Clinic Media

Night Swimming

Dark Side of the Family

This new play at the CAT Club is a response to the terrible stories of fatal tragedies related to parents and young children.

Night Swimming is an exploration of the raw and harrowing material of extreme domestic stories where the family seems to spiral almost inevitably towards a sad end.

Rather than presuming to know how to tell it as it is, writer Kenneth Hickey imagines his way in and around this difficult material. What he comes up with is deliberately self-conscious in its style in that it is like a board-game for two players.

The husband and wife move around a predetermined space, landing on various set-piece scenes that they play out.

The characters all but say: “C’mon, your turn.”

Though it has this carefully wrought and contrived structure, it manages to avoid being trite.

And, even though it is a monotone of pain and sadness, it is quite theatrical.

Director, Eoin Ó hAnnracháin applies a subtle hand to the text, nicely modulating its frequent wavy moves from naturalistic scenes to moments that are more harsh and expressionistic.

James Browne catches the troubled and deeply broody layers of the husband while Kate McSwiney O’Rourke wrestles with the fragility and anger of a woman marginalised as a woman “suffering from her nerves.”

Better than Hickey’s Autopsy which featured in the CAT Club last year, this time he has found a style that suits the more lyrical and dramatic flourishes of his writing.

As a representation of a family melting down into dark and awful destruction who knows how true it is?

But, as a response to stories that have become part of a netherworld of Irish contemporary life, it is a legitimate, intelligent and honest engagement.

Liam Heylin, Evening Echo, Wednesday the 12th of November, 2008.

Howie The Rookie

Two monologues on either side of an interval might not be everyone’s idea of a good play, but this one works well – not least because of the quality of the production it gets in the Granary.

The only real pity about the enterprise is that such a small audience turned up to see it. The new talent on show deserves a warmer welcome in Cork over the next few nights.

Given that this was the first production in the latest New Directors’ Festival at the Granary, the most noteworthy thing about it was the top-drawer performance from Nick Kavanagh.

For a young actor it was an expertly modulated performance, flicking between characters at ease and finding an easy and assured tone over a 45-minute monologue.

Mark O’Rowe’s acclaimed play is like a film eagerly described from a barstool.

Director Eoin Ó hAnnracháin builds on the queasiness and intensity towards a slow release of tragic and twisted consequences.

The second monologue is given quite a convincing performance by Stephen McCann as his character’s story overlaps with Kavanagh’s.

It is the kind of play that could be sound-tracked to death but Ó hAnnracháin wisely lets the script make the music through the talents of the actors.

A new director could be forgiven for falling to the temptations of staging a production that draws attention to itself in all the worst ways by attaching all kinds of bells and whistles and directorial signatures. But the collective talents at work on this piece seem to be too cool to fall for that.

Good work, deserving a good audience.

Liam Heylin, Evening Echo, Thursday October 11th.

The New Directors Festival at The Granary Theatre in Cork was initiated in 2006. This year a further four directors, furnished with a small but facilitating budget, were given the opportunity to promote their directorial skills. At first glance, the selection of material seemed familiar and undaring, however each text presents the director with significant challenges.

The festival kicked off with Mark O’Rowe’s Howie The Rookie. Since Eoin Ó hAnnracháin’s production was the ice-breaker it inevitably established a standard for the festival; an accomplished opener, it raised the bar high. The monologue is a form very familiar to Irish audiences. However, oration in a theatre space is a notable challenge for even the most seasoned of actors; in lieu of a world represented on the stage, the actor’s task is to create images that are at once fantastic and credible.

O’Rowe’s visceral descriptions of the body in action make such tricky simultaneity possible. Director Eoin Ó hAnnracháin did well to cast Nick Kavanagh in the role of the Howie Lee. Kavanagh displays a physical awareness and dexterity from the word go; stalking the stage on the balls of his feet like a ravenous cougar, we feel the range and potential of his appetites. His embodiment of physical activity and restlessness successfully highlights the primeval element of O’Rowe’s portrayal of young male energy, so that alongside the urban landscape of a Dublin estate is an inner space made up of pulsating veins, white-knuckles, twitchy wrists, throbbing lungs, spittle, blood and sweat.

The depiction of the body in a hostile environment reveals Howie Lee’s vulnerability and the necessity of remaining alert, perched on the brink of violence, and at the same time magnifies the materiality of that environment, its textures, lines, temperature and moods. Together these create a sensory odyssey, a privileging of the external, and creates an exhilarating contrast to psychologically motivated drama which tend to prioritise inner states. Kavanagh’s was certainly a hard act to follow and Eoin Ó hAnnracháin prudently opts for a more insouciant pitch in his direction of Stephen McCann in the role of the Rookie Lee. In contrast to Howie Lee’s restless flexing he has adopted casualness as a subterfuge; despite the persistent smirk it is soon apparent that Rookie Lee’s nonchalance is feigned. Interestingly, this lack of verve alters the focus somewhat so that Rookie Lee’s presence and stature is much less substantial than Howie Lee’s; this is unexpected and succeeds in imbuing the second monologue with a pathos which anticipates the horrific but somewhat inexorable ending.

Fantastic and entirely credible, Ó hAnnracháin’s rendering of Howie The Rookie is a fine achievement and on its own was enough to convince me of the value of the New Directors Festival.

Irish Theatre Magazine, Volume 7, Number 33 Winter 2007