‘I could squeeze a bullet between those lips. Point first. Press it between those rosebud lips. Prise it between your pearly whites. Gently. I wouldn’t break a single tooth.’
Now that I have your attention…
Earlier this week I caught up with director Marc Atkinson, and actors Erica Murray and Aaron Heffernan, to try and get a handle on, among other things, Sugarglass Theatre’s alluring new production of English playwright Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm- an intense, poetic two hander in which a nameless couple “interrogate their relationship and the time they have spent together, using and abusing each other’s’ memories and imaginations in a desperate bid to relive the experience of the night they first met.”
The play itself is a heightened, abstracted evocation of the bruising intensity of young love, of its origins and ends. The duelling couple conjure up a violent, sexual, mythologised epic from the shards of their shattered relationship. I put it to our creative threesome that part of the draw of plays such as this is their propensity to shock, and that this can become an end in itself. “I no longer find it shocking.” Atkinson demurs, “People are reacting to what they think should shock them, yet at their core, these works deal with the very same human themes that ran through classical Greek theatre.” Atkinson has been reading and directing Ridley’s works since his early undergrad days (a second year production of the uber-controversial Mercury Fur was “the first time I fully directed something on my own”) and argues that the playwright’s preoccupation -apparent through the unusually intoxicating vernacular he writes in- isn’t with simple shock tactics, but rather with “the power and point of words” as tools to convey an almost overwhelming extremity of feeling. “He’s not afraid of fantasy, of telling epic stories which are, at the same time, deeply rooted in our culture now.”
But what of the actors tasked with bringing to life this lyrical outpouring? How do they conjure up these ravenous, sorrowful illusions with only language at their disposal? “I think the main thing for us, working within a framework of constant flux,” says Heffernan, “is to simply undergo the play’s situations rather than trying to act out or code the meanings therein.” “It was a gradual process which was very intense and difficult at times”, Murray notes, “but now I think we feel comfortable with it and I am genuinely excited to see what people think.”
Heffernan and Murray have both seen breakout success over the past year (the former through his devising of the beautifully realised family show Monster Clock, the latter for her fringe-nominated performance in The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle). Atkinson too has seen his most recent project, the ambitious All Hell Lay Beneath, lauded as one of the ‘Top Three Highlights’ of Absolut Fringe 2012 by The Irish Times. All three are graduates, or soon-to-be graduates, of Trinity College’s Drama Studies programme, as well as its seemingly unstoppable Society wing- Trinity Players.
Yes, it seems that a disproportionately large amount of the city’s dramatic wunderkinder cut their teeth inside the Black Box of The Samuel Beckett theatre at one stage or another. I’m curious as to why this is. “Players sows the seeds of enthusiasm”, muses Murray, “it pulls you in and allows you to experiment.” Heffernan agrees, but emphasises that they are all conscious of the importance of broadening horizons, of not existing “within a bubble.”
For such a young company, no matter how buoyed by recent accomplishments, the large Project space must seem a daunting prospect. Yet this team doesn’t appear either particularly nervous or cocky about the task at hand. They seem professional because of course, at this stage, they are. And maybe that’s the trick. Maybe there is no great conscious leap from student theatre to the realm of the Pros. Maybe you just keep working, keep walking tall, and don’t look down. If you’re good enough, you’ll get there. For Marc, Aaron, and Erica, it’s been working pretty well so far.
I wouldn’t bet against them proving it again.
Tender Napalm runs in The Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, from November 27th-December 8th