Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Shades Through A Shade

Shades Through A Shade. Image by Ewa Figaszewska

****

It sounds a little daunting, and a tad dull. Gare St Lazare’s intertextual and interdisciplinary Shades Through A Shade. An academic delight referencing Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener, Beckett’s Belacqua from his short story collection More Pricks Than Kicks, and Dante’s Beatrice and The Divine Comedy where Belacqua first appeared. Add a sprinkle of text from St Augustine, a jigger from Julian Of Norwich, a whisper from Hildegard Von Bingen and some Jean-Luc Nancy to name the major culprits, and you might feel a doctorate in The Religious Significance of Literary Characters Whose Names Begin With The Letter B would be helpful. But the truth is The Divine Comedy, like Ulysses, and some would add Beckett and Moby Dick, is something more people claim to have read than have actually read. And those who have usually never got past Inferno. In other words, you don’t need to know all the references. For Shades Through A Shade pulls them apart, selects what it wants, then reassembles them loosely after its own unique fashion.

Theatrically, Shades Through A Shade is a genuinely fun production. Puncturing seriousness by resembling the worst auditions for The Play That Went Wrong. Lines lost, awkward tableaux, overacting, the line between stage, performer, musician and usher endlessly erased sees excerpt follow excerpt in humourous fashion. Performers Natasha Everitt, Simon Jermyn, Conor Lovett, Lux Lovett, Trey Lyford, Seán Mac Earlaine and Julia Spanu taking meta-theatricality out for a spin against a steady musical score. Music by Benedict Schlepper Connolly, played live, a fusion of flavours ranging from Persian folk to religious choral channelling the laid back guitar stylings of Bill Frisell with Norma Winstone styled vocal accompaniment by Spanu. A healthy interruption of Grunge serves as a palette cleanser, as does an Alleluia Gospel moment replete with arm swaying backing singers. Set design by Judy Hegarty Lovett and Simon Bennison, with original artworks by Morgan Doyle, lighting by Simon Bennison and costumes by Valentina Gambardella might not push the visual boundaries, but screen curtains constantly being whisked across stage sees energy flow and the space constantly charged and changing. Meanwhile, extracts from letters, devouring shards of paper, rerunning the play’s highlights inject playful delight into the wild, visual mix.

Shades Through A Shade. Image by Ewa Figaszewska

If, theatrically, Shades Through A Shade is not so heavy after all, thematically it’s still pretty dense, and its one hundred minute running time can be a challenge. Large chunks of text endlessly recited risk becoming about as exciting as a train spotting AGM being recounted by a stickler for detail. Seeming to weave a circular theology, juxtaposing religious with the atheistic, the anxious and the absurd, and both against the spiritual, even as terms are never clearly defined. Defying faith or faith as defiance? The happy life or the impossiblity of happiness? We’ll let you decide.

Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, and co-created with Conor Lovett, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Sebastian McKimm and Morgan Doyle, Shades Through A Shade might not make for light going, but it’s forever light hearted. When it comes to life, or art, we’re all just strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage, getting our lines wrong, missing our mark in both sacred and profane moments. Wondering in what state shall we die? When perhaps the more pertinent question is, in what state do we live? All up for discussion in this playful, fun and thought provoking production.

Shades Through A Shade by Gare St Lazare runs at The Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of  Dublin Theatre Festival 2024 until September 28.

For more information visit Dublin Theatre Festival 2024