| A Look-back and Guide |
Kaite O'Reilly |
| Writer, Translator, Dramaturg , Theatre in Wales and International , October 27, 2023 |
Kaite O'Reilly is a protean presence in Wales' performance history. The reviews below cover her own work and collaborative work with the Llanarth Group. 23 December 2020: “The Beauty Parade” “A collaboration between O’Reilly (who directs, alongside Phillip Zarrilli), composer Rebecca Applin and Sophie Stone, one of Britain’s most prominent Deaf actors, The Beauty Parade aims to tell the story using a theatrical language which takes its lead from Stone’s expertise in extending sign language into the realm of choreography. The programme notes tell us that Applin composed her score using Stone’s visual “translations” of O’Reilly’s text as a starting-point. “Even before the action begins, one is struck by Simon Wells’s imposing set, which is dominated by a large, sloping, military style hut, which operates as a changing room, as well as a vantage point. Ash Woodward’s video backdrop integrates aesthetically ambitious subtitles alongside ominous skies dotted with parachutes. The sound (Hedd Davies) and lighting design (Lee Curran) is equally doomy.” * * * * 09 September 2019: “The Persians” in publication “The evening event is to launch her version of Aeschylus’s Persians now published by Fair Acre Press. It has a reputation behind it. It won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Works in Poetry. This site praised the vigour and directness of the words that underlay Mike Pearson's production for National Theatre Wales. Of the chorus of four men: “In their agony of chest-beating, rage and lament Mike Pearson raises their combined voice, movement and gesture into a realm of sublime Dionysiac theatricality. “ “A poet is best fit to offer judgement; from Gillian Clarke “the language is modern, the word-music timeless...a breathless song of mourning that insists on being heard. O’Reilly has overlaid Aeschylus’ timeless tragedy with a distinctively contemporary howl of pain”, she wrote for New Welsh Review, “Kaite O’Reilly chooses the iambic drumbeat of English blank verse, and a long-lined lyricism that befits an epic lament, the rhythms ring with echoes of Elizabethan drama.” * * * * 27 August 2019: Llanarth Group Nominated for 2019 James Tait Black Drama Prize “Kaite O’Reilly and Phillip B Zarrilli’s thought-provoking,one-woman piece promotes inclusivity in the arts and is written from a radical disability perspective. It challenges Shakespeare’s representation of the disabled monarch Richard iii, satirising the non-disabled actors who have played the part in the past.” * * * * 08 March 2019: “Peeling” Taking Flight Theatre Company “With this powerful production Taking Flight Theatre and its Artistic Director, Elise Davison have moved from their boisterous open-air productions of plays by Shakespeare to a venue based production of an award winning play by acclaimed writer Kaite O’Reilly. Davison has risen to the challenge and given us a highly watchable theatre experience. “On a stage nearby a production of The Trojan Women is roaring away. The Chorus: Alfa, Beaty and Coral have given up trying to reach the stage because they feel restricted by their enormous, multi-layered costumes. This is very much to our benefit as the sharp creative imagination of Kaite O’Reilly gives us an evening of great delight as our three recalcitrants swap tales of life, sometimes with great humour but often with deeply felt passion.” * * * * 11 September 2018: “Suddenly I Disappear” “This latest work gives us all this but much more. It is a strong shout from a representative set of people asserting that they are in no way disabled by their disability and demanding that we look at them without our long suffering sighs. “Initially we seem to be invited into a dream-like space. In the half-light to some haunting cello music the people in the play walk slowly and seemingly aimlessly around the stage. At times their shadows appear in silhouette on a white screen at the back of the stage. * * * * 6 September 2018: “Suddenly I Disappear” ““What is normal? What is normal for you, isn’t normal for me. We’re so limited by these ideas of normalcy, what it is to be human...There are so few good parts for people who are different, whose bodies don’t conform.” “...I took people’s hopes, fears, thoughts, lived experiences, and used them to inform a fictional monologue. There are lots of different opinions: some people say ‘I’m not disabled, I don’t want to be called disabled’ because they may have a very different perspective from someone like me.” * * * * 9 March 2018: “richard III redux or Sara Beer [is/not] richard III” “The very large, throne-like chair blazed in scarlet light that we see as we enter the auditorium does indicate we might be in the presence of royalty. But what we get from this excellent exploration of reality/nonreality throughout Kaite O’Reilly’s well crafted script is much more down to earth. Beer comes on stage, gives us a wide smile, sits on the edge of the big chair and with the first of many cups of tea that she continues to drink throughout the play, tells us that as a young girl in Cardiganshire she always wanted to be an actor, although it was still called actress in those days. Her mam had other ideas and told her not to be so twp." * * * * 12 October 2016: “Told by the Wind” “A man and a woman occupy Small World's central space along with a pair of chairs, a small desk and a lowered window, all in a common distressed condition of paint. There are words but not many, ten minutes in a show of an hour. If multi-cast drama is akin to the colour and sweep of a Rubens or a Tintoretto this is like gazing into the limitless depth of a Samuel Palmer. It comes without music so that the brushing of a fern on wood takes on a quality of audibility, and significance, unrealisable in the outer world. “With sound and action honed to an essence the result asks for a heightened attention. That required quality of attentiveness shared across an audience is not just salutary in itself but nudges into zones of philosophical enquiry. Attention was a cornerstone for the thought of Simone Weil- “the virtue of humility is nothing more or less than the power of attention.” Small gestures that say nothing explicitly assume a weight of signification; eternity indeed is to be found in a grain of sand.” * * * * 09 March 2015: “Playing the Maids”Gaitkrash Co, Theatre P’yut & Llanarth Group” “Zarrilli, a performance scholar of depth and distinction, is author-contributor to Routledge’s magisterial “Theatre Histories” (2006, first edition). The artistic underpinning and justification may be found across its pages. A fellow author points to the fineness of the line that separates cultural hybridity from a vague diluted cultural tourism. “Playing the Maids” assaults familiar criteria of aesthetic judgement, in particular the emphatic beat of rhythm and propulsion The viewer has to allow the artists their own pace and the subtly shifting changes in sound and action. As for the clash of language and the moments of meta-theatricality they carry themselves with conviction. “Playing the Maids” transcends the genre of purely exploratory theatre,for two specific reasons.” * * * * 22 February 2015: “Playing the Maids”Gaitkrash Co, Theatre P’yut & Llanarth Group “The piece situates itself in a metatheatrical limbo: one minute we have one of Genet’s maids in front of us onstage, the next the same actor speaks her own name as stated very clearly in the programme on our laps. These transitions, from one reality to another, are not always obvious, leaving the audience in a constant state of questioning who exactly they are looking at, at any one moment. The way the company play with this ambiguity is inspired and had me (at times, literally) on the edge of my seat and still has me questioning the power dynamics present within the piece and, now, wider society.” * * * * 07 August 2012, 05 August 2012, 03 August 2012: “In Water I’m Weightless” "A complete feast for the senses this mash up of speech, sign language, dance, projection and music was sometimes frustratingly chaotic but always engrossing. To see disabled performers such as Nick Phillips dance to punk music with more energy than a hyperactive five year old dosed up on sugar completely shattered any prior expectations. "The fragmented monologues and conversations gave quick glimpses into what it is like to live with a disability or impairment. A section entitled “Things I’ve lip read” added a touch of dark humour, “At least she won’t nag”, “It’s a shame more women aren’t like her.” Whilst this highlighted a lot of major issues and concerns without ever asking for sympathy – quite the opposite in fact – I wanted more narrative, to dig that little bit deeper.” * * * * 20 December 2010: On Translating Aeschylus “The process was dauntingly thorough. “...through my close reading of 23 translations, made across three centuries, I like to think I have a sense of the bass line – the original ‘voice’: These 23 voices were a composite passage to the work but also a sense of the dramatist. “Aeschylus, poet, philosopher, soldier-playwright, anti-warmonger, humanist...could have written a swaggering tale of victory, of the battle-prowess Greeks and their cunning and sacrifice to protect this early, emerging experiment in democracy. He could have written a xenophobic pageant of blood-lust and warriors, filled with self-congratulatory jingoism and gloating over the dead. Instead he chose to write a powerful anti-war play which painfully depicts the waste and agonies of conflict – the pity of war - written with fire and dignity from the point of view of the defeated” * * * * 27 August 2010: “The Persians”. Translator for National Theatre Wales. “Her language varies greatly from the two most recent published translations. One is composed in a workaday, sometimes lacklustre prose and the other is by a classicist who naturally seeks to reproduce the rhythms of the iambic pentameter. Kaite O’Reilly is a writer for theatre. As with Tom Paulin doing Euripides earlier this year the six-stress line simply is not our language. In the main her language is delivered in urgent four and five syllable rhythms. Sian Thomas’ Atossa is a crag-like presence which dominates the action. But she has been given a language that is as commanding as her performance.” * * * * 02 February 2010: The Llanarth Collective“Told by the Wind” “Stripped of most elements we associate with drama, this intense meditation in movement revels in stillness. It's so still at times, you worry that scratching your head or crossing your legs will be audible to all. Performers Jo Shapland and Phillip Zarrilli, with writer Kaite O'Reilly, draw on Asian aesthetics, string theory and the Japanese theatre of quietude to present something that is beyond linear narrative, character and gripping plot twists.” * * * * 09 April 2008: “The Almond and the Seahorse” “What marks out Kate O’Reilly’s writing is the skill with which she sets up deep echoes and resonances so that her play vaults beyond its subject of Traumatic Brain Injury. The parallel story of two victims and those left behind is heartbreaking, but the play moves it into wider questions of culture and identity. “She shows how love requires more than an atmosphere of compassion in which to breathe. Archaeologist Sarah is exasperated by husband Joe. He has become kind, well-meaning, likeable and she yearns for the lost grit in his personality. Twenty years the carer of Gwennan, husband Tom has read his Oliver Sacks and Gerald Edelman. What is a personality, he wonders, if it can be changed so abruptly? If we are “ just electrical impulses, carbon matter” what are we worth? In a landscape bereft of divinity, where bodies are burned but refrigerators are interred, the mind sustains itself on illusion. “The poor brain thinks it’s a soul” he says “it thinks it’s immortal.” * * * * 20 March 2008: “The Almond and the Seahorse” “Impressively researched, documentary in style, with the all too human heartaches exposed, this gritty, well-paced staging by Phillip Zarrilli needs no added theatricality to get across the sheer hurt and despair experienced. Former plumber Joe (Celyn Jones) had a brain tumour removed two years ago, which has also taken away his short-term memory. His archaeologist partner Sarah (Nia Gwynne) strives to cope while holding down her demanding job. Pregnant Gwennan (Olwen Rees) crashed headfirst through a car windscreen 20 years ago with devastating results.£ * * * * 9th March 2008: “The Almond and the Seahorse” “The Almond and the Seahorse are colloquial terms for the parts of the brain responsible for memory, emotion and personality traits. Both Gwennan and Joe have suffered Traumatic Brain Injury. All Gwennan’s recent memories have been obliterated. She remains, to herself, an attractive young twenty year old cello player, her husband Tom she sees looking old and unattractive, she has cut him out of her life. No one should let the misfortune in the play deter them. The clarity in the writing and the wonderful way in which the actors are able to enter so completely into their characters is what real theatre is all about.” * * * * 18 September 2003: “Peeling” “There are so many moments of tenderness, great humanity and delicacy. Towards the end of the play, when the girls are packing away their great costumes, Beaty played with beauty and magnificence by Lizzie Smoczkiewicz takes some fairy lights that have been hanging on the metal frame under Coral’s dress. She drapes them across the three dress frames, empties Coral’s bag of knitting and pegs out the small, white clothes that she has knitted for the baby she can never have.” * * * * 23 August 2003: “Peeling” “Peeling is not a perfect piece of theatre; some of the video images of war thrown up behind the actors have become empty visual clichés, and the script’s jokey introductory phase - all bitchy thespian back-biting - lasts far too long. But, given a spookily eye-catching design, a superb central performance from Sophie Partridge as pregnant Coral, coupled with the sheer strength and radicalism of the original idea behind the play, Peeling survives some shaky moments to become a brave, moving and - for a whole generation of women - quietly ground-breaking show.” * * * * 10 October 2002: “Speaking Stones” “If you want to see the full range of work by Wales’ cutting-edge playwrights, you’re probably used to going a bit further afield. This time you would have to go a little further than usual: Graz in Austria, to be precise. Here, Kaite O’Reilly has been collaborating with American Director Phillip Zarrilli (who also has a studio in West Wales)and the Austrian company Theatre Asou to create Speaking Stones. It is a montage of images, voices and fragments which describes its subject as “that which comes after…” It requires the full journey of the evening to understand what this means.” * * * * 06 April 2002: “Peeling” “O'Reilly's drama, given a striking and cleverly judged production by Jenny Sealey for Graeae Theatre Company that integrates sign language and surtitles into its very fabric, occasionally seems to hark back to the campaigning feminist theatre of a couple of decades ago. But it is saved from being dated or over-worthy by the sheer quality of the writing, its angry wit ("Crippling up. The 21st century's answer to blacking up") and its mixture of the snug and the epic, recipes and genocide.” * * * * 05 April 2002: “Peeling” “Violent imagery of planes, guns, bodies on the back-screen emphasises this, but not as effectively as O’Reilly’s dialogue, which sometimes has the punch and spareness of the late Sarah Kane’s suicide-play, 4:48 Psychosis. “Rape as a war tactic, babies’ heads split open like conkers,” the cast laments. “Teeth bared, eyes rolled back, mama’s precious, future joy, gone forever,” they add. “Women, children, war,” they repeat.” * * * * 18 February 2002: “Peeling” “The off-stage play (The Trojan Women) tells the story of women who dance with their children to their mutual deaths rather than be captured by enemies – the story has been updated to bring in references to modern warfare. In O'Reilly's PEELING play the women gossip, chat, bitch, row and even make soup. Gradually the themes of on-stage and off-stage plays blur and merge, the women are revealed from their costumes and their true lives and stories are stripped of their camouflage. The metal skeletons of their huge dresses become cages . . . . At regular moments during all this fleeting, haunting images appear on a huge screen.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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