Self Accusation - Article
Taking a look back over Bedrock’s body of work we turn to 2005. Using culture, Amnesty International approached Bedrock and Fishamble to help highlight its Women’s Day Festival.
Find out how Bedrock responded to the brief in Belinda McKeon’s article in the Irish Times [Wednesday, March 2, 2005].
In a rehearsal room high above Dublin’s Dame Street, a young woman is talking of terrible things… “I just wanted to be healed.”
Meanwhile across the city, the artistic director [Jimmy Fay] of another theatre company can almost see himself exhale, so icy is the rehearsal room in which he is putting two performers through the paces of a play by one of the most important writers of post-war Europe, the Austrian Peter Handke. Artist Amanda Coogan and playwright Alex Johnston are finding their way through the allegations and incriminations that comprise Self-Accusation.
Written for two performers, one male and one female, the narrative is a long explosion of responsibility and regret which it is never clearly indicated who is meant to be speaking, and why. The apparently ceaseless crimes of which the play throws in the face of its protagonists range from the unforgivable to the mundane: “I dealt in uninspected meat”, and on the lesser failings of climbing mountains with the wrong shoes, of failing to wash fresh fruit, or failing to shake bottles of hair lotion before use.
From self-revelation to Self-Accusation, the business of speaking out demands courage. Fishamble and Bedrock are companies which have both, at various stages in their histories, produced work which epitomises such courage, either stylistically or thematically – think Bedrock’s production last year of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away or the “Theatre of Cruelty” season which it hosted in 1997. Or think Fishamble’s production of the first play by Mark O’Rowe, From Both Hips in the same year.
Approached by the Irish branch of Amnesty International to contribute new productions to the cultural strand of its International Women’s Day Festival…both companies committed themselves without hesitation. The only question for Culleton and Bedrock’s Jimmy Fay was what to produce; save for requesting that the work touch, in some way, on the issues raised by the festival in question, Amnesty had left them with a completely open brief.
“We didn’t want to do a play that was about violence against women,” says Fay, and Johnstone agrees: “But there are actually terribly violent images within the piece, which can be read into it or not. It is a thought provoking kind of poetic. It’s a play not about the guilty or the innocent. But about wresting with guilt itself, about why this is going on. I think that’s what’s interesting about doing this for Amnesty.”
