Orla Tubridy -Iphigenia
I have always found remounting a show a challenge. I suppose it’s the lazy performer in me. Inside me a weaselly mischievous voice is saying, “People liked it the last time, didn’t they? Just do it as you did it before.” Of course we all know that even if you have been too busy to give the piece much thought that the magic alchemy of time has stirred your imagination and your soul and that it cannot be anything like the same. And this is true not only for you, but everyone involved. Time has moved on, you all have a different perspective.
Peter Brook understood this all too well. He brought performers up to speed so that they could perform the play before an audience, before dissecting the work, learning from it and almost starting again, working towards their next performance. Despite current performance-as-research and other workshopping processes this idea is still rejected as either financially untenable or more importantly as an interruption of the director’s and actors’ ‘private’ process (as if you could learn nothing from performance at all and it was an invalid way of learning!). We were offered this opportunity by default. We had had our one performance and were now some months later, remounting it for a different occasion and a different space.
The first thing I did when revisiting THE SACRIFICIAL WIND, a dramatic poetry performance in this years Cuirt Festival of Literature, which had previously been mounted as an Arts in Action project for the National University of Ireland Galway in the new O’Donoghue Centre, was to reorder some of the poems. I also was in discussion about the ending, which both myself, the writer, and it turns out, the actors were not happy with and felt it didn’t work dramatically. This change highlights where we went next because having made that change, all the rest followed .
I need to explain; in the original, the final poem became a speech to the audience by the actors about the moral ramifications of what they had seen, which made the piece sound too didactic, rather than letting the characters speak. Once we cut that poem and ended the piece with Euripides’ final words, the intensity moved through energetically to the very end. It changed everything; not only the shape but the ethos and focus of the piece. It made the piece much more character driven than it had been, which in turn freed up the actors to embody the text as the characters, even more than they had before. This in turn greatly enlivened and intensified the work making the whole piece more edgy and unpredictable. This, and one or two other text changes fundamentally changed the form of the piece. Anyone who works with Michael Chekhov technique understands that two of the basics are the feeling of form and the feeling of the whole. If remounting this show has proved anything it has proved those tenets to be true. Not that I needed that proof mind you but the profundity of those structural changes and where they led us surprised even me.
Another thing that has intensified the work is the change of venue.The Town Hall Studio is a small 64 seat room; the O’Donoghue where we performed first is a 120 seat venue which has a kind of formality about it. The new venue brought with it a rough, less predictable atmosphere, where the confessional nature of the characters became even stronger as they tried to justify their actions to the audience around the sacrifice of the young princess Iphigenia and their collusion in the start of a bloody and protracted war. As a result, the lighting became less formal and more dramatic as did the staging.
The packed house last night and the warm reception might mean that it is hard to get a ticket. It is only on for another three nights. I would advise you book through http://www.tht.ie or http://www.cuirt.ie if you are around Galway and intending to come! on Thursday night we are having a talk back after the show with Lorna Shaughnessy the writer and myself chaired by Tony Hegarty.
Max Hafler - Radiating /Receiving 