By Rose Rushe
TRUTH being stranger than fiction, playwright Helena Enright has filed her published works and PhD in ‘theatre of testimony’, successfully, so far. Her latest project sees her step up as performer also in an impressive run of 36 shows taking place in a boat, moored, but good to whisper and recall, reminisce and reveal original stories from Wednesday August 13 on.
A Limerick woman, known best perhaps for her ‘Walking Away’ play, Enright is performing “a multi-sensory theatrical experience about the River Shannon based on real stories”.
She’s working with director Ciarda Tobin, fresh from ‘The Táin’ and a long time collaborator. The venue is a 90-foot barge, the ‘Spero in Deo’ (hope in God) and dates from 1885.
For multi-sensory, read the influence of sound, set, costume and film designers in an on-site production funded by Limerick City of Culture. Contributed stories include a recital by Mícheál O Suilleabháin of his ‘Legend of Sionna’, tales from a Malaysian woman living here and an American with whom the playwright connected through her New York research at Irish Arts Centre. Pat Lysaght of Corbally is another contributor underlined.
“Before I moved to England I had lived on Clancy Strand,” Enright says “and all the time, I used to cross the river, even going back to my school days in Salesians. I have lived on boats over a lot of the years, on an estuary in Exeter”.
Having been cleared for €30,000 by former City of Culture’s Karl Wallace and encouraged to “challenge yourself, explore it”, she evolved a production that she can tour.
Ultimately, the aged barge was secured and “Patrick O’Brien of Music Generation City Limerick and Windings has created the most beautiful soundscape. Steve Hall, film maker, is involved and we’ll be streaming one midnight performance to New York”. Tip your East Coast friends off to be in Coogan’s Bar on Thursday August 21/Friday 22 for this atmospheric run of ‘The River’.
Directing these many layers and individual stories, Ciarda Tobin cites inherent challenges to theatre of testimony.
“There are kinds of rules, it’s different to Ibsen or Shaw. You are dealing with a person’s voice and [big laugh] that person is likely to show up, for a start. The staging has to be true to the cadence of the voice.”
She and the writer harmonise on the end-story not being mimicry but its essence.
“If you allow the story in, it will come out,” Helena Enright believes, “using the tools of the actor but then finding that ultimately, you are the teller. I often call it ‘letting it breathe’”.
Breathe we shall from August 13 to September 1 at 1pm and 7.30pm sessions of ‘The River’. Book on theriver.eventbrite.ie
