THIS SH*T HAPPENS ALL THE TIME by Amanda Verlaque

 

THIS SH*T HAPPENS ALL THE TIME by Amanda Verlaque

At the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on March 23rd 2022

 

Amanda Verlaque’s new play This Sh*t Happens all the Time eschews symbolic logic for a hyper-realist aesthetic.  The title itself gives up on the contrivance of traditional theatre, when a title is crafted, brief and summarising, for a realistic statement derived from everyday life which has little to do with theatre and more to do with a speech or a sermon. 

This is a one person show which happens to be intensely, brilliantly performed by Caoimhe Farren as Me.  Farren holds together her monologue which is replete with its own pathos and humour, although the message is direct and unambiguous.  This message consists of homophobia, homophobic attitudes, and crimes which were hitherto unlegislated for.  This lack of subtlety is a flaw, but it also indicates the author’s belief that theatre is didactic and must have a purpose beyond mere entertainment.  The problem is that the monologue form is at odds with the realist aesthetic.  Its hard for these to be sustained simultaneously.

The play’s language is colloquial and direct, obviously Verlaque uses the full range of seedy, uncomplicated, discriminatory language to underline her point.  Verlaque puts responsibility squarely on Farren’s shoulders for the plays evolution by refusing to create scenes and characters.  Paradoxically, many of the scenes are anti-realist as if a theatre group had decided to cut out everything but a lonely, dislocated voice raving in front of a neon sign.  Music and lighting are adeptly used to point out time shifts and contrasts such as a shift of decades or a movement of location and the work of Sarah Jane Shiels must be praised in relation to this.

Sophocles was also a writer who sought to divulge taboos and unwritten laws, but he did so in a way which sets up intriguing opposites, characters that are not ciphers or representatives of an idea, a philosophy or a point of view, and a story wherein events are logically and chronologically displaced rather than being revealed in order.  Verlaque’s technique is to leave us in no doubt because no other position is ever even considered, there are no other characters in the play.  This appears to be the work of a priest, a sermoniser, or a didactic politician, not a writer which is essentially the position that Verlaque is attempting to undermine.  She seems to be opposed to sermonisers, priests and didactic politicians who created the culture where the crimes she depicts took place.  Although the play bangs on with its message and evokes the colloquial at every point, radical, didactic plays rarely do this.  Instead, dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, for instance, attempted to undermine their works realist claims by pointing to the artifice, not away from it.

Verlaque’s work is an interesting experiment, but it seems to fail to complete its ambitious claims, and this failure seems to reveal itself at the level of the writing.  An ensemble cast complete with characters, situations and scenes might have evoked a more complex symmetry. 

Paul Murphy, Lyric Theatre, March 2022

 

 

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