Yfel
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Pan Pan’s new play, Yfel – the title is the Anglo-Saxon spelling of Evil – is the latest work reckoning with good art made by bad people. Gavin Quinn’s production opens with diehard students of a theatre school workshopping Ibsen and Chekhov, and already waist deep in toxic ideas about using art to exploit others.
It’s a dive into a type of rehearsal-room behaviour that’s now widely condemned. During a classroom presentation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, we see a student director (Marcus McKenzie) use insults to get results: “Am I decomposing? Do I have rigor mortis? Why do I feel like I’m in a funeral home?”
For Pan Pan it’s not a clean-cut takedown of theatre’s bad guys. Their 2023 piece History Play, which was also set in a classroom, for a history lesson, included a scene in which a student asked about the ramifications of archives, and whether or not to preserve evidence of events.
It resembled an outward expression of internal anxiety; Pan Pan’s records were scrutinised as part of a Waking the Feminists investigation of top-funded theatre organisations.
History Play teased intriguing questions about how to live your life when your past can be weaponised against you, but the effect was off-puttingly defensive. In Yfel, trying on the costumes of villains seems to creatively liberate Pan Pan – Quinn is sitting behind a strip curtain dressed as a Pulcinella schemer from commedia dell’arte – allowing the company to condemn theatre’s abuses while broaching the confusion of artists trying to nail acceptable interpretations of classics.
It isn’t a neat #MeToo narrative, but it does allow the company to reclaim their power – Pan Pan in their villain era.
The company mustn’t be compared with the terrible artists of Yfel’s theatre school. The latter is often Pan Pan’s opposite, committed to Stanislavski-like ideas: “It feels like we have the material and the embodiment, and we need to collapse the distance between them,” suggests a student (Mish Grigor).
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Only Faith Jones’ spiky actor shares Pan Pan’s affection for postmodern theatre, dissing a classmate with, “That’s the issue with you. It’s always ‘meaning’.”
We get full-on portraits of both a sleazy, erotica-obsessed queer director and a bullying choreographer. (Inspiration is taken from the boot-camp-style actor-training experiences of Grigor and McKenzie, who are part of the Melbourne-based Aphids collective.) But the lampooning of monstrous directors isn’t exactly this production’s forte. (Brokentalkers’s Masterclass has precisely executed what Yfel is aiming for).
More affecting are allusions to art-making being personally difficult, whether in the pining of an Allan Sherman song (“Take me home / I hate Granada”) or in parallels made with Goethe’s Faust (“When you know how hard life is, it is worse than death”).
Quinn’s production moves into a smoke-filled, crimson-lit version of Faust where we see the alchemist’s bewitched lover meet her demise. Pan Pan impressively emerge from their own hostile territory by the end, replacing their previous defensiveness with an openness to change.
“I think Faust tries to understand the world around him and listens to the wrong person,” a sympathetic observer says. “I think I need to read it again.”
Yfel is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, December 13th
