TheatreUpstairs@Lanigan’s Bar, Dublin ***
Donal O’Kelly’s new solo show digs for truth beneath the controversies, protests and PR spin of the Shell Corrib gas project in Rossport, but it still requires mythological intervention to find any answers. Inspired by the name given to the enormous tunnel boring machine by the transnational oil company – Fionnuala – O’Kelly’s play imagines the Shell executive who christened it as a contemptuous cynic: “Always girls’ names. You couldn’t be calling it Mick or Dick,” Ambrose Keogh tells an unseen flunkie. “Wrong message entirely.”
O’Kelly’s message can seem just as blunt, however creative his telling. Ambrose is presented as a pinstriped villain in an underground lair (at the Bellanaboy refinery), who is diverted from a path of pure malevolence towards an encounter with an heroic anti-pipeline campaigner (who is also his former classmate) and, with only slightly less plausibility, the Fionnuala of legend, the eldest child of Lir. Appearing in the form of a swan, but using the voice of Mrs Brown, Fionnuala puts a “geas” on Keogh, commanding him to “tell the truth about Shell” – a mythological substitute for sodium pentothal.
O’Kelly’s inquiry is more serious than that sounds. Centring on the alleged assault of farmer and activist Willie Corduff, one of the original Rossport five, Keogh now supplies eyewitness testimony to the event and claims responsibility. O’Kelly renders the attack in vivid, horrific detail, but it raises uneasy questions about the use of dramatic licence. This confession is not only fictitious, its speaker is enchanted. Can that be considered vindicating?
There is little concession here to balance and O’Kelly condemns Keogh to an eternity of torment. Such wishful demonisation makes Ailliliú Fionnuala less a piece of agitation propaganda than placation propaganda; something to “confirm” our worst suspicions about corporations and human nature. Yet it is more effective with the repetition of fact: that no pressurised pipeline of raw gas has been allowed through populated areas anywhere else. The truth is more staggering than fiction.
Manipulating Robert Ballagh’s original, sparing set from O’Kelly’s 1988 play Bat the Father Rabbit the Son (where Ambrose first appeared), director Sorcha Fox and O’Kelly construct a vivid and fluent story – O’Kelly is an absorbing and often incantatory performer – but even an impassioned digression that relates this political battle to the nation’s deep history of institutional abuse and state collusion, doesn’t make its argument seem more than two-dimensional.
Ambrose is a straw man unsatisfyingly easy to knock down. It would be much more interesting to give us an Ambrose who is not just compelled to tell the truth, but who actually believes what he says.
Until November 17th
