![]() The next version of this play will hopefully return to a local stage with a full production. Watching this play was a very rewarding way of spending this afternoon and a bit of a treat to round off three and a half weeks of dipping into the Belfast International Arts Festival. There’s a depth to the writing which even includes a great quote from the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, citing Tin Woodman’s conclusion that “once I had brains, and a heart also so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart”.īloodlines by Vittoria Cafolla was one of the four scripts chosen from the seventy or more submitted to the New Playwrights Programme. The dynamic between the two protagonists in each of the two eras and the elements of symmetry between them were well observed and well performed. Director Emma Jordan allowed some simple props to add life to the relatively static read-through and wisely avoided the use of canned sound effects. While the format of a read-through (combined with good breathing technique) easily permits rapid transitions, keeping up the energetic scene changes could be an opportunity for very inventive costumes and set design. Condron captures well the political and pseudo-religious conservatism which Cafolla has written, plunging the character into a spin that lashes out and abuses those who would have maybe stopped to give him a second chance.ĭecisions being proposed for a young destitute mother (played by Adele Gribbon) push Margaret over the edge and trigger the exploration of how the wider vision of the suffragette movement has never been fully delivered.Īs the scenes ping pong between the two timelines, Mary Lindsay impresses as she switches from the violent delivery in a regional accent to the calm more posh tones of the unmarried well-to-do city professional. The modern day scenes are lighter in tone and support more humour than the historically rich pre-war passages. ![]() Sister Phil (Nicky Harley) is a genetics student whose own lesbian love life is caught up in the claustrophobic village and isn’t sure whether she can stick staying under the local spotlight. ![]() But after a failed relationship with a disappointing DUP councillor (Michael Condron) from another tradition, she’s picky about who might father her child, even remotely by IVF. Meanwhile in modern-day Tyrone, a vegetarian butcher Annie Baxter (Mary Lindsay) seeks an injection of high quality sperm into her ovaries. Dan Gordon plays the snobby Bishop Charles Frederick D’Arcy who presides over the Society and supports the segregation and institutionalisation of those deemed “mentally deficient”. But this runaway thinking and its oppressive conclusions about controlling the population are challenged by Margaret Boyle (Mary Lindsay) who works with the city’s poor and is becoming involved with the Suffragette movement. On stage, Dr James Lindsay (played by Michael Condron) introduces the latest paper by Charles Darwin’s son Leonard. Vittoria Cafolla’s new play Bloodlines cleverly twists together two situations a century apart that question the male regulation over women’s fertility, sexuality and powers of decision-making, and asks how much Northern Ireland has really changed?īack in 1911 the Belfast Eugenics Society really were debating whether the city could breeding itself away from the growing “feeble minded and subnormal” working classes. The creepy patterns of speech are echoed in the disturbing music tracks – deep ratchety and distressed strings, the ever-rising sound of a kettle boiling, soaring religious voices – that created a sense of unease in my chest that lingered a few hours after leaving the cinema. The opening hour sets up the rules of the game and the board on which the socially awkward Murphy family must play the second half sees what happens when they apply themselves to the dilemma at hand. Like The Lobster, director Yorgos Lanthimos has again created a world in which norms are turned on their head, and a film in which there are two distinctive parts. Medical experts pore over the growing number of patients without realising that they need access to supernatural diagnostics rather than MRI scanners. Gradually Steven becomes aware of the bind in which his family have become trapped. A curse – maybe even a series of plagues – is revealed when the couple’s son Bob (Sunny Suljic) wakes up one morning and has lost the power of his legs.
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