My review of CARE coming up just as soon as the doctor and nurse go have a little chat …

As a company who have become skilled in making theatre about specific communities, WillFredd have always felt true to their documentary sources while at the same time allowing for humour and playfulness of form. So when director Sophie Motley and designer Sarah Jane Shiels walked into the St Francis Hospice in Raheny over a year ago, you’d wonder if a performance about employees who care for patients in their final stages of illness could carry the same cheer?

From an opening scene where staff deal playing cards that in turn deal out placements for patients’ beds it seems that frolics are still in play. Tactless perhaps but it signals a sincere portrayal of palliative care and its mixing of medicine and mirth.

Blue curtains are stripped back to reveal nurses and doctors collecting the medical history of a new patient, Anne, represented by a mannequin gleaming under Sarah Jane Shiels’ pearlescent lighting.

It’s a fine line between light and dark, and Motley has a cast to tread it expertly. Eleanor Methven intelligently spells out medical diagnoses as a doctor and later she comically voices disdain at the mention of a hospice (“I’d rather iron my own legs!”). Similarly, Sonya Kelly’s undercutting wit eventually gives way to a gentle monologue describing the scene of a client’s last breath.

A combination of scenes reveal attitudes towards hospices as depressed and death-obsessed environments. However, when the staff rush to a patient’s request to hear an Elvis song, with Shane O’Reilly belting out the refrain “This time the girl is gonna stay” and the rest of the cast providing dazzling support, the truth appears to be that people work determinedly to raise patients’ spirits. Illness does not prevent the fulfilment of lives.

There are many tools on display. Composer Jack Cawley’s welling arrangements pace the production softly. O’Reilly’s physical vocabulary traces the steps of rehabilitation in a movement with musician Seán Mac Erlaine, whose wind instruments hum a low melody.

It’s where reality intrudes that WillFredd’s theatre is extraordinary, and in CARE the circumstances are particularly emotional. O’Reilly interrupts a scene by pounding furiously against the wall, creating a sense of the utter uncontrollable, of lives spinning out of control. And only Motley could so discreetly transform the clicking of a doctor’s pen into a fading heartbeat.

It all ends with a reversion to the ordinariness of the workplace, of a place that has to continue when lights are extinguished. But from WillFredd’s glowing production about decline we’ll remember that care is at hand, magnifying lives and their brimming inspiration, even when surrounded by shadows.

A game of poker. Some show tunes. Dismantled mannequins. Plasticince as dinner. These may not seem like the hallmarks of a show about hospices and palliative care, and you would be right. But WillFredd (FOLLOW, FARM) have succeeded once again in using a talented ensemble and their own ingenuity to create a show that is more about the audience than about the actors, more personal than political, and more about those left behind than those left to die.

WillFredd have followed up two successful years with a show that actively seeks to put life on the agenda. The premise is simple: in a hospice the staff go about their day to day work. They make tea and give baths, they pray and they clean, they sing and they dance. They show the audience that is no ‘normal’ day in the life of a hospice worker.

Like an impressionist painting the brushstrokes of brilliance are scattered over a white canvas. Up close they seem scattered and impulsive, but stepping back Sophie Motley’s superb direction creates a picture of a homely place, for staff and patients alike. In using a mannequin as the “patient” she allows the audience to place their own relatives on this faceless body. The musical interludes are uplifting, but self-aware and deprecating. More than anything, the depth and darkness of the humor is deeply profound. In a time when the Abbey is staging Sive in an effort to revive Irishness, WillFredd have discovered a truly Irish voice. This is evident in their discussion of a hospice as a place “for elderly Protestants” and the stark fact that “feeding [patients] up won’t make them better”.

Although Motley maintains an Irish sensibility and sense of humor, there is an awareness of the cruelty within the system they uphold. The opening lines of “How many beds? Two beds” and the game of poker that follows indicate just how much there is at stake during this performance. But also, just how much is at stake on a daily basis in a way that graphs and Irish Times reports never can.

In putting the patient at the center, they skew the focus in order to concentrate on the humanity of those around the them. But it’s not about death; it circles around a human staff that care for the patient, care about them, who care full stop. At first it establishes that the Occupational Therapist, Nurse et al. are defined only by their jobs, and then it shatters this illusion. The ensemble are restrained and animated in equal measure, bringing terrific energy and understanding to each role they play. Eleanor Methven is uncannily credible in her role as the doctor. But Shane O’Reilly gives a performance that spans the entire spectrum of acting ability, from an Elvis-like routine and right back to a considerate nurse.

Sarah Jane Shields’ set is equally drastic, jumping between the clinical white and blue that the audience is so familiar with, while adding splashes of colour with flashing lights. Working in tandem with the set, Sarah Bacon’s costumes are similarly divisive in relation to colour. Emma O’Kane’s choreography creates the most evocative moment of the entire show. Her duet between Shane O’Reilly and Seán Mac Erlaine is visually striking and literally carries the feeling behind the word “care” in every gesture.

In seeing the sheer humanity of the care team, WillFredd have depoliticised palliative care and brought it to an audience who are willing and ready to listen. And if that doesn’t convince you, then the lyrics “Love is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate” should do the trick.

The highly acclaimed WillFredd theatre company returns to Project Arts Centre with Care, a transformative piece about not just death, but also life in a hospice. After their first two award-winning productions, Follow and Farm, Sophie Motley and Sarah Jane Shiels’s group once again pushes the boundaries of contemporary Irish theatre scene with yet another ethically challenging play. However, as stated by Motley during the post-show discussion, their focus was never on any particular hospice patient; instead, the story is told from the staff’s point of view, so this show is really “about the people who add life to days if not days to life” (programme).

Working closely with the staff of St. Francis Hospice, WillFredd challenges the stereotypical notion of the hospice as a place where you go to die, embracing the idea that life can be valued especially in a place where you are surrounded by death. While Care is not a documentary, it is nonetheless forged by the company’s experience with “daily Hospice life,” (venue website blurb) including the fictional patient, Anne, created by a doctor at St. Francis to help WillFredd devise the show.

Anne (the only fictionally named character), played by a mannequin on whose surface or skin her medical history can be written, “is not real, but her story is close enough to being real to create a meaningful character” (programme note). Anne is at the centre of the story told by the great performing ensemble, which in WillFredd’s trademark style blends words and music, dance and movement. The cast, composed by stellar actors Eleanor Methven, Sonya Kelly and Shane O’Reilly, and great musician Seán Mac Erlaine (the second musician and sound designer Jack Cawley was unfortunately absent from last night’s show), works in perfect harmony between one another, resulting in performances that stood out in the crowd, as well as an authentic impression of camaraderie.

However, the team spirit highlighted by the performers could not have been achieved without the majestic behind-the-scene work of Motley, Shiels (Lighting/Set Design), Emma O’Kane (Choreography), Dan Colley (Dramaturg) and Margarita Corscadden (Stage Manager) to name but a few. Together they have created a show that will resonate for a long time for the way they approached such a sensitive issue with humour and a caring touch that never slips into stale sympathy or sentimentality.

A truly significant production for years to come, its only lack for me was that it kept me wanting for more.

Even for a company as imaginative as WillFredd Theatre, it would be easy to lose its nerve when dealing with the solemnity of palliative care. The essential work of hospices, treating patients in the final stages of illness, invites an automatic sense of reverence, which would be fatal for a piece of theatre. This astutely judged work defuses it immediately, slyly announcing in its opening moments an approach that is respectful, intelligent and inventive.

As three people sit around a baize-green hospital gurney, a croupier deals out playing cards representing patients (“Home care, medium male”; “Beaumont, low female”) awaiting limited beds.

It might sound callous: playing games with people’s lives. Instead, director Sophie Motley and her collaborators are artfully aware that we are exploring a system and the people who deal with it – in short, who cares? By not putting the patient at the centre, that disarming focusallows for a greater and quite challenging insight: it’s nothing personal.

This also extends to WillFredd’s methods, an abundance of styles and techniques that form a sophisticated and sometimes restless bricolage, a machinery that still aims for emotional effect. A steady series of sequences introduces us to doctors, nurses, therapists and chaplains, structured around the entrance and exit of a patient named “Anne”, represented only by a mannequin, a family tree and a medical history.

Motley’s is far from a clinical exercise, however. Developed over a year spent in consultation with Irish hospices, it is dense with detail yet engagingly spry in its delivery.

Shane O’Reilly’s nurse and Eleanor Methven’s doctor deliver differing perspectives on hospice admission procedure while Seán Mac Erlaine and Jack Cawley supply a softly sighing accompaniment on electric and acoustic instruments. O’Reilly later delivers a song about breathlessness and anxiety that becomes a spiralling human case history resolving in RD Laing’s maxim, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100 per cent mortality rate”.

Motley and her dramaturg, Dan Colley, have an eye for such eruptions. A comic sequence of hospice workers explaining what they do at dinner parties leads to a phenomenal outburst, conveying frustration and despair that few could put in words. It also means that it is not a retreat when we return to the system itself as a source of succour.

Like the eloquence of Sarah Jane Shiels’s supple design, there is an artful coalescence of technique and theme, where staffroom conversations blur into charming fantasy sequences, or the solving of loaded crossword clues prefigures the final realisation of death.

In Sonya Kelly’s gentle bedside description of a final coping strategy, a system of care is not impersonal, but a necessary paradox, as honoured and consoling as a ritual.

Read it here.

Exuding wit, invention and charm, Farm is a rootsy week one stand-out in the Absolut Fringe. You’ll never have seen sheep dipped the way they’re done here in a simple and imaginative opening. This site specific, warehouse production gently herds and prods the audience into a series of observations and lessons from the land. There’s a real-life horse, a talking cow and hilarious bee harmonies. The pride and condescension of the garden plot nerd is explored and a welly tap-dance morphs into a barn dance hooley. In one of its most introspective and evocative moments, Shane O’Reilly ploughs a furrow with a pitch-fork hinting at the grind, entrapment and loneliness of this seemingly blissful existence. Willfredd Theatre, Spirit of The Fringe winners last year, encapsulate that accolade again.

Caomhán Kane, February 2013

Most actors can relate to that awkward feeling one gets when their parents come to watch them perform. But for Shane O Reilly, the Child of Deaf Adults(CODA), it was only after he conceived his one man show Follow, that his own parents got to appreciate the true depth of his art. A series of vignettes inspired by incidents from O’Reilly’s own life- and others shared by members of Dublin’s Deaf Community, the show contains a brand new style that aims to communicate stories to both a deaf and hearing audience at the same time.

“It provides direct access to theatre for deaf people, genuinely integrating them into the world in a way that doesn’t say, ‘you’re different’ “O’Reilly says. “Usually deaf audiences gain access through an interpreter, who is to the left of the stage, so they miss a lot of what an artist is trying to convey. A script is related to them and every so often they can reference an image by looking at the main action.”

In Follow light, sound, sign language and performance are mixed together so that the play is experienced by the whole of the audience at the same time. It allows a hearing audience to experience what it is like for the deaf to watch a show through light and vibration (there are speakers beneath the seats) and allows a deaf audience to view a show that has been curated for them from the beginning of the development process, not just as an afterthought.

“It stemmed from myself, lighting designer Sarah Jane Sheils and musician Jack Cawley looking for different ways to explore narrative,” says director Sophie Motley, who formed Wilfredd Theatre with Sheils in 2010. “Using what you already have- light and sound, to create a narrative that doesn’t just support text.” When she worked with O’Reilly on a separate project during this time he reminded her how exciting it would be to explore Irish Sign Language(ISL), and she co-opted him into the process.

“We explore things that are culturally specific to that community,” O’Reilly says, “situations that while directly relating to one person, have very much a universal tone. An awful lot of deaf people would relate to the frustration of being misunderstood or the isolation of finding yourself in the place where you are the last person to receive information that is very important to you. That’s the theme that runs through the whole show.”

They researched all aspects of deaf life in Ireland-from Oralism to getting a guided tour of St Joseph’s School for the Deaf from some former pupils. “Sophie was also keen to explore the little d,” O Reilly says. “In deaf culture deaf people would write deaf with a capital D to indicate it as a culture, not a disability. Little d is recognition of those who don’t feel they belong to that culture. People who lost their hearing or who don’t have sign language.”

Before they started they spent three weeks sitting in the rehearsal room creating the toys they needed to tell the tale. “We needed to figure out how to transduce light and sound so that we could make Shane’s signs clearer, rather than his voice louder, so that you could actually see the words.”

“When we were making this show Jack was just determined to make a sound design that deaf people had access to,” says O Reilly. “So through workshops with the deaf we developed our knowledge of vibration and their access to base through breathing and visual sound. It’s about taking access and immersing it into the style so you don’t see the access part any more, you just see the art.”

They constantly harvested response from deaf people. Hand’s On presenter Sarah Jane Maoloney, was regularly in the rehearsal room- watching the work develop and advising in terms of authenticity. “After our first run she remarked that some of the signs I was using were feminine when it was a masculine character in a boys schools telling the story.”

They also consulted people who caption shows for theatre to insure that their imagery and ISL was pure enough they didn’t need additional captioning. “In life there are moments when you can immediately read a person purely by the state of their face, “Shane says. “You can make out who the mother is at the funeral of a man who has died, you can see whose birthday it is when the cake comes out. Human emotion is triggered to the point of an extreme, the mask our face alone creates need no further interpretation. We have a number of moments like that in this show, where the captioning unit pulls out or I don’t speak very clearly. But then Sophie also has me pull it back to an almost vacant or empty mask so that people have to go to the hands or go to the speech.”

Speaking to deaf audiences after the show O’Reilly says that they compared seeing Follow to watching TV in Blue-Ray for the first time. “Having a show made for them that also pushes the traditional structure of story telling and of traditional theatre. As artists we wanted to explore our own intention and our own style. To have people discussing aspects of the work, not the interpreter’s, is, for us, a success.”

Does ISL (Irish Sign Language, the method of communication used by many deaf people) have dramatic possibilities? Apparently WillFredd Theatre company wasn’t sure, but went ahead with an exploration anyway. The result is Follow, a play with sound by Shane O’Reilly and Jack Cawley. I’m slow to use the word “masterpiece,” but this hour-long interweaving of several stories from the world faced by people who cannot hear clearly, or even at all, comes damn close.

There is the bunch of little imps in a deaf-school dormitory all getting a bad dose of the runs after eating their own cookery, and having to deal with the outcome with inadequate bathroom facilities. It’s delightful, though it takes a deeply sad twist as the same little imps are taken to Lourdes, only to have the ring-leader Ned having to face the family gathered at home and watch their faces as they realise the longed-for “cure” has not materialised.

There is the macho young disco man with 80 per cent hearing loss in both ears trying to sort out his health insurance in a hearing world: macho men wear their ear-protectors round their necks, he admits, and yes, it’s his own fault he’s deaf now.

There’s the desperate young father following a garda and trying to explain that he can’t understand when the garda calls to the house and asks if he has two children, only to lead him to a local hospital where nobody understands his anguished incoherence.

They’re just three of the stories within a story performed by Shane O’Reilly through speech and sign language accompanied by subtitles. O’Reilly is a consummate performer, his body lithe and expressive, his voice perfectly modulated in the way that we have all so often been reminded is how we should speak to help deaf people to hear us.

The emotions ar perfectly pitched under Sophie Motley’s direction, ranging from mischievuous to distraught.

The sound is designed and the music composed and performed bu Jack Cawley, an amalgam that begins with the cautionary disco assault on the ears (mine were still painful the next morning), and takes us through the various sound levels experienced by deaf people.

Design is by Sarah Jane Shiels and there is production involvement from Arts and Disability Ireland. But Follow is first a piece of creative dramatic art. The “disability” element comes behind the creative thrust, which is as it should be in art.

****

In Follow, Shane O’Reilly, the son of deaf parents, provides a unique insight into life as deaf people experience it, using a combination of ordinary language and Irish sign language (ISL) that makes it possible for deaf people to view the show without the need for an interpreter. O’Reilly performs alone, using words, gestures, and signs hat become a whole dictionary of creative movement. And yet there’s plenty of humour, with no attempt at softening the problem of deafness, nor any attempt to patronise or sentimentalise it. He introduces sign language with the words that go with it.

ISL is not the brisk finger movement that you normally associate with deaf people; the movements are more a sort of mime. People can be named by a kind of visual rhyming slang. The boy’s name is Ned, the sign for him is a head resting on his hands, signifying, bed rhyming with Ned. There’s a recurring sequence where he’s watching an underwater programme on television. The plight of a deaf boy desperate to go to the toilet, standing in a queue of over 40 others, is both touching and very funny. O’Reilly is accompanied by a keyboard and guitar player and sound and lighting effects that lend great atmosphere. A genuinely absorbing piece of theatre.

No. 2: FARM

WillFred Theatre pulled off a rather remarkable achievement in their follow up to Follow, their Spirit of the Fringe winning exploration of what it means to be deaf in the world today. The land and those that keep it has been tilled over by artists throughout the years, given rise to some delicious theatrical crop, if what’s been plucked is often shown to be rotten at its core. But rarely has it been excavated so compassionately, with such grace and theatrical warmth as this beautiful, moving and rare work. Through song and dance, drink and disclosure, we are given the lay of the land, the natural mechanics and man-made maladies that manifest on everything from the tiniest of allotments to the most sprawling estates. An anthropological study, structured as show and tell, the sparking imagination behind each segment not only tickles you pink but pierces your psyche so that while you laugh at how the plight of the queen bee is presented-as a barbershop quartet, you feel the pain of her situation. Shane O’Reilly’s solo dance was spectacular to look at but you couldn’t miss the raging sorrow beneath it. And both the brutality and brilliance of bovine birth was confided to us by one of our fellow heard members, in a blood soaked hospital gown with a warm mug of tea. FARM showed us the messy, harsh and essential work done on the land but it had the good grace to show us the very human struggle.

*****

The farmer and the land have been vilified in Irish literature and in the Irish mind-set for long enough. WillFred Theatre try a more open minded tack with FARM, where docudrama meets art installation, with song, dance and livestock thrown in for delightful measure. The life expounded is less country ideal more gratifying slog which never turns its back on the reality of the situation. Business can be tough, the life can be lonely, the rot of globalisation and global warming laying waste to their best laid plans. But in this finely tuned production from director Sophie Motley, the darker moods are tempered with knowing, chin up humour. The passion of the producer-even on tiny allotments is infectious, informative and delivered with pleasing ease; the movement between segments perfectly placed so as to move us along but not leave the feeling behind; while the immense imagination of the whole affair captures the magic and miry relationship man has with nature.

A rousing dance that captures the satisfaction such hard work can reap is stunningly countered by a silent solo on solitary life; the life and times of a queen bee is lauded in an erotic, ukulele lead barbershop soon after we are treated to the horrors of bovine birth from a first time dam. While the cast meld human and animal elements into their performances and choreography so beautifully, the whole piece elicits a sense of childlike wonder from the viewer – something that is very hard to pull off without cheapening the sense of raw feeling that is essentially captured here.

FARM’s greatest achievement though is its ability to make your soul sing and yearn at the same time. It makes us pine for the simple pleasures, the reality that impedes them and the almost perfect theatrical experience that it embodies.