Looking back at Belfast International Ballet Festival’s gala performance (The MAC)

The traffic management changes for the Fleadh were just coming into effect as I walked down through Belfast city centre to The MAC on Saturday 1 August. The streets were already more animated than usual, tourists looked relaxed, and there was a lilt of fiddles on the air, not yet tinged with the hum of outdoor generators.

Tucked in before the larger cultural extravaganza began was the Belfast International Ballet Festival. I’ve never made it along to review one of the big ballet shows at the Grand Opera House (though the news that they don’t always use a live orchestra these days also puts me off).

My last foray into the world of ballet was attending the annual performance of Amber Gordon’s School of Dance in Hillsborough around 15 years ago as a parent. Ballet is a form of dance that rarely makes it into musical theatre, not even as contemporary ballet, even though many of the dancers will have studied ballet at some point.

Normally, unless you’re taking part and attending classes, there’s little public evidence in venue programmes that ballet is an artform that anyone continues beyond primary school. But on that mid-summer weekend there was plenty of evidence on The MAC’s main stage that ballet is alive and well.  

I’m an irregular and uneducated reviewer of dance shows, mainly dropping into performances staged during Belfast International Arts Festival, the national dance company Luail, or work that Eileen McCrory or Dylan Quinn have choreographed. RIP ponydance and their legendary Pony Panto Christmas Show and an unforgettable Ponies Don’t Play Football production in 2016).

The short Belfast International Ballet Festival shone a light on local talent, as well as featuring dancers from elsewhere in the island. The final performance of the weekend was a gala night that included dancers from the High Points Youth Ballet and S-MB.

The first act danced along to traditional classical music, dominated by Russian composers. While I might not know a plié from a tendu, it was obvious that there was much strength, poise and grace on show. Powerful moves yet delicate and so well balanced.

While hair tied back in a bun was the order of the day, it was good to see that the somewhat austere, disciplinarian vibe of professional ballet could adapt at this level so wearing glasses was possible, and one dancer totally rocked a fringe … apparently Anna McCoy’s trademark perk of being a professional ballet dancer according to an audience member in the know!

After the interval stunning pieces of contemporary ballet by older dancers (neon costumes and hair worn down in Reflections, choreographed by Luc Burns) demonstrating emotional intensity as well as the precision of their movements, interwoven with more classical fare from larger groups of dancers.

While ballet is regularly be portrayed on film as elitist and upper class, what was on show on the MAC stage was athletic, graceful, with the ensemble dancers creating beautiful visual backdrops against which the principal performers could move. Professional dancers Luc Burns (Andersonstown) and Leigh Alderson (Portadown) joined in after the interval, adding lifts and a hint of romance to the storytelling. Zara Turpie with her high kicking tambourine work added a new twist to ballet musicianship!

Interval conversations took in the difference in arts funding north and south of the border (about four times more government investment in the south) and how that affects the ballet scene.

While the Northern Ireland audience demand for dance of any kind has been nurtured and grown a lot over the last decade, it is still small. One of the joys of the ballet festival’s gala evening was to see the joy and respect light up the faces of the people sitting near me: many of them ballet teachers and students from across the island, revelling in being able to watch their peers perform. 

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Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong – a well-crafted and brilliantly performed study of a man who was caught in a miscarriage of justice (Wooden Bridge Productions at Lyric Theatre until Sunday 13 September)

Actor Don Wycherley’s eyes dart across the audience and if he delivers a line staring at you, it’s as if your soul is being interrogated. Walking around the stage in this one man show, Wycherley is as comfortable with the complex pattern of the script as the character Paddy Armstrong is cozy in his nursing home dressing gown.

It’s a genuine tour de force by Wycherley (who played local Irish language newspaper editor Rob Cullan in Scúp) as he imagines Armstrong in old age, living in a foggy world where words start to disappear between his brain and his tongue, uttering a chain of recollections that switch mid-sentence from one thing to t’other. Even before the tale of coerced confessions and unsafe convictions has begun, the audience are collectively rivetted by the actor’s characterisation, shuffling around the stage, switching accents, pulling faces and running in slow motion.

Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong is no random selection of anecdotes from an autobiography (written with Mary-Elaine Tynan). Tynan together with Wycherley and Niamh Gleeson have crafted a 75-minute narrative that circles around but still gently moves forward in time.

So early on we get a sense of how young Armstrong was when he became hooked on gambling. The local priest suggested Armstrong would be safer living in England away from the Troubles. How Armstrong met Carole Richardson and lived together in a squat. Soon we’ve jumped forward to Armstrong’s interrogation in 1974 and how torture fed into the capture of his so-called confession. Then it’s 1975 and we’re in court as Armstrong is given a life sentence and the judge remarks that he wishes they had been indicted for high treason, which still carried the death penalty. Behind bars in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and HMP Hull the threat has swapped from bent coppers to bent screws and menacing prisoners.

Armstrong was arrested along with two other men (Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon) and a woman (Carole Richardson) – the Guildford Four – and accused of planting bombs in Guildford pubs frequented by British Army personnel. On the evening of 5 October 1974, explosions killed four soldiers and one civilian, with a further 65 people wounded. A couple of years later, members of the IRA’s Balcombe Street Gang would admit responsibility for the Guildford pub bombings, confessions that were suppressed by the Director of Public Prosecutions. (A line in the play almost casually remembers “the man I’m doing time for shakes my hand and walks off, leaving me [in the prison wing]”.)

The Guildford Four’s convictions were eventually quashed in October 1989 and a subsequent inquiry criticised the trial judge. Solicitor Alistair Logan commented that “four people spent 15 years in jail for an offence they didn’t commit and no one really knows after reading that report why that happened”.

Music and sound effects pepper the action. Wycherley’s timing synchronises key lines of dialogue with moments in songs, though the fast fades are very abrupt and a more complicated sound design might have extended some low-level sound effects to match the lighting states that accompany scenes (like those played out in prison).

Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong doesn’t overly dwell on the what if questions, but instead explores how Paddy Armstrong’s life and personality persevered despite – or in spite of – attempts to derail it. You can catch it on the Lyric Theatre’s main stage until Sunday 13 September (there’s a Q&A with Paddy Armstrong and Audrey Carville after the Saturday matinee) before heading back to Clontarf and the Liverpool Irish Festival in October. There are also opportunities to catch it in Derry (26 February) and Cookstown (13 March) next year.

Photo credit: Ciaran Dolan

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Six: Teen Edition – a wunderbar production of the popular dive into history and herstory (East Broadway Theatre Company at Belvoir Studio Theatre until Saturday 5 September)

Welcome to Six: Teen Edition, the musical that reclaims the history of the six wives of King Henry VIII. It’s a summer production from East Broadway Theatre Company directed by Katie-Rose Spence.

By the end of the opening number Ex-wives the six actors have settled into the roles and the Queens are in competition to see which suffered the most begins. Alana plays Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage to Henry overlapped with his interest in Anne Boleyn (Matilda). Ella’s Jane Seymour claims to have been Henry’s true love. Soon Anna of Cleaves (Sophie) is wife number four, before Nell’s Katherine Howard enters the fray. The fight to be the most oppressed is halted by Catherine Parr (Julia), who as a survivor resets the women’s source of identity and they stop soloing and begin to sing in harmony.

As well as toning down a few of the most suggestive elements in the script – but not all! – the Teen Edition comes with the freedom to introduce extra performers. So in this production, the six colourful queens are joined by five performers (Alex, Charlie, Faith, Felix and Tia) dressed in shimmering black. They add to the spectacle of some of the dances, execute a gorgeous piece of interpretive dance during Heart of Stone, and are brilliantly over the top in a wunderbar version of Haus of Holbein, performed for once with the six Queens off-stage. Hats off to assistant choreographer Alex who throws brilliant shapes like a Club 18-30 rep on commission and is fleetingly allowed to realise Henry VIII on stage during a handful of songs.

The live four-piece band (led by Alex McKelvey) are crammed onto risers split between a staircase which allows individual Queens to ascend and sing over heads of the ensemble below. While the staging was simple, giving each Queen their own themed lighting added depth to the visuals.

Alana sets the pace with the first queen’s No Way, while Matilda turns heads before Anne Boleyn loses hers. Ella absolutely slays the key change in Jane Seymour’s Heart of Stone. Right from the start, Sophie imbues Anna of Cleaves with stacks of attitude, only for the pink Barbie Queen to up the stakes as Nell’s Katherine Howard brings her pop diva voice to All You Wanna Do. When the surviving Catherine Parr emerges from the sidelines, Julia pours lots of soul into the show’s quietest ballad I Don’t Need Your Love.

Six is a pretty full-on 75-minute show with little time for performers – or the cue-laden tech team – to catch their breath. The six queens were on top of their characters and Amy Smyth’s choreography. The wobbliest moment came when a lengthy stretch of dialogue leading up to the Remix wasn’t quite quick fire enough and threatened to sap some of the energy. The enthusiastic audience who had been clapping along to many of the songs rose to their feet for the closing mashup Megamix Megasix.

Groups licensing the show are not allowed to copy the costumes or choreography of the professional version of the show. So with the familiar costume designs and dance routines deliberately absent, there’s a sense that Six: Teen Edition is closer to the original 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe production. Hard to believe that Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss hadn’t begun to write Six this time ten years old. It’s a great 

East Broadway’s fabulous production of Six: Teen Edition continues at Belvoir Studio Theatre until Saturday 5 September. Get booking while tickets remain.

Photo credit: Michael McCrystal Photography

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