The Cold Sings: The obsessed reflections in Sylvia Plath’s mirror
Junk Ensemble's dance transports to the grubby New York of The Bell Jar.
The Depot @ The Complex , Dublin Theatre Festival
★★★☆☆
Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath’s life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Underlining the decades of claims and reclamations, the caricature of her as a crazed poetic sorceress and the arguments that she is a female genius, has been a kind of obsession. People are desperate to look at her and find something reflected back, whether it’s confirmation of some cliché, or the hunger of being shown something new, unsettling and truthful.
Obviously, Plath should be remembered for her transcendent art, and not her suicide; The Bell Jar is one of the greatest protest novels of the last century. In The Cold Sings, their new dance exploring the Plath myth, Junk Ensemble are similarly interested in exposing those links between repression and insanity during Cold War America. Inside the warehouse surroundings of The Complex, we find a vibrant 1950s music bar, resplendent with red velvet curtains and a live band. While listening to two singers (Walé Adebusuyi and Sean X, with dimple-smiling vocals borrowed from early rock and roll), it dawns that the lyrics are taken from “Tulips” – Plath’s poem about a dazed woman in hospital who gets pulled back into her vibrant life by a vase of flowers. (“Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me”).