GALWAY YOUTH Theatre grace this year’s Cúirt with a strong double-bill of works from America’s Neil LaBute (Autobahn ) and Germany’s Marius Von Mayenburg (The Ugly One ).
The term ‘double bill’ might even be an understatement as Autobahn comprises four short plays that all take place in a car. Not around a car, or by a car, but in a car. This site-specific staging means the audience will literally enter the world of the play as, from the car’s rear seat, they witness a variety of funny, moving, and intense relationships.
GYT presented Autobahn in the arts festival a few years ago but this staging is not a revival of that earlier production. LaBute’s original play consists of seven short two-handers and where GYT’s earlier staging featured four of those, this time they are staging the three other vignettes in the series along with one they performed before.
The line-up in this year’s production features ‘Merge’, ‘Apologies’, the eponymous ‘Autobahn’, and ‘Bench Seat’ (the one survivor from GYT’s earlier Artsfest show ). Each playlet enacts a close-up, intimate, drama of relationships in crisis, and the audience perspective of eavesdropping from the back seat of the car makes for real emotional immediacy.
‘Merge’ portrays a boyfriend’s interrogation of his girlfriend’s suspicious work trip; ‘Apologies’ sees a husband struggling to apologise to his wife; ‘Bench Seat’ is about a dating session gone awry, and ‘Autobahn’ focuses on a couple coming to terms with the guilt of returning a foster child.
Two performances of Autobahn take place at Nuns Island Theatre from this Monday to Sunday at 5pm and 8.30pm. Due to its site specific nature there are only 12 places per show.
The Ugly One marks the Irish premiere of a play by one of Europe’s rising stars of theatre. Born in Munich in 1972, Marius Von Mayenburg is a playwright, translator, and dramaturg whose plays are garnering a growing international audience, winning productions throughout Europe and beyond.
The Ugly One is a clever, thought-provoking work on the subjects of appearance and identity. Its central character, Lette, thinks he’s normal, but he’s wrong.
His personal marketability is dire and his wife thinks he’s unspeakably ugly. Banned from presenting his newly invented plug at a Swiss convention, the mild-mannered Lette takes matters into his own hands with some transformative aesthetic surgery.
The operation is a raging success – after the bandages come off women want him, men want to be him, and the surgeon’s even thinking of cloning him. It is not long, though, before Lette learns there might be such a thing as too beautiful.
The Ugly One is a painfully hilarious and disturbing satire on the contemporary obsession with appearance. In the play’s first English production, at the Royal Court in 2007, a cast of four played multiple roles, but Galway Youth Theatre’s staging features a core cast of nine, plus a chorus and, for good measure, a pianist.
The Ugly One also runs from this Monday to Sunday at 8pm in the Nuns Island Theatre. Both productions are directed by Andrew Flynn.
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
