The Gate bifurcates its audience for a curious staging of Annie Baker’s low-key play about amateurs engaging in a creative drama class in small-town Vermont.
Marty (Niamh Cusack) is a jill of all trades at a community centre. And one of those trades is acting. She is teaching creative drama to Schultz (Marty Rea), a recently divorced carpenter, Lauren (Hazel Doupe), a teenager who aspires to break into the acting scene, Theresa (Imogen Doel), an actress retreating from the New York scene, and also her own husband James (Risteard Cooper), here for moral support. Over the course of six weeks this group will do a lot of lying on the floor trying to not get in each other’s way counting to ten. They will also embody the home life of each participant, and maybe, maybe, the wish of Lauren, actually do some acting – though it won’t be with a script. Some things will change dramatically, but little of that drama will occur in the class.
Be careful what you wish for, cos you just might get it… Exasperated by the fiasco that was Look Back in Anger I suggested alternative titles. I asked for an Annie Baker play. And for my sins they gave me one. With a damn exciting cast too. And yet it reminded me of Neutral Hero, which ran at the Dublin Theatre Festival a decade ago. There are almost two distinct things happening here. One, a realistic reconstruction of the exercises of a drama class; the sort of mortification involving absurdities that always puts off most people in school from Speech & Drama class. Two, a subdued portrayal, sketched in micro-scenes of relationships forming and fraying over the course of these six weeks of classes. (Almost three things happening: if you count the performative boredom by members of the audience around me.)
At the end of the penultimate session Baker contrives a loaded scene of revelations, that feels awfully like someone trying to achieve catharsis without enough prior build-up to earn it. There are transcendent moments in this play. Notably the titular manoeuvre of improvisation and bonding, and the final scene in which Schultz and Lauren begin pretending to meet ten years in the future and a circle of light forms around them as they truly connect with some sincere acting; that also serves as a conduit for hope and self-realisation. But, despite some hilarious moments such as Cooper’s delivery of “Self-Actualisation” and Rea and Doel’s dance of awkward flirtation, too often this falls between two stools. It is neither a fleshed out character study of small town frustrations and dreams nor a rigorous meditation on absurdities and necessities of theatrical training.
Director Roisin McBrinn almost gives physical embodiment to the play’s cleaved impulses by placing the audience either side of the stage, but good performances cannot unify it.
2.75/5
Circle Mirror Transformation continues its run at the Gate Theatre until the 30th of June.
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