THE VIEW by Rust Co-Operative
CLUB na MÚINTEOIRÍ – The Teacher’s Club, 36 Parnell Square West, Dublin 1. To Saturday 18 May, including Saturday matinee at 4.30 pm.
9.30 pm. Runs 1ht 5min No interval.
Tickets: 00353 87 9355 449
boxoffice@gaytheatre.ie
Review: Michael Paye 13 May 2013.
Beautiful and timely. Essential theatre.
This wonderful performance is brought to you by Rust Co-Operative of South Africa as part of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. On the 24th of April, the LGBT community of South Africa marked a very different anniversary: the murder of LGBT rights activist Noxolo Nogwaza. Following on from such horrendous brutality and foregrounding the importance of remembering, THE VIEW portrays a nightmarish scenario where South Africa’s LGBT community has been rounded up and removed from society in the interest of “preserving the species,” as one character ominously puts it.
From an undisclosed location, a young victim of this oppression has a view of the whole earth. Forget those images of the planet which paved the way for a rash of positive intimations of global citizenship in the 1970s; this is an earth of division and hatred where a group of human beings deemed surplus to a healthy, reproductive planet has been removed. His memories guide us through this world.
A deep, narrow stage allows a myriad of characters, most of whom are played by the utterly phenomenal Ella Gabriel, to communicate their views and opinions, from the driver who transports these undesirables to the young man’s conflicted father, whose love for his son is cloaked in a painful mesh of shadowy confusion and loss. Indeed, shadows, light and darkness pervade the stage thanks to the sensitive use of lighting which captures our attention and grants intimacy to the performance.
There is a haunting quality to THE VIEW which eloquently orients our vision towards the injustices of this world. Don’t expect to walk away from this one and brush it off or, like so many, brush this very real crisis under the rug. There has been too much of that already.
Cast: Ella Gabriel and Roelof Storm.
Director/Writer: Philip Rademeyer.
Designer/Stage manager: Penelope Youngleson.
2013-05-15 16:24:52
