The Last Return: The high cost of “culture”
In Druid’s comedy, a violent brawl in a theatre reveals the bloody origins of western culture.
Mick Lally Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
At the beginning of Druid’s astonishing dark comedy, when a customer steps triumphantly into the entrance of a theatre foyer, the scene is set to the imperial sound of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The sight is so funnily overblown, it’s as if high culture were demanding our attention. Behold, the Great Works!
Sunken to learn that the evening’s performance is sold out, the woman (a high-strung accountant, played by the excellent Fiona Bell) joins a queue for return tickets, where already there are signs of customers gaming the system. “It’s up to the queue to organise itself,” says a detached ticket seller, whose dryly scripted explanation of the rules refuses to lost its jolt, no matter how many times it must be repeated by a terrific Anna Healy.
The theatre foyer of Sonya Kelly’s playscript may have the inter-war years furnishings of the Schaubühne, but the production’s accents edge closer to a venue from the Edinburgh International Festival, while the play’s action situates us in a vaguely European country where security guards brandish firearms. Fittingly, director Sara Joyce’s staging ushers us to a stylised world, where there are brash lighting effects and sight gags, and, in Francis O’Connor’s design, obvious iconography borrowed from Waiting from Godot. (The bare tree, the stony backing).
Kelly has given intelligent portrayals of absurd systems and the loss of human courtesy before. The concerns this time around feel wider in scope - the fictional auteur of the theatre’s production is never confirmed to be a playwright, an opera composer, or a choreographer, but their name, Oppenheimer, brings historical catastrophes to mind.
In the queue, the punters keep track of the favours they carry out, and attempt to exploit what they learn about each other. For instance, when Bell’s woman discovers that the man at the front – an Oppenheimer scholar, entitled and irritated in a Bosco Hogan’s performance – has a kidney condition preventing him from sitting for long, she tries to prompt him to leave for the toilet. “You are high and dry,” she says, with a sociopathic smile, wishing to take his place in line.
Those wicked puns, written as part of that character’s motive, make up much of the comedic dialogue. Elsewhere, a pristine line comes from another customer, a U.S. Air Force hothead played by Fionn Ó Loingsigh, who is inconvenienced by having to wait. “I am going to do what people from my homeland do best. Complain about the service,” he says.
Suffering from PTSD, the soldier is convinced that a night out at the theatre will lift his spirits and cure him. The academic is at risk of losing his relevancy without seeing the latest production, while the accountant is desperate to network in her office, where the Oppenheimer production is a popular watercooler topic. No one says anything specific about the artwork, just how it can advance their lives.
These are all clever ideas about what the consumption of live performance can do for people, but the play’s most ambitious target is the bloody origin story of western culture itself. When a woman who doesn’t speak English – a refugee from Somalia, nicely played by Naima Swaleh – arrives, the characters all seem to appear to us as deeply symbolic, as near-allegorical in their mirrors of colonialism, exceptionalism and displacement.
The Waiting for Godot call-backs may suggest this to be another play about agonising routines, but they also bring to mind the Theatre of the Absurd and its troubling spectre of a violent world. Joyce guides the play’s struggle over a theatre ticket towards its surreal, shocking conclusion – a savage brawl, where people are even slipped poison and gunned down.
It is a battle over territory, over profit, but also – in a compelling twist – over retribution for centuries of colonial plundering. It turns out that some things are worth waiting for.
Runs until 23rd July. druid.ie
Friends,
In case you missed it, my stories below were recently published in the Irish Times.
My interview with Louis Lovett (“Louis Lovett and the dark heart of children’s drama”)
My review of Translations (“Translations: Seizing the emotional connection to language”)
My review of Dubliners (“Dubliners: Struggling to get intimate with James Joyce’s short stories”)
My review of Girl From the North Country (“Girl from the North Country: In a Depression-era musical, Dylan’s music gives everyone a leg-up”)
- Chris
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