The Easter Rising and Thereafter at the Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1
reviewed for The Times, 28th April 2016
Image credit- Nick Rutter
Few would think the Irish civil war could make a cabaret act, but Christopher Bland almost pulls it off.
Sir Christopher Bland, the programme tells us, “is an Anglo-Irishman whose critically acclaimed first novel, Ashes in the Wind, was published in 2014”. He’s also a former chairman of the BBC, the RSC, BT — the list goes on — but this week, the scion of the establishment is reinventing himself as a simple son of Erin with poetry in his soul.
Bland’s latest retirement project is a retelling of the causes and consequences of the Easter Rising, peppered with traditional music and poetry as so many cultural artefacts. Few would think the Irish civil war could make a cabaret act, but he almost pulls it off.
There’s a respectable, if stagy, evenhandedness. In a cliché-ridden Irish pub, Bland conjures up the Ulsterman writer Louis MacNeice and the nationalist icon James Clarence Mangan (author of the republican classic Dark Rosaleen) to rope the onlookers into a slam poetry re-enactment of Irish history. This allows experienced hand Ruairi Conaghan to do wry work as MacNeice: “Never trust a man who can’t tell the difference between red wine and blood,” he mutters as the mystic rising leader Patrick Pearse declaims.
What Bland fails to supply is a basic narrative structure. Characters come and go, new ones popping up and vanishing like puppets in a whack-a-mole machine. So Donnacadh O’Briain’s production is inevitably cramped, and not just by the mill of performers overpopulating the narrow Jermyn Street stage.
One suspects that the ensemble were selected for their musicality rather than their stage experience. So at the sides they fidget, stammer and pull focus, whoever is centre stage. There are moments of beauty: Tim van Eyken puts in a heart-catching performance as Roger Casement, his speech from the dock eerily reminiscent of African-American complaints against a racially selective death penalty.
The politics will satisfy everyone and no one: in his male-heavy cast, Bland even throws in the odd righteous line of token feminism, when he’s not recycling the oldest Lady Macbeth tropes about the nationalist leader Countess Markievicz (Gráinne Keenan). Yet what’s most missed is simple storytelling.
