It’s almost too easy. Vulgar as it may seem, The Shitstorm, the title of Simon Doyle’s new play, directed by Maeve Stone and currently running in the Peacock as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, is a highly accurate description of its contents.
The play is a contemporary reimagining of (or a possible sequel/prequel to) William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It swings between the ridiculous and the sublime, frequently stopping short of flat-out awkward along the way.
Shakespeare’s original play centres on Prospero, a learned duke and sorcerer, who is usurped by his brother and forced to flee his homeland with his daughter, Miranda. Finding refuge on an abandoned island he proceeds to enslave a sprite named Ariel and the island’s former ruler, a creature called Caliban. Doyle and Stone’s adaptation centres on Prospero, apparently in the throes of a mid-life crisis, and the burgeoning romance between his teenage daughter and a gormless Caliban. It takes its starting point from Prospero’s decision to renounce his magical powers and “drown my book”, an event which occurs at the conclusion of the Bard’s original.
Like Shakespeare’s best plays, Doyle’s script veers between the everyday and the elevated, albeit with uneven success. His prose passages are banal to the point of plodding – scenes progress by increments – and although the more symbolic passages prove engaging, there are occasional stumbling blocks. Does air really dissipate? Do things not dissipate into air? It also appears as if Maeve Stone does not trust these more poetic passages to hold our attention and insists on providing sound, lighting and movement to accompany them. This ultimately either distracts from the text or unnecessarily re-emphasises its content.
The most effective marriage of music and text comes in the final fifteen minutes of the show, during which, for reasons I can only guess at, Miranda fronts a punk band inspired by the elements. It is in this section that Stone, Doyle and their sound team – Morgan Buckley and Frank Sweeney have composed a thrilling pastiche score and Paul Maguire provides some of the crispest sound design I have ever heard – unintentionally vindicate the principle that music should be paired with lyrics, the simplicity, rhythm and rhyme of which are lifted by the music, instead of obfuscating it, as occurs when passages of free verse are underscored.
Fionnuala Gygax, as Miranda, gives a very engaging vocal performance in this last section, which inexplicably concludes the show, although, possibly due to the script, her characterisation of Miranda never moves beyond a caricature of a stroppy teenager. Pom Boyd is landed with the paper-thin role of Ariel, while Ian Toner, as Caliban, comes closest to genuine psychological depth, mostly thanks to a nice monologue about Prospero’s deposition of his mother as the island’s ruler. He is also most successful at navigating the script’s tricky humour, which varies between banal crudeness and too-cleverness, rarely being actually funny. I wonder, however, if this intentional: The Tempest is a “problem play”, one of Shakespeare’s works which sits uneasily between comedy and tragedy.
Uneasy is the best word to describe The Shitstorm, which cannot decide what it is, or if it can, seems reluctant to let the audience know what that might be. Personally, I am clinging to a suspicion that it is about the possibility of reinventing experience through language, although my basis for that suspicion is tenuous. But, as they say, any port in a storm.
