The Doppler Effect – revised and rebalanced but still a mesmerising experience (The Belfast Ensemble at The MAC until Saturday 14 September)

The Doppler Effect was the second production from The Belfast Ensemble that I reviewed. Back in October 2017, it was a mesmerising experience to stand and move around the outside of an unseated theatre space, while live music was performed in a central cube, with a figure on a central platform interpreting the words being spoken by an actor. Video was projected onto the translucent skin of the cube.

“Any one aspect of this show could hold my attention. I got lost in the music and then the words and then the movement and the imagery. There is a lot going on, but it’s all complementary and well balanced and no particular discipline is allowed to dominate …

“The Doppler Effect is genre-busting: musical theatre accompanied by dance, some narrative and some of the best visuals I’ve seen in a theatre. The genius of The Belfast Ensemble is that together the artists produce high quality, imaginative work that is riddled with enough layers of meaning that you are left wanting to hit rewind and go back to the beginning to breathe it all in again.”

The promenade style of performance – where the audience are encouraged to move around the space and look through the set and projections from different angles – puts on onus on the audience to help craft the story.

The piece returned in 2018 and has been substantially revised in 2024 for performances at the Festival de Marseille (in French) and this weekend in The MAC (in English).

The most common example of the Doppler effect is the perceived change of pitch when a vehicle with its siren blaring approaches you and then passes into the distance. And there’s a sense that the message of the eponymous show has shifted in its journey over the last six or more years.

While my grasp of the ‘plot’ could be somewhat opaque when leaving previous performances, in this latest instantiation, Conor Mitchell has substantially redeveloped the queer storyline which now sits in an unmissable layer above the music and the visuals. It makes everything easier to follow, but I nearly miss the sense of ambiguity!

We watch Ruaidhrí Maguire move in tandem with the character’s inner monologue which is voiced with incredible precision by Abigail McGibbon. Appropriately, we’re travelling through a day with a student who is a physics whizz. His inner musings on the people he meets are quite shocking: though can any of us honestly say that we don’t make equally unvoiced and prejudiced commentary as we wander through life?

Susie Griffin, Aoife Magee, Elias Rooney and Gillian McCutcheon play Mitchell’s score live, hunched in the lower corners of the cube. Sets of speakers in the corners and sides of the staging, as well as behind the audience feed the layers of music and narration into the space. The sound design and mixing (Aaron Ross and Megan Joyce) is bright and intimate, deliberately preserving the sound of lips and breathing. Against one wall of the theatre, Gavin Peden sits drumming his fingers of one hand on the table, counting the beaths in the ever-changing time signatures while cuing the change of visuals with his other hand.

The whole production could be reduced to a single computer running the lights, videos, recorded score and narration, with just the dancer performing live. But the joy of The Doppler Effect is that each night is live. Each performance has the risk of someone dropping a beat. The audience and the creative team are in the moment. It’s thrilling to be part of, particularly in a final moment when the visual break out from the box and fill more of the space.

Back in 2017, I wrote:

“For this showcase of local imagination to receive no funding heaps shame upon the vision of arts funding bodies who should expect this work to travel internationally.”

Everything produced by The Belfast Ensemble has an international feel to it, pushing boundaries of form and practice, mashing music and light and video together with performance in unorthodox ways. There’s often a very European cultural sensibility – less staid, less evolutionary – to the work. So it’s good that the funding situation is better (though still in no way sufficient for the ambition that is on show) and the productions are finding ways to be performed outside Northern Ireland. (I nearly wish they’d run a few minutes of the show in French this week to demonstrate yet another example of the team’s versatility.)

The final performance of The Doppler Effect is in The MAC on Saturday 14 September at 7.30pm.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!