Fire Below & Beckett Women at the Lyric Theatre & The Mac, Belfast


FIRE BELOW (A War of Words)

by Owen McCafferty

directed by Jimmy Fay

at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

on the 14th October 2017

Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure



&

BECKETT WOMEN: CEREMONIES OF DEPARTURE

Presented by The Poets’ Theatre



Not I



Footfalls



Rockaby



Come and Go



At The Mac, Belfast on the second of November, 2017



The Mac, Belfast has presented a conflation of four Beckett shorts under the pompous imprimatur, Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure, not that a deep-seated engagement with women, feminism or femininity underscores Beckett’s writing.  Often Beckett’s work is deeply male oriented but in a blank, neutral sense.  The male is usually an Irish tramp such as Molloy or Malone, and focuses on his aloneness and jagged ruminations in the chaos, the flux of experience or non-experience.

By contrast Fire Below is a short plotless interlude in the lives of two middle-aged, middle-class Catholics and two of their middle-class, middle-aged Protestant counterparts in the post Good Friday Agreement era.  Ruairi Conaghan, Cara Kelly, Frankie McCafferty and Ali White play the couples, Gerry and Rosemary, Tom and Maggie, survivors of the conflict yet still surrounded by the vestigial traces of sectarian strife.

The play begins with a somewhat puzzling excerpt from the Mozart Requiem possibly explained by the presence in the audience of ex-Queen’s University alumnus, Simon Callow, who began his acting career as Mozart’s librettist Emanuel Schikaneder in Amadeus.  This then is the exquisite corpse hidden in the shrubbery.  The mise en scene is bare, some coloured lanterns hang before a patio replete with deck chairs and barbecue. The area has somehow expanded over the years.  The patio overlooks a Protestant bonfire on the 11th of July, the play deals with the class and religious dimensions that have subtly altered after the supposed cessation of hostilities.  The fire below relates to the class system, higher people and their rejoinder to the lower orders who are both literally and metaphorically below, like the Lilliputians who are midgets to Gulliver’s giant.

There are typically shallow patterns of humour such as pretentious speech, sarcasm, then a woman says the F word and somehow the audience knows they must fall about laughing and do.  How obliging.  Women, it is implied, are not meant to use the F word and when they do it’s a big laugh.  Banality and puerility are never far off as the superficial banter and craic unravel revealing deep seated divisions.  The conversations range across responses to popular culture and to issues of language such as recent controversies regarding the Irish language and Ulster Scots.  However, when the two couples begin to debate the situation of Palestine which is viewed as another little Ulster yet more violent still, this provides a pretext for the end of the dialogue. Sudden, undisguised tension heightened by underlying animosity reveals the true relationships underlying the action.  Fire Below has minimalist designs but the language it evokes is never less than colloquial, self-consciously prosaic, never daring to be so daringly visionary and polemical as Beckett.

Without a plot there is nowhere much for this situation comedy to go but it does go somewhere contrasted with Beckett’s characters who go off on rambling monologues, sometimes in English and sometimes in French.  A vestigial plot is revealed through the three women who play all the parts and clearly represent the different stages of youth, middle age and old age.  Another character seems to be the Grim Reaper without a scythe, a morose monk-like figure who stands completely still at both the beginning and ending of the play.  Otherwise s/he takes pictures, rocks an antique rocking chair complete with antique woman, and behaves mysteriously like the figure of Death in Bergmann’s film The Seventh Seal.  Apocalyptic, grandiose music initiates and condenses the drama but it is somehow appropriate and the overall, wordless effect is undiminished, the trauma of living and dying are revealed.  The mise en scene is thought through carefully and appears to be a sitting room with tea and chairs and those odd shaped balls that clairvoyants use.  A division curtain separates both sides of the stage, creating an illusion of depth.  In Not I one side of the curtain is a screen presenting a giant mouth uttering poetically charged non sequiturs, looking like the mouth of Big Brother (or Big Sister).  Sound design and mise en scene matter just as in Fire Below they seem inconsequential, arbitrary, or (possibly) made up on the night. 

Contrastingly, Footfalls presents an inconsequential dialogue developing into a further monologue spoken in the third person, Rockaby, which seems steeped in the premonitory power of language evoking decay and ultimately death.  Repetition of banalities may fascinate or madden or possibly both on alternate moments, these plays have proven to be a finishing school for the ambitions of many PhD students.  But they still evoke something even if not every word of each monologue communicates or can be even understood.  The overall impression was that Beckett was being taken a bit too seriously, however, especially since the artistic director, Bob Scanlon, refers to the plays as “a temple devised for patient and respectful vigils.”  What if the audience responses were not respectful, what if people yawned loudly during performances or sat on fart cushions or on small dogs appearing to be fart cushions?  Are these responses that Beckett might detest?

It is possible to yawn and yet to entirely comprehend Beckett’s methods and means especially with our benefit of hindsight and understanding of the limits of the avante garde.  The kind of effects Beckett was aiming at now seem to have caught up with some of the technological gizmos and gimmicks or our own day such as digital cameras.  The Mac was able to reproduce the kind of cinematic grandeur that was only available in Hollywood in Beckett’s day. For instance, the first performances of Not I simply had a white sheet cut out and a mouth speaking through.  Contrastingly Owen McCafferty eschews the experimental in favour of a return to naturalism and hardly acknowledges the technology that is now ubiquitous.  Paradoxically, McCafferty fails to exploit the poetic resources of language in favour of relevance and topicality but would perhaps benefit from viewing some of these Beckett shorts again too!



Paul Murphy, Belfast, October 2017


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