The Play's The Thing

During October, T and I have seen a play a week. We’ve enjoyed being avid theatregoers. All of the plays we saw are featured in the Belfast Festival. They all have been very different in their approach and some have worked much better than others.

We started off with ‘The Night Alive’ by Conor McPherson at the Lyric. Despite the excellent acting, Adrian Dunbar and Laurence Kinlan in particular, and direction, a series of well staged exits and entrances to a scruffy bedsit in Dublin, I came away disappointed. The characters were all somewhat stock: the struggling antihero, his devoted best mate, the tart with a heart, the father figure, the threatening outsider. Too much time was spent building the two central characters, which we know anyway, and not enough on the development of the other characters who remained as sketches. The drama of their interactions suffered as a consequence. Conor McPherson is very good at dialogue and is an excellent director, but I felt there was a much better play straining to get out.

Next was ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ at the Grand Opera House, based on the book by Mark Haddon and adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens. I have nothing but praise for this play: a compelling story told from the point of view of an autistic teenager that is very well acted, an extremely innovative square set with spectacular back projection, fantastic sound and lighting design, and excellent direction that took us from the garden of a house in Swindon to Central London. No wonder this play has won a series of major theatre awards in London and New York. We rarely get touring theatre of the highest calibre in Belfast. Well done to the Belfast Festival for helping to bring the National Theatre here. The play was almost sold out a month beforehand and we only managed to get seats in the gods.

Finally we saw ‘To Break the Window of Opportunity’ by Campo at the MAC. This was experimental theatre from a pair of young Dutch performance artists: a spare set with a painted rear canvas of a desert with cultural icons inserted into the landscape, odd home-made wooden props that were brought onto stage and animated in unusual ways by the two performers, excellent sound design and no speech at all. It was like seeing a strange silent movie that presented a series of cultural rituals and then subverted them in interesting ways. I found it curious and stimulating. There were only about twenty people at the performance we attended. The play deserved much better than that.

It’s been a fine way to spend our weekday evenings, I came away feeling that we needed to do this more often.