Riverrun - Project Arts Centre- Dublin Theatre Festival

Riverrun  is a very difficult show to describe or analyze.  Which . . . considering the source material is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, is not exactly a surprise.  You can’t exactly call it abstract, but it is a piece where you really sit there and let yourself flow along with it.  It is stark but expressive sound, movement, light, evocation, but it leaves behind plot and pretense at single unified meaning.

 As a theatrical work it manages to lay bare the connection between Joyce and Beckett, but this literary history is nearly irrelevant, a bit of intellectual background in the shadow of the immediacy of the artistic achievement happening on the stage. The words and their maybe meanings were physically embodied by Olwen Fouéré’s mesmerizing performance. The space was very simple and spare, evoking the sinuous lines of a shoreline or riverbank in a very minimalist fashion. At the centre of the stage was a microphone stand, bent and twisted like driftwood. The floor was speckled with white like sea foam. But largely the effect was created by sound, light, and Olwen Fouéré.

I don’t think this work of theatre can be separated from the performance or the performer.  Fouéré is a spectacular actor in all aspects, and her control was exquisite. She would shift with her movement, a turn of the light, a change of voice and expression, into an aged man, a beautiful statuesque woman, a gargoyle.  In front of our eyes, she transformed herself. In interpreting the words of Finnegan’s Wake, she embodied them, bringing meaning and momentary clarity.  Physically Fouéré was in near constant movement, a controlled tension that was riveting, working with the constant flowing breath of the sound.  At times, due to the control of her movement I felt underwater. Her breath, voice, body, eyes in the light, all together became the physicality of words. 

With them and the words with herself. 

Abstract but full of meaning of some sort – powerfully evocative. It was the physicality of breath. The liquidity of sound. The river reaching its source and destination.