Ghost Stories – an all male tale exploring the ghosts of guilt and toxic masculinity (Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 May)

The producers of Ghost Stories make a plea to audiences – and also specifically to reviewers – not to divulge the plot and keep the show spoiler free … although the original writers and directors did themselves make a 2017 feature film based on the story of their 2010 stage play!

Suffice to say that in terms of structure, an overall narrative thread revolves around paranormal debunking guest lecturer Professor Goodman (who has a touch of Nigel Farage about his voice and his mannerisms), and is illustrated by three different ‘ghost stories’ before a neatly circular conclusion that ties everything together and for which the clues have been staring everyone in the face for much of the previous 80 minutes in the exploration of guilt, poltergeists and locked-in syndrome.

The show’s reputation and marketing leans heavily on selling the “spine-tingling” experience as “a truly terrifying theatrical experience… with the buzz of a thrill-ride, delivering something truly unique”.

Theatre can be really chilling in terms of the story and the telling. Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman is deeply disturbing and always leaves my heart cold and my sleep disturbed (both the Decadent Theatre version and the more recent, excellent staging by Prime Cut/Lyric Theatre). The opening scene of Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl (which finished its run in the Lyric Theatre at the start of May) saw a young child alone on stage attempting to disfigure himself. A really frightening start orchestrated by director Rhiann Jeffrey. Back in 2014, Jimmy McAleavey’s Unhome (a Tinderbox production in The MAC) achieved both menace and ghostly apparitions that startled audiences.

Ghost Stories uses special effects to play with the audience’s senses even before the show even begins. Although I’m blessed with no sense of smell, people near me reported the smell of fresh carpet and damp before the curtain went up. The bass subs which continue to rumble as if you were in a cabin on a sea ferry throughout much of the show. Surround sound throughout the auditorium throws voices in unexpected directions. The lighting design (mostly lateral from the wings) and the forced perspective sets allow props and people to lurk in the darkness towards the back of the stage.

For me, the tales of “three apparent hauntings” felt quite mundane: I’ll not lose any sleep over the details. The night-watchman’s experience demonstrates good stagecraft. A teenage boy’s late-night account includes a great physical stunt. And there’s good prop control as we listen to “a businessman awaiting his first child”. However, the element of fright almost entirely revolves around loud noises, bright lights, and strobed glimpses of unexpected characters or objects. A sound-track of loud screaming accompanies these moments, making it seem like the whole audience is panicking when the number of vocal percipients is actually much lower. It’s like a sophisticated version of the Ghost Train at Barry’s (Curry’s) in Portrush without the dangling fronds touching your shoulder.

All of this ultimately builds up to a spectacular scene as the performance draws to a close with the – for once – totally unexpected arrival of a fifth cast member (which brought back fond memories of Patrick J O’Reilly’s Damage in the 2014 Outburst Festival). It’s the best effect in the one-act show and finally delivers a really thrilling moment that catches everyone off guard.

Worth noting that the content warning on the Grand Opera House website mentions “the use of smoke, haze, sudden very loud noises and moments of extreme shock and tension” but doesn’t highlight the strong reference to suicide (which seemed to be the trigger for a number of people to walk out last night). The location of a death and the victim’s age in the second story also has a tragic local resonance.

It’s relatively uncommon – but not surprising – to see a touring show with an all-male cast. (A child calling for her father and prolonged gasps of sexual satisfaction as a character watches a porn video are the only times women’s voices are heard during the play.) Taking my seat in the stalls 48 hours after the end of last weekend’s Front & Centre: Women of the North’s Playwriting Symposium, I did wonder whether the theme of toxic masculinity and the hint of male gullibility would be much weakened if the Professor (Dan Tetsell) or the young boy (Eddie Loodmer-Elliott) had been played by women. The remaining cast members are David Cardy (night watchman), Clive Mantle (businessman) and Lucas Albion (who appears on stage and understudies along with Simon Bass). Ghost Stories was written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, who also directed the play along with Sean Holmes.

Ghost Stories will continue to uncover its truth in the Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 May. The performances are good, the technical trickery is expert, but it was rarely as terrifying as it promised.

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The Salt Path – homeless but not without hope, a couple dig deep on an involuntary ‘Camino’ (cinemas from Friday 30 May)

Some people have the freedom to choose to take off and walk long distances. And they do so for many reasons. The Camino de Santiago across the north of Spain is a popular pilgrimage. A communal path that has company along the way if you want it, and space to be on your own if you value the time to think. Others enjoy going for a long hike and wild camping along the way.

New film The Salt Path portrays a semi-fictionalised retelling of Raynor and Moth’s real life experience (available in book form) of starting out from Minehead in Somerset to walk around the coastal path to Land’s End and beyond. As a couple they’d run out of choices. They lost their house on the back of debts following a poor business investment and a lack of legal advice. [Update - a July article in the Observer alleges a different background to the story.] Moth had a recent diagnosis of a rare neurodegenerative disease (CBD): the prognosis was terminal albeit it not immediate enough to qualify for emergency housing as a newly homeless couple. Armed with a pair of rucksacks, a tent, some rice, pasta, and a paltry amount of cash, they set off to live on the coastal path and see where it took them.

“I can’t move my arms or my legs, but other than that I’m good to go.”

Gillian Anderson stars as Ray, a woman who perseveres, who simultaneously copes while not coping, who keeps putting one foot in front of the other, and exudes a practical and heartfelt love for her partner. Jason Isaacs propels Moth up hills and over uneven terrain despite a gait that impedes progress. Anderson’s character is relatively steady. However, Isaacs wobbles between being physically helpless, deeply morbid moments, and an almost superhuman shows of strength in the face of an emergency.

While the dialogue in one scene late in the film will bring tears to your eyes, the quality of the acting is never reliant on the delivery of lines but instead on the glances, gazes and sighs. The actors’ faces and their characters’ demeanours become weathered as the days become weeks and months: Moth’s symptoms mean they rest frequently, and progress is very slow.

Alongside Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay, director Marianne Elliott and cinematographer Hélène Louvart add a third major character: the stunning scenery and surroundings, with crashing waves, windswept and tide-damaged woodland, soaring birds and lolloping mammals, strong sunshine and horizontal rain. Close-up shots in the tent and in built-up areas they pass through are in sharp contrast to the wide vistas and drone shots capturing the pair walking through landscapes devoid of other humans.

Ray’s constant companion on the route is her much-annotated copy of Paddy Dillon’s Walking Guide of the South West Coast Path. Moth is reading through Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation, which becomes the punchline to a running gag about mistaken identity. Watch how those with plenty – individuals, families and businesses – treat the homeless and hungry, and how willingly Ray and Moth offer to share the little that they have.

The moments of human kindness are a tonic throughout the film. The 115-minute run time is perhaps the weakest element: so many scenes from the first half of the real Ray and Moth’s journey are squeezed into the narrative that the passage of time in the cinema does become noticeable.

The Salt Path is being screened in local cinemas including Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 May.

 

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When The Light Breaks – grief(s) observed in this beautiful Icelandic character driven study (QFT until Thursday 29 May)

Una’s spending the night at Diddi’s student digs. But she’s tired of sneaking around. He’s getting up early to head back home to Reykjavík to tell his girlfriend Klara that their long-distance relationship is over. Una wakes up in his bed, brushes her teeth, escapes out the window to avoid his flatmate discovering their affair, and goes to college. News slowly breaks that there’s been a devasting multiple vehicle crash and Diddi may be involved.

When The Light Breaks watches over a day as this young woman comes to terms with internally grieving for her first love while externally suppressing her true emotions. As a general rule of thumb, Icelandic films are always worth a punt. They tend to feature strong characters, in tense situations. Screenwriter and director Rúnar Rúnarsson doesn’t overcomplicate the story – or elongate the film’s duration – but instead lets the camera linger on Elín Hall’s expressive face (playing Una).

The awkwardness is explored, at first through a sense of personal grief greater than other friends (and supposedly secret from them), then extended through the presence and a closeness to official girlfriend Klara (played by Katla Njálsdóttir). As one person leaving my screening observed, “Diddi certainly had a type”: Una/Hall and Klara/Njálsdóttir could easily pass for sisters, facially so similar other than the style of their hair!

By the close of the film, more and more is left unsaid, leaving audiences free to imagine. Did Klara suspect Una was on the scene before she flew up to mourn? Has she since spotted Una’s familiarity with Diddi’s life? Does she find solace in being around someone else who knew him so well? You decide!

Grief is always hard to gauge. Difficult to define or predict. When The Light Breaks spends 24 hours in the life of students discovering how they will react. Well worth catching at Queen’s Film Theatre before Thursday 29 May.

 

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Chora - inaugural show from Luail delivers masterclass in trust and movement

Ireland’s National Dance Company, Luail, has made a very confident leap onto the stage with their first production. Chora – ancient Greek for ‘space’ or ‘being’ – is its inaugural work, a triptych that explores memory, patterns and interactions. Performed last night in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, it had premiered in Dublin last Tuesday before a night in Wexford and will finish at the end of the month in Cork.

Against a live score of relentless harsh strings from the Irish Chamber Orchestra perched up at the back, the company dancers come on stage for Invocation (choreographed by Mututau Yusaf and composed by Julia Wolfe). One dancer is fighting against the oppression and goading of six faceless demons who swirl and snarl.

The black dance floor is rolled back to reveal a gleaming red mat underneath. From experience, rolling up dance mats is not something you want to do with an audience, but a string quartet give the stage reset a feeling of ritual before the (eight) company dancers and three guests perform Liz Roche’s Constellations.

The movement and the spacing and dynamic between dancers of both pieces feed naturally into the post-interval performance of I Contain Multitudes. Now circulating around a white dance floor, eight dancers fall into subtle shared rhythms, almost magnetically attracted to each other before breaking away into a pseudo-random path that will see them nearly collide in the next round. Guy Nader and Maria Campos have created a spectacular work that is both beautiful and breath-taking.

The score is an arrangement by Marijn van Prooijen of Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, a piece largely based on quintuplets that is essentially in 10/16 time. The pace and the complexity of the interactions between dancers building up on stage is echoed by the orchestra is working through increasingly intricate layers of repetitions of the score, with rather essential conducting (counting) duties switching between a couple of players throughout the forty-minute performance.

If the music is elegant and mesmerising, the movement on the dance floor is even more so. An initial lack of touching is soon replaced with stylish holds, jumps and lifts. It’s so precise despite looking almost haphazard: a hand grabbed here, a foot twisted there, a tumbling over someone bent over behind. By the performance’s zenith, dancers are being hoisted into the air and falling sideways into the waiting arms of (unseen to them) colleagues in a show of trust that belies the company’s recent formation. Like zooming into a fractal, the patterns on stage are familiar and repeating yet constantly changing and unique.

Overall I Contain Multitudes feels like the kind of overseas work that would wow audiences at Belfast International Arts Festival. Katie Davenport’s flexible set – particularly with how the orchestra are kept in view without ever becoming a distraction – together with her billowy costumes add to the richness of the performance. Also understated but all the more powerful for it is Sinéad McKenna’s lighting design, with strip lighting descending to completely change the shadows cast on the floor for Constellations, and some beautiful shadow work during the final performance.

It bodes well that Luail has so quickly established its technical and performative prowess to tour this triple-bill of work. You can catch the final performance of Chora at Cork Opera House on Wednesday 28 May. Hopefully the company will return to Belfast before too long.

Photo credit: Luca Truffarelli

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Magic Farm – watchable satire about media ineptitude without any bite (Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 22 May)

A New York documentary team travels to Argentina to capture their latest in a series of quirky subculture episodes. This time their plan is to feature an eccentric musician who wears a rabbit costume with big ears. But nothing quite runs to plan.

The opening minutes of Magic Farm feel like a spoof TV news show, and on paper, this could have been a cracking celebration of the perils of gonzo documentary making, the kind of youth TV that might once have played on late night weekend Channel 4. In practice, the movie that’s been made is a satire that lacks any bite and becomes a watchable droll character study of misfits on tour.

The hapless and clumsy team of five are nearly as professionally flimsy as their proposed content. Presenter Edna (played by Chloë Sevigny) senses that her show is on its last legs and a lot is riding on this episode. Her husband is exec producer Dave (Simon Rex), somewhat hands off on the details of what’s happening, but historically way too hands on with the crew. Day-to-day production decisions fall to producer Jeff (Alex Wolff) whose his lack of research and curiosity have landed the team in the wrong country. Sound man Justin (Joe Apollonio) is neither streetwise nor aware of his homoerotic aura. The most junior member of the team turns out to be the most competent: Elena (Amalia Ulman, who also writes and direct the film) successfully manages the budget and coordinates the chaos while dealing with her own personal issues. Her language skills can only partially counter the general feeling that everything is lost in translation.

The local fixer’s tree-climbing daughter (Camila del Campo) sees through the film crew’s antics, yet their presence in her rural village is a welcome break from terminal boredom. She’s probably the most interesting member of the ensemble cast, and more of her perspective on the unfolding madness and panicked fakery would have strengthened the storytelling.

The cinematography takes risks with bold 360-degree shots, strapping cameras to animals, brash colours, and eye-catching editing. But the comedy is sparse: a crew member falling off a skateboard is one of the funniest things that happens. Reference is made to someone having had an affair with the actor Gerard Depardieu. News broke minutes before the preview screening I attended that Depardieu had been convicted of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021. As a consequence, his mention in the film felt very dark, beyond a laughing matter.

The punchline – sorry for the slight spoiler – is that there’s a health emergency developing in the area in which the team are filming. Their documentary skills could have captured what’s happening and told that powerful story, rescuing their reputations and careers. Instead, their self-absorbed incompetence means that they miss all the visible clues that they’ve been tripping over all week.

While Magic Farm doesn’t deliver on the ambition it seemed to promise, it’s still a fun 93-minute tale of media ineptitude. It’s being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 22 May.

 

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The Surfer – Nicolas Cage plays a lost soul descending into madness, chasing a pointless dream with a heavy price tag (UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 9 May)

The Surfer – a never-named divorcing man with a teenage son – returns to the scene of his youth, planning to buy his childhood home on a clifftop overlooking a surfing beach in Western Australia. This quest seems to be the only positive thing in his life, a humiliating notion that conjures up a whole range of possible problems. And that’s before he encounters the toxic masculinity of a local surfing gang who aggressively protect their beach from outsiders.

Set in the week leading up to Christmas, The Surfer a sunny antipodean affair, with zero festive cheer. A clean-shaven Nicolas Cage descends into fever dream insanity as he stubbornly refuses to cave in to the demands from the local hoods. Their evil leader, Scally (played by Julian McMahon), is wrapped up in a less than subtle red ‘dryrobe’, orchestrating rituals based on water and fire and demanding that his fervent disciples suffer to be part of his malevolent club.

The Surfer loses his dignity, his mind, his vehicle, his wallet (a mere symbol of his larger emasculation by financial institutions), and ultimately even his values and morals are on the line. Other than Nicolas Cage’s very committed performance, there’s nothing enjoyable about this catastrophe film – written by Thomas Martin and directed by Lorcan Finnegan – other than Radek Ladczuk’s lush cinematography (enhanced with wildlife close-ups and drone shots looking down at waves), all backed by François Tétaz’s sparkly soundtrack. It’s an act of anguish to watch the torment play out over 100 minutes. While the twice-daily tide may clean the sand, it cannot wipe away the blood that’s been spilt on the beach.

Hardly any women appear on screen (other than a helpful photographer played by Miranda Tapsell). This is all about men behaving badly. Bullying with more than a hint of historic criminal acts and police collusion. Topped with animistic behaviour and initiation ceremonies. The Surfer’s interactions with a beach bum who lives in the corner of a car park ultimately illustrates to what lengths the rich may go to increase their material possessions.

The Surfer runs in cinemas including Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 9 until Thursday 15 May.

 

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Tina: The Tina Turner Musical – struggling against serial coercive control to find her voice and success (Grand Opera House until Saturday 24 May)

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical is a story of struggle against coercive control: male violence, male oppression, and talent that didn’t neatly fit into the vision of those (men) running the music industry. 

The title role at Wednesday evening’s performance was played by Jochebel Ohene MacCarthy (who alternates with Elle Ma-Kinga N’Zuzi). Her powerful vocals were electrifying throughout, bringing the singer/songwriter to life on the stage of the Grand Opera House. The young Anna Mae (played by Chizaram Ochuba-Okafor and Chloe Angiama) establishes the potential talent and innate stage presence of the girl who will eventually wow tens of thousands in concerts.

By the time the interval comes round, we’ve watched a mother flee a violent home with one daughter, but leave her other child, the precocious and loud-singing Anna Mae Bullock, to grow up with her abusive father. We’ve seen 17-year-old Anna Mae be talent spotted by Ike Turner, an older music man who changes her stage name to Tina Turner and eventually leaves her no option but to marry him all the while not paying her a wage: marriage may be “good for the bank and good for business” but it isn’t good for Tina. And we see how Tina’s talent outshines his, leading to further confrontations and a big split.

While the second act eventually reaches the point where Tina Turner’s solo career takes off, she must first battle more strong-willed record producers to take back and assert control, while facing up to her mother and the hard-to-shake-off Ike, and meeting a younger man she’ll later marry on her own terms.

Tina Turner’s back catalogue, along with other tracks from the period, are intelligently woven into the linear narrative. Like most jukebox musicals, there’s a background hum of wannabe karaoke singers in the audience adding to the talented on stage backing singers. Mark Thompson’s fabulous set plays with depth and favours soft focus backdrops on the video wall that eventually lifts to reveal the band for the final numbers.

The wigs are awesome. The home aquarium is stellar. The costumes (also Mark Thompson) dazzle, although some of the on stage quick-changes felt close to being exploitative, and seem very prone to delay. Bruno Poet has arranged an extraordinary number of light fixtures facing the audience to create the concert atmosphere for specific moments in the production. The choreography is good, although dancing in slow motion with wooden chairs and an odd creative decision to freeze frame Ike while Tina sings around him felt flat.

Granting boyfriend Raymond (Kyle Richardson) the lead in Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together creates a very solid duet. Giving a wife-beater (Ike played with commitment by David King-Yombo) who hits his children a song with the lyric “Be tender with me, baby” is certainly poignant (and a bit icky). Gemma Sutton gives a great rendition of Open Arms as Tina’s assistant-turned-manager Rhonda. The audience particularly love River Deep Mountain High, I Don’t Wanna Fight, Proud Mary, and the final much-anticipated arrangement of What’s Love Got to Do with It.

The musical’s book by Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the painful life of the singer who would become world famous as Tina Turner. Fans of the artist will be in heaven. Fans of good jukebox musicals will also be impressed with the solid biography.

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical continues its three-week run in the Grand Opera House until Saturday 24 May, after which the tour decamps to Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre between Tuesday 27 May and Saturday 14 June.

PS: Note to audiences: talking loudly during the songs is not what others paid to come to the theatre to hear. It’s a long production and won’t finish until quarter or twenty past ten ... although one man behind me said his loud goodbyes and left ten minutes before the interval! And if anyone beside you proffers a misogynist heckle during an emotionally stark and vulnerable scene – “you can stay at my house” was neither smart nor funny – feel free to lecture them when the lights come up at the end.

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