BWW Reviews: Urban Opera Sings About Disintegrating Housing Estate

Can you pack up and move 300 lives without breaking anything? Maud Hendricks and her collaborators in outlandishtheatre platform spent two years working with residents of St Teresa's Gardens, a social housing estate in Dublin currently poised for demolition.

To present their insights in the form of an 'urban opera' reminds us of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who crossed upper-class claims to opera with working-class subject matter, filling the opera-houses with filthy jazz-inspired ballads. Not dissimilar, the lyrics over the ragtime bars of Morgan Cooke's piano make references to tea and biscuits, going to mass, buying runners; in short, bringing any high society assumptions firmly back to earth.

In an underground studio, performers sing ten songs taken from different perspectives, often departing into fantastical scenarios. Two church-going women who decide to investigate the near-empty estate have notions of turning it into their own place of worship in Cooke's camp turn and Dearbhla McGuinness's kooky performance, before pondering seriously on the people who lived there. Shane O'Reilly's working out of a young man's unemployment articulates painful feelings of uselessness and alienation, and ultimately sends him climbing to the top of the Spire to volunteer his skills.

Elsewhere, there is preservation of life in the estate. Phelim Drew's commanding tenor as an old tenant rings with pride for the place he lives in. "I'm a process" he announces later, embodying the city of Dublin, as he continues to describe himself in contradictory terms. A place in transition is given a disturbing outcome in Bernie O'Reilly's creepy mime performance, where the voiceover of a tour guide leads us through a house converted into a heartless museum.

For all these imaginative ideas, there is a lack of cohesion in director Maud Hendricks's staging, her scene changes lackluster and exposed, the final beat of the performance landing uncertainly. A surer hand feels needed in moments, such as the scene where she plays an ignoring community worker, with the rift between her and Aine Fahy's seeking youth feeling weak.

The airs of a disintegrating community are most poignant in moments of transcendence, evoking mythology in Tír na nÓg: "in our back garden we never grew old". In equating St. Teresa's garden with Eden's, we realise a place of beauty, a place that's just as significant in Irish history as anywhere else.

EX-hib-IT-US runs at Film Base Dublin until May 16th. For more information and tickets, see the outlandishtheatre platform website. Photo: Hazel Coonagh.