MythFest 3-7 June 2015 – Trinity College Dublin

I went to all nine performances. Here are the highlights.
Click on photos to enlarge.

Homer’s Odyssey
Penelope is leaving one of some 3000 voice messages to Odysseus asking when he is coming home. Blind Homer seated on right.

Ahoy! Tales of Piracy
Henry Morgan, Anne Bonney, Granuaile, Black Bart and Captain Kidd tell their stories to decide who will replace Blackbeard as captain.

The Unquiet Hour: A Tale of Fairies
Too much talk, too little action, not much story, but salvageable with heavy editing, distilling 50 minutes into 15, or maybe 20 with the addition of humour. Some clever, poetic lines but only two laughs. One: “You are the most beautiful person in the world.” “How do you know?” “I checked.” The gold-clad actress has marvelous facial expressions.

The Brown Bull of Cooley
A slapstick Cliff’s Notes summary of the great Irish epic the Cattle Raid of Cooley. The rock guitar player on the left is the Brown Bull, the white-draped figure on the right is an impressive opera singer as the White-horned Bull. In the epic they fight and kill each other. Here they duel musically. Young kids loved it.

Tales from the Shadowlands: Fairytales
One at a time, these four women sat in a chair in semi-darkness next to the screen and told a story with a book on their lap (why the book?), while the others manipulated shadow figures behind the screen. The Juniper Tree is on the screen here. The Happy Prince figure stands out against the white blouse on the left. The stories were The Red Shoes (Hans Christian Andersen), The Happy Prince (Oscar Wilde, but they changed the angels at the end of the story to fairies), The Juniper Tree (Grimm), and William the Curious, Knight of the Water Lilies (Charles Santore). The tellers were nearly invisible, giving precedence to the story. Simple, straightforward, cleverly done.