Shades Through a Shade - Review of Gare Saint Lazare Ireland's latest theatrical production

 

 

 

 

Shades Through a Shade

Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett

Gare Saint Lazare Ireland

 

Shades Through a Shade ( 23- 28 September), currently running in the Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival ( 26.09 – 13.10, 2024) is, as one should come to expect from any Gare Saint Lazare Ireland production, a dream within a dream within a dream conjured up with some bleak nightmare. Featuring texts by Gorgio Agamben, St Augustine, Dante, Beckett, Hildegard Von Bingen, Melville, and the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy as well as texts from Julian of Norwich, Shades is theatre as you would imagine it played out in the sixties in Paris or California; in other words… hallucinogenic! The visual displays, Morgan Doyle, and music, by the composer Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, all help to create an incredible theatrical vibe and mood, which this reviewer was badly in need of to cure, somewhat, my post-modernistic dystopian blues.

A terrific cast of performers ( Natasha Everitt, Lux Lovett, Simon Jermyn ( Guitar), Conor Lovett, Trey Lyford, Seán Mac Erlaine ( Various instruments) and Julia Spanu ( Vocals) all help to individually add to a theatrical extravaganza that Judy Hegarty Lovett directs with a very strong hand. Textually, extracts from Dante’s Commedia and assorted pieces by Beckett, taken from the Trilogy as well as other works, are some of the more familiar works. There is a very strong association between both authors, Beckett read him in Italian when he was a young man at Trinity and still had his old copy of the Commedia by his death bed in the hospice in Paris, so Hegarty Lovett uses extracts from the two authors as a kind of vertebrae upon which she adds all of the other voices in an almost seamless intertwining and which creates a very strong sense of journeying.

Belacqua and Bartleby are the twin protagonists who take us through the, at once, surreal medieval landscape starting on Mount Purgatory where we find Dante’s protagonist, the ever slothful Belacqua, whom Beckett was to adopt as a doppelganger as a young student in Trinity where he appears first as far back as Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks. Melville’s scrivener is a nice shoe in for Belacqua, Gare Saint Lazare Ireland equally mounted a lavish production of Moby Dick some years ago so what you find in Shades to a certain degree is a very sophisticated and experienced theatre troupe, I almost wrote Mountebanks, juggling texts from former influences from former works and inserting other elements, such as Agamben and Jean Luc Nancy alongside the triad of Christian thinkers already referenced.

Indeed, medieval hierarchy is an explicit theme in the central section of Shades of a Shade, the text is by Agamben and refers to the fact how hierarchical structures have been around in western thinking since Aristotle, continuing through Dante ( a divine comedy in which the protagonist, Dante himself, is guided by Virgil from the very lower ranks of Hell, right through the torturous climbs of Mount Purgatory till he meets his divine love Beatrice, who also makes a cameo in Shades) right up to the so called Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The medieval hierarchy of Dante, incorporating extracts from Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso give a solid structure, and when the Florentine Master’s Dublin reincarnation is not paraphrasing, the sacred texts of Von Bingen and Julian of Norwich offer an uncanny and somewhat apocalyptic tenor that is all too timely, considering the very bleak political scene internationally. Humour abundantly abounds in the piece, as a very tenuous line is maintained by all the actors throughout the performance, whether they are jumping about like circus folk in a kind of dystopian commedia del art, or painfully crawling across the stage like so many figurines from a Flemish medieval master!

Another interesting development is the interjection of other texts by Hegarty Lovett, correspondences from, say, her to technicians or other possible members of the theatrical production, surely a nod to Foucault and his all too revolutionary upending of the traditional hierarchy by aligning all documents, like people, in the very all too modern horizontal clime of stratification; the modern hell! Something about the almost collegian sense of humour in these supposed random insertions makes one baulk in one’s chair, far more interesting to get back to the fire and brimstone of the Christian believers where Hell was a proper fiery place and where all the miscreants of creation are sent. I couldn't help but think of the great French historian and antropologist Emannuel Todd and his all too timely latest meditation on the link between a sytem of belief, religious that is, and the birth rates of a civilisation; according to Todd, due to our secular beliefs birth rates in the west are dramattically decreasing, while in other parts of the world, where belief systems are still in place, they are on the rise...! All of which seems to be evoked in Shades Through a Shade. 

So, if you are a poor and tired commuter looking for a little soulful engagement on the meaning of Life, yes, with a capital L, and everything in between, you could do a lot worse than run, (Yes RUN!) into Trinity and make your way to the rather austere structure made of wood and to be then taken hand in radioactive hand, and  in glove, by the pranking divine jokers of le la Gare Saint Beatific Players of dear olde Ireland…you won’t know yer arse from yer elbow, but sure whenever would you, says you!