The Plough and the Stars

The Abbey curtains up second in the curious case of the duelling Sean O’Casey productions for the 1916 centenary, but their rendition of his 1926 provocation surpasses the Gate’s Juno.

O’Casey’s final Abbey play depicts the Rising exploding the lives of the extended Clitheroe family and their tenement neighbours. The socially ambitious Nora Clitheroe (Kate Stanley Brennan) is cordially disliked by her neighbours Mrs Gogan (Janet Moran) and Bessie Burgess (Eileen Walsh). Voluble dislike exists within the Clitheoroe clan as preening Citizen Army peacock Uncle Peter (James Hayes) is tormented by the Young Covey (Ciaran O’Brien) for his ignorance of true socialism, and ridiculous garb. Ignoring these political spats is Jack Clitheroe (Ian-Lloyd Anderson) who resigned from the Citizen Army on being passed over. However, when it’s revealed he was promoted, but Nora hid the letter from him, Jack furiously leaves her to join a monster rally whose Pearse-derived rhetoric stirs the patriotism of even the disreputable Fluther (David Ganly). The Rising sets the scene for looting and Nora’s undoing…

English director Sean Holmes has spoken of how he approached the text as if it was a Shakespeare play, not bound by its period. This aesthetic is evident everywhere, from Jon Bausor’s intimidating steel staircase with multiple landings, to Catherine Fay’s modern dress costumes including hardhats, via Paul Keogan’s disruptive lights which render the Figure in the Window a glare from a big screen in a pub, to Philip Stewart’s thumping music between acts, and it pays off in spades. Needless to say this is all very much ‘Not Chekhov’ to reference the multiple audience walkouts back in October at a similarly radical take on The Cherry Orchard. But it works, and works gloriously. Consumptive Mollser (Mahnoor Saad) singing the national anthem at the start of the show (in a transparent bid to bring the audience to their feet at every performance) before coughing blood; Fluther, Mrs Gogan, and Mrs Burgess all directly cajoling and heckling the audience; Fluther robbing cans and puncturing one which sprays the audience before he desperately tries to drink it hands free – all these touches bring a Shakespearean vividness and rambunctiousness that casts these characters in a new light. Fluther’s drinking, whoring, and disdain of piety and patriotism becomes Falstaffian, Hotspur and Lady Percy hover over the abrupt parting of the Clitheroes, and King Lear shimmers over the finale’s madness and dead bodies, not least because O’Casey’s final kick in the teeth does in his more abrasive version of Cordelia.

4.5/5

The Plough and the Stars continues its run at the Abbey Theatre until the 23^rd of April.

Have you read Jenersky’s Thesis on the Origin, Development, and Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat?

Transformers: Dark of the Franchise

Shia LaBeouf is done. Michael Bay is done. Transformers as a franchise is not done. But maybe it ought to be…

Whispers (by which I mean the usual incessant briefings by publicists) abound that Jason Statham is about to assume the lead role in the Transformers franchise and take it in ‘a darker direction’. While it’s always nice to see ‘The State’ in action movies, the last thing this franchise needs is to go any darker. It’s positively screaming out for a reboot to the sunnier climes of its original vision. And yes, I am aware that talking of something needing a reboot to capture the halcyon era of four years ago is a new level of preposterousness, but it’s justified. The third act of Transformers 3 is so dark as to resemble Independence Day by way of the back-stabbing betrayals by humans collaborating with exploiting aliens of Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD rather than the fun of 2007’s Transformers. This is amplified by very questionable touch of District 9 in the Deception guns that vaporise flesh so that piles of bones fall to the ground after they shoot people.

Ehren Kruger has written a script that, like his Scream 3 which also featured Patrick Dempsey, is structurally very sound and has any number of nice touches, but which fundamentally strays from the existing tone of the franchise.  Kruger’s rewriting of the space race as a cover story for a covert mission to retrieve an alien artefact, and the meltdown at Chernobyl being a disastrous attempt to utilise that alien technology, works as well as X-Men: First Class’ similar slyness. Patrick Dempsey impresses as two kinds of villain, the romantic rival who has more money and power to impress the girl, and the Quisling of smooth collaboration and self-justificatory villainy. The comedy with Ken Jeong maniacally harassing Sam, John Malkovich chewing scenery as Sam’s eccentric colour-coded boss, and Alan Tudyk freaking out as John Turturro’s unhinged PA is all very funny….but it’s insane; you’re laughing nervously because this doesn’t fit in with the rest of film almost as much as you’re laughing because it’s funny.

Kruger’s comedy is a style of humour which is entirely different from the comedy of the first film which organically grew from the characters around who an action story suddenly took place. This lack of organicism is a problem unwisely highlighted in-camera when Frances McDormand’s spook tells Sam he really has no function in this story, and sure enough Sam later inserts himself into the storyline by sheer perseverance rather than any interior logic. A greater problem is the discordant note struck by Kruger’s approach against Kurtzman and Orci’s template. It’s always embarrassing to remember just how juvenile a director the middle-aged Michael Bay is, but the ogling of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (all low-angle shots and short skirts) is different than that of Megan Fox, because it lacks the nod and wink self-awareness of Kurtzman and Orci’s script. It’s as if Kruger has no interest in semi-apologising for this nonsense. Bay’s lingering introductory shot of Huntington-Whiteley is, fittingly, of her arse, which is what her performance is a load of, to paraphrase Shirley Manson. But this can be forgiven as just Bay being Bay…

What is unforgivable, after the disastrous introduction of so many non-characterised or racially caricatured robots in the last film, is that Kruger doesn’t retrench and try to fully utilise the original Transformers, but instead retains racially caricatured characters and then (like a LOST scripwriter) continues to hoover up yet more new characters. I’ve complained about this before but Kruger here reaches the apotheosis of this franchise’s incomprehension of the riches available in the Transformers comics. Sentinel Prime may be from the comics but so is Shockwave, and he’s outrageously wasted in the film when in the comics he has the most distinctive style of delivery of any Transformer bar Grimlock and is a wonderfully nuanced villain. Kruger’s shocks are effective but the killing of Ironhide is incredibly gimmicky and the weak exits of Starscream and Megatron from the franchise are disgracefully disrespectful to their characters’ status in both the comics and the previous films, and, in Megatron’s case, as tonally wrong as Burton’s Batman dispatching the Joker. But then how Optimus finally deals with Sentinel plainly belongs in a macho action movie for adults, not a sunny blockbuster for children. Characters gushing blood oil, having limbs parts torn off, and their spines CPUs torn out is too much. The darkness makes this film feel loooong…

Transformers was a cartoon series designed to sell toys by creating archetypal characters who had entertaining adventures. The comics injected cod-Shakespearean parallels and ended in traumatic apocalypse but they were also great fun. Surely the film-makers could remember their true target audience and lighten up a bit…