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Aoife Duffin as Antigone in Pan Pan's Oedipus Loves you. pic by egotechnique
Oedipus loves me…or so says Pan Pan whose excellent piece of theatre made a return to Project this month. I missed the show on it’s first outing in 2006 (when Ruth Negga played the Antigone role pictured above) and it’s been round the world and back again ever since, so I was determined to catch it this time out and went along on Saturday night.
As the myth goes, Oedipus has far too much love to go around, and doesn’t seem to want to exclude immediate family members in the lovefest. This contemporary twist on the myth imagines the effects played out on a suburban family who try the usual cocktail of drugs, drink, poetry, attention seeking, psychoanalysis, medication and good old fashioned thrashing it out on a drum kit/mic/guitar to get them through…Britney would have felt right at home.
The piece (part play, part musical, part happening) is played out on a buzzy set of inner rooms, neon lights, overhead cameras, flat screen tv’s, mic-ed up helmets and loud loud music. The effect is chaotic, comedic, direct and above all contemporary. Sure, some of the visual devices used, particularly the live visuals created on the flat screen from play text, handwriting and cut out dolls, might have seemed more “new” in 2006 but they still ring a modern bell, maybe not in a visual art context but certainly in a theatre one, and certainly on an irish stage by an irish company,
There are a ton of astute reviews online (just google Oedipus Loves You and you’ll find them in spades, particularly from the recent New York Show at PS12) but for whatever the academic or critical viewpoint might be, and one can disect the myth ad nauseam, it’s just a great live show. A proper rollercoaster of an event that feels fresh and vibrant and young and somehow at the pace of how we digest our media these days.
Pan Pan’s Oedipus is a hodge-podge of multi-tasking with multiple scenes playing out simultaneously on stage, inter-cutting with thumping live pop music, club dancing, a bit of cross gender nudity, club-like visuals, kinetic visual effects, a brilliantly dark and funny script (people need to laugh more- straight up theatre audiences on a saturday night in dublin could do with being a little less po-faced) and great great performances, not to mention bonkers lyrics that manage to totally take the piss out of our drug addled ”poets” (pete doherty anyone) while sounding totally “deep and irreverent man”. This is what smart contemporary live entertainment is all about – enjoying the moment.
Lisa Lambe and Aonghus Og McAnally in The Nose
Recently caught the last show of The Nose by the superb Performance Corporation in Project on Saturday last and it was nothing short of a pleasure. There are reviews aplenty on their site but for my part i thought it was great; a complete absorption into a fantasy world that was brilliantly conveyed through outstanding performances, stunning costumes and a fantastical set. It was funny, relevant and surreal and a genuinely enjoyable night out.
I’m a huge theatre fan and theatre goer, and although it is one of my favourite live experiences and quite often my cultural option of choice, it is not always enjoyable in the usual sense of the word. It is almost always thrilling, engrossing and immediate but often hard hitting, emotional and tough. Don’t get me wrong, hard hitting and tough I happen to like, but it was great for a change, to simply enjoy for enjoyments sake, without having to compromise on production values or performance. A sharp script with contemporary parallels it was witty and precisely executed and displayed a real sense of grown up wonderment.
Incidentally The Performance Corporation is making great headway with the new media tools we know and love, but see very little evidence of in most arts organisations (as we were reminded today at the arts council’s new media conference. Their new site incorporates blogging (via wordpress) with a really compelling production blog from The Nose, rehearsal photographs (thank you flickr), movie clips (vodpod and youTube) and, naturally enough; a facebook group.
Always at the forefront of new technologies I think they’re a brilliant example of how to use this new media to get a sense of the experience their work can deliver out to all sorts of audiences online, while still preserving the value of the live event, perhaps even more so.
The proof is in the pudding of course..see the clip from the (just finished) run of the Nose below:
