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dublin / arts and media Sunday September 19, 2004 21:11 by ec
Spacecraft’s previous production to ‘Bleeding the System’ - ‘The Hypothetical Death of an Activist’ - was a localised to Dublin re-write of Italian Playwright Dario Fo’s celebrated farce ‘The Accidental Death of an Anarchist’. It was set in a City Centre Garda Station in the immediate aftermath of the events of 6th May 2002 when a Reclaim the Streets protest had been greeted by a spectacular police riot on Dame Street. The police riot was filmed and subsequently widely broadcast on TV to a stunned Nation. The play was at the time, and still remains, the sole theatrical representation and affirmation of the existence of a growing political culture in Ireland which identifies with the radically internationalist counter-globalisation movement. The Fo re-write by Les Shine and Felix Ford set a high bar for Spacecraft for future productions as it was that rare beast in the theatre – a knockabout farce with satirical teeth which had the audience in no uncertain terms rolling in the aisles. It was obvious to anyone who saw it that the Spacecraft gang had hit on a novel and productive update of a surreal and satirical mode in Irish Comedy rooted in the glory days of ‘Halls Pictorial Weekly’ when broad and topical mockery of the institutions of Irish Life was not only tolerated but expected. The only question at the time was how Spacecraft would manage to live up to the expectations generated by such a successful and timely re-write of an iconic piece of theatre. Well they have managed it in spades in the form of an original farce by Fergal Leddy set this time around May 2004 as the country gears up for a referendum on citizenship and awaits its tabloid guaranteed (seconded by McDowell) destruction at the combined hands of the WOMBLES and ‘hordes’ of pregnant immigrant mothers. I had the pleasure of catching ‘Bleeding the System’ at the final night of it’s trial run at the Convergence Festival. It opens with the recounting of an incident witnessed by the dramatist on Dame Street in Dublin in April 2003 in the course of which a Uniformed Guard without further comment snatched a bunch of roses from an immigrant street trader and drove off. Fergal wrote an account of his attemts to lodge a complaint with the Gardai about the incident for Indymedia Ireland at the time. The play, with this symptomatic incident as a starting point, takes the form of a rapid-fire fictional recounting of the onward progress of the bunch of flowers, the Flowerseller and the Garda and is set against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger reaching towards some kind of grim societal climax of empty, property obsessed, misanthropic and insular grandiosity. These elements orbit and eventually spectacularly collide around Bean - the unlikely anti-hero of Bleeding the System. He is a failed impotent Irish Businessman of dubious repute with Nietzschean delusions of an imminent rebirth into grandeur, omnipotence and riches. . . .
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