11/04/2016
See below Review
LIAM MURPHY
Member of INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF THEATRE CRITICS BOARD
WATERFORD
ARTS & THEATRE REVIEWS
PLAY FOR VOICES REVIEW The Muse & Mister Yeats
As part of a fundraiser for Waterford Hospice, Stephanie Taheny and Joan Johnston organised a performance by Curlew Theatre Company in The Garden Room at Waterford Museum. Curlew, a Connemara company who specialise in 'festival style' performances and the poet Eamon Grennan, adapted and directed The Muse & Mister Yeats. This 'play for voices' had a simple setting of three chairs and a collection of scarves that allowed Tergolin Knowland to become the seven women who inspired W B Yeats, romantically and poetically. Her partner Sean Coyne played the role of interviewer/commentator.
This was a beautiful hour long performance full of lyrical and expressive love poems as these women, inspired, aroused and enthused the idealistic, eccentric, dreamer who wrote plays and poems that earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Eamonn Grennan is a respected academic and Gallery Press published author and his love, and deep understanding of the creative drive brought so much to this treat, this gem of an evening. An evening, that resonated with the craziness of a seeker of 'the silver apples of the Moon, and the golden apples of the Sun'. Yeats voice intoned 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and Knowland sang 'Down By The Sally Gardens'. It was fun to experience the 'young and foolish' poet who was fascinated by magic, mysticism, mythology, fairies, and the occult. He sought love as a cerebral thing at first, but in later life had sexual prowess enhancing surgery with a Steinach operation to boost testosterone levels.
In charming fashion, we met Maud Gonne his 'eternal' muse; Olivia Shakespear, the novelist who initiated him into physical intimacy in London when he was in his early thirties. Yeats proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult; had an intense relationship with Florence Farr (actress), and Mabel Dickinson (physical therapist). He married a member of the occult group Order of the Golden Dawn, George Hyde-Lees and she practised 'automatic writing' as the poet 'dictated' over 3,000 pages from the 'spirit world'. Crazy poet indeed, who bought a new carpet for the stairs after he won the Nobel Prize in 1923.
Later in his life, he had a romantic liaison with the le***an poet Lady Dorothy Wellesley (Gerald), lover of Vita Sackville-West. He even took digitalis to stimulate his heart with the drama critic Edith Shackleton-Heald.
Tegolin Knowland was radiant and believable as the weird, wild and wonderful women.
Here's hoping Curlew Theatre will come this way again.
€2,000.00 was raised for Waterford Hospice.
Thank you the Johnson family for putting up with us over the weekend and to Brigid Quinn for the lovely breakfast.
