informative, as was the brief summary of the events of the Easter Uprising in 1916, by the time we got to the modern era the show degenerated into a jingoistic compilation of images that reminded me of bad US propogandha films from the 1950's. Avoid The Dublin Experience folks, if you're coming to Dublin, unless you really need a crash course on Irish history in a 40 minute package.
After that I went to see a couple of Fringe shows in the evening:
A Season in Hell (After Arthur Rimbaud): Presented by The Stomach Box
"It has been found again!
What? Eternity.
It is the sea mingled with the sun."
- 'Alchemy of the Word', A Season In Hell (trans. Oliver Bernard)
A contemporary, site-specific operetta based on the poetry of 19th Century wunderkind Arthur Rimbaud. The production was performed in a warehouse, in a cavernous, dusty and gloomy room, to which we were led by a guide after meeting on the street a couple of blocks away. Music was performed live, and there were some excellent directorial flourishes, including some inventive use of video and the original appearance of the main performer, swathed in a black robe and carrying a lantern through the darkened room accompanied by a recording of an Arabic singer.
Sadly A Season In Hell was let down by its director-composer's insistence on singing. Had he stuck to the piano and the occasional spoken word performance it would have been a much stronger show. He had such a weak voice and narrow vocal range that it drained the work of any real power, save for when he was declaiming the poetry, at which point it came to spectacular life. Given that I'm quite an admirer of Rimbaud and his poetry, I found this show rather disappointing.
Urban Ghosts - Pale Angel (Presented by Bedrock)
"Once upon a time there was a little girl who made friends with shadows..."
- From the opening monologue of Pale Angel
(a line delivered by a menacing, suit-wearing, rabbit-headed man.)
An evocative, complex and sometimes cryptic fusion of physical theatre and drama, this performance by Irish company Bedrock was devised and directed by Jimmy Fay, with text by Alex Johnston. Its drama was informed by the suicide of American photographer Francesca Woodman in 1981. Woodman, who often used herself as her own model, was little known during her own life but has increasing come to be recognised as one of the major artists of her generation.
Superb lighting, strong performances, and a plot that explored grief and guilt, and which occasionally veered into the surreal and haunting, ensured that I was utterly captivated by this production from beginning to end. In fact I liked Pale Angel so much that I went to see the second show presented by Bedrock during the Fringe on Tuesday. More of that shortly...
***
After seeing two shows in one night I retired to the downstairs bar at my hotel, where I had a couple of pints, was slightly disturbed by the vast number of Amercian accents dominating the room, and went to bed relatively sober and relatively early - by my standards, at any rate!
***
Tues 13th September
Rose early, about 8.30am and had a free breakfast - fruit and cereal - in the backpackers' dining room, then strolled down through the Temple Bar and over to the main Dublin Tourist Office, where I booked myself a guided tour to the Neolithic chamber tomb of Newgrange (this would later turn out to be a mistake - see tomorrow's post for more details).
At this stage of the trip I was also seriously considering blowing off the rest of my plans for the Continent and staying in Ireland for the rest of my holiday, seeing as I was enjoying the atmosphere and energy of Dublin so much, but to do that I would have to get my visa extended, as I'd told customs at the airport I was only staying for a few days. This turned out to be a bit more complicated that I wanted it to be, so in the end, I decided to keep to my already distorted schedule and head on to Amsterdam in a few days time.
This sorted, I headed off to the National Museum of Ireland which has a superb collection of Stone Age - Iron Age antiquities, and where I marvelled at how small the hilts of Bronze Age (circa 1400-1000 BC) rapiers were: what tiny hands the warriors who wielded them must have had!
I was just admiring the natural mummification of a bog body when the power went off, and all of us were herded outside onto the street by nervous security guards, who presumably sought to ensure that none of us smashed a glass case and nicked a gold torque while the generator was down... Missed my chance, there!
Out on the street, I walked back past the modern Irish Parliament to the Temple Bar district, and went to the National Photographic Archive, which is dedicated to preserving and presenting old photos of a vanished Ireland. The exhibition showing while I was there was called Regeneration, presenting photographs taken by the Congested Districts Board, a government organisation who helped families from poor, over-populated and under-developed areas re-settle or re-build.
Given the activities of similiar well-meaning but destructive government boards in Australia's colonial history I was a touch suspicious, but the exhibition gave the Congested Districts Board nothing but good press: great photos too, of bare-footed children, turn-roofed cottages, tiny fishing villages and much more, most of them taken circa 1910.
Just across Meeting House Square was the Gallery of Photography, who display contemporary photographic work (rather like Melbourne's CCP). The current exhibition was the marvellous The Architect's Brother, a series of works by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison (USA). Their work was a spectactularly strange and beautiful series of photogravures, presenting surreal and haunting sepia-toned images: a man crawling across a series of planks which he is nailing together over the surface of a lake to create a bridge...a rent in the earth reveals the gears and mechanisms of a strange machine...a man waters a tree that sprouts from his head, its roots like dreadlocks...dangling from ropes tethering a cloud, an everyman hooks himself to the peak of a mountain.
Thereafter, having enjoyed yesterday's performance by Bedrock so much, I went to see Urban Ghosts: Self Accusation at the Fringe, a lunchtime performance. This was a local production of Peter Handke's 1966 two-hander, a deliberately contrived piece more spoken word than theatre, featuring two performers (a man and a woman), alternating confessional declarations of guilt: "I lay on the floor during months with the letter R ... I failed to look away ..." Through its deliberately repetitive & confessional litany, this piece 'examines the path we all follow from youth to adulthood, from nature to culture, an inevitable progression towards conformity and integration in society'. It was fantastic, and I'd love to perform it here in Melbourne one day.
Thereafter I strolled through the streets of Dublin, through a crowded mall to St Stephens Green Park, where young boys threw sticks into the leafy boughs of a chestnut tree, where countless couples were entwined in the afternoon sun and mallards quacked on the lake. I admired memorials to Joyce and Yeats - god but Ireland loves its writers, would that Australia was the same - and then dropped into The Stag's Head for dinner (Irish Stew) and a pleasant yarn with a young barman who'd spent a year in Australia (several months of it in Melbourne), and who told me he despaired of the trait of his countrymen to seek out the first Irish pub they could find every time they visited a new country.
That night, I returned to Trinity College, to the Beckett Theatre to see what was to be the highlight of my Dublin Fringe experience: the Welsh company Earthfall's adaptation of Jamie O'Neill's award-winning novel At Swim, Two Boys.
My god but this was a beautiful piece of work; one of those performances so sublime, so moving, so poignant and romantic that it made me weep while watching it. Watching? No, participating: this was a performance of physical theatre that made you feel the emotions and experiences the two dancers were presenting, that made you feel like you were actively involved rather than just a passive observer seated in the audience.
The story explores the growing love between two teenaged boys, Jim and Doyler, and is set against the backdrop of 1916, when World War One raged in Europe and when the Easter Rising launched the fledgling Irish Republic and the rebellion against English rule. Performed by Terry Michael and the beautiful Cai Tomos, the production of At Swim, Two Boys is set in a low-walled pool which gradually fills with water as the dance continues. The performers leap, spin and splash with exuberence and tenderness as the production plays out, to a sublime, cacophanous and delightful live score by expat Sydneysider Roger Mills (and another musician, whose name I don't know, unfortunately).
Now, I'm not a huge fan of physical theatre at all, but this piece really won me over, and I'm going to try my hardest to see if there's not some way of ensuring that it can tour Australia, because god I want all of my friends to be able to see it.
The following day I went out and bought the novel it was based on: that made me cry too, but more of that later...
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