All of Cork's a Stage by Maxine Jones
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There can be few better places for a Sunday morning lie-in than Hayfield Manor, Cork, birds chirping outside and the smell of toast and coffee in the air.
Into this idyll weave strange images. Devils screeching, falling out of the sky and trying to grasp my hair; a madman gnawing human bones; a black corridor with doors off either side, where distracted people mill about gesticulating soundlessly. These are my memories of the night before - from three separate productions of the Cork Midsummer Festival, which ended on July 1st two weeks of innovative and entertaining theatre.
Theatre, if you think of it as an enclosed stage and audience in rows, is too limited a term for what I saw in Cork last weekend. Woyzeck, one of the key productions, took over the whole of the naval base on Haulbowline Island. The audience arrived by ferry from Cobh at 10pm, the sky still bright. We stood on a jetty looking over the water to a long grass peninsula, beyond which was more sea and the pretty hilltown of Cobh.
On the grass, the first surreal act of Georg Buchner’s classic was played out. A logger chops wood, singing a nonsense song, and a deranged Woyceck runs onto the ‘set’ spouting oddly poetic non-sequiturs. Buchner was an inspiration to Kafka with his depiction of an ordinary man out of his depth in the struggle for existence. Written in 1836 it is enduringly modern. It is fair to say, though, that in Corcadorca’s production it is the set that steals the show, making the play itself, often arrestingly unintelligible, merely a peg on which to hang this tour de force.
Ushers wave us to the next scene, following a strutting soldier and his majorettes. We look up to where Marie proclaims her admiration from the top of a wall, then we join her, Woyzeck and their little boy in a courtyard where a burlesque fair is in motion, with a raving half-man, half-horse, a transvestite and a cycling monkey. The windows in the top room of a house light up and we watch a lustful scene between Marie and the soldier. In another room we see the little boy. From the other side of the yard, Woyceck attaches a tin can to a wire, puts in his wages, and sends it across to the house, over our heads.
Now, in the dusk, a half moon and a gleaming north star have enhanced the ‘set’. Marie, in a red dress, dances across the grounds of the navy hospital with the soldier. In a grotesque parody, the soldier beats up Woyzeck, spraying blood. We walk on round the naval base, surprised at every turn, until we end up back where we started, for the denouement, the lights of Cobh now twinkling in the dark.
I’d taken a taxi out to Cobh from the Everyman Palace theatre, where Guests of the Nation had a cast of one and the set consisted of three chairs. Such is the power of Frank O’Connor’s short story and the sureness of Denis Conway’s delivery, however, that the impact is no less than the naval base multicast production. Two English prisoners play cards every night with their Irish captors, while the woman of the house potters in the background. The cosy, humorous domestic scene is shattered when the narrator is called on to shoot the ‘hostages’.
The following morning, I take a tour of Cork, and the drama of its past is brought vividly to life by the guide. With a wave of her hands she maps out the curve of the river still running under Patrick St. I can almost see the ships sailing in. She points out the two front doors of the only pub in Patrick St, the lower one being where the boats would tie up. The Crawford Gallery, she tells us, used to be the harbour commissioners. Now it has sculptures by Rodin and a café run by the daughter of Ballymaloe House. Hidden behind the upmarket Monica John fashion shop is a Huguenot cemetery, says the guide. She tell us to ‘look up, look up,’ where we’ll see the grandeur of Cork’s buildings and not the mobile phone and games shops beneath.
At the English Market, photographs of people at last year’s festival, hang from the ceiling. Here, in the 1800s, farmers would bring their produce for the occupying English to buy. One stall has 50 varieties of fish on display, another blood sausage, tripe and pigs’ trotters, others the best of Italian and Greek fare.
Also an institution, Brown Thomas has the opening day of its summer sale. The place is packed with the well-heeled ladies of Cork and the occasional bewildered husband. I abandon the fray and make for Café Paradiso, a vegetarian restaurant which is so popular, even with carnivores, that it is nearly always booked out.
St Finnbar’s cathedral next, where colourful windows depict Biblical dramas. I wander the city, crisscrossing the many bridges over the Lee, which sends up a breath of sea air. At the Cork Visionary Centre in North Main Street, a scale model of the town, with each house and garden picked out, gives me my bearings. The centre is a long island in the river Lee, like the Ile de France in Paris. I notice that that Shakey bridge is coming apart.
I walk back to Hayfield Manor, where after a bit of pampering in their newly refurbished spa, and a delicious cream tea, I sally forth for my second evening of drama, with three shows on the trot.
The final one is a piece de resistance. Dangling in a wooden boat from a gigantic, ship-yard scale crane, a fisherman in a cloth cap rows across the sky. A spotlight paints his reflection on the huge granary wall behind. He is set on a high scaffold where he puts his wellied feet up on the edge of the boat, pours a Beamish and produces a sandwich. From another crane comes a mermaid on a sea-horse swing, her long tail floating in the breeze. The fisherman woos her and she comes to his boat. The audience is satisfied. What could cap that?
Suddenly three ululating demons descend from the sky, twisting and turning and hanging from one ankle. They dip into the audience and soar back up to the arm of the crane. They descend into the boat and pluck out the fisherman, taking him up high and letting him drop – the audience gasps – so he hangs limply at the end of his bungee cord.
The next scene is truly celestial as the fisherman dons wings and the aerial gymnasts girate among long floating sheets of white netting. He ‘swims’ back to the boat, picks up his mermaid and the pair float off through the sky, the fisherman giving the audience a thumbs up.
It was a great weekend, but the sound of suitcase wheels on the cobbles below my window tell me it’s checkout time. I leave the haven of the hotel with a date firmly inscribed in my diary for next year’s Cork Midsummer Festival.
Fact box
Maxine Jones saw
Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor, with Denis Conway; Woyzeck by Georg Buchner, Corcadorca; Meat by Neil O’Sullivan, Asylum Productions; The Cleansing of Constance Brown, Stan’s Café; Wired and Free, Fidget Feet. www.corkfestival.com