Blissfully blinded by faith

The Well of the Saintsdir Michael Levy22 – 26 NovemberBurton TaylorIn a tableau reminiscent of the plays of a later, bleaker Irish dramatist, two blind beggars sit at a crossroads, stripping rushes and squabbling. Mary (Amy Tatton-Brown) and Martin Doul (Alexander Stewart), the main protagonists of JM Synge’s The Well of the Saints, inhabit a dream world in which, gently deluded by the local villagers, both imagine the other to be matchlessly beautiful. Their life is one of idleness and isolation until a passing saint grants them the power of sight, but though they are now able to join the community, they find the life of toil harsh and disillusioning.Vision brings suffering and sin: Martin’s first sight is the saint’s bleeding feet, and his eyes lead him away from his unlovely wife and into lascivious pursuit of the young and beautiful Molly Byrne. Aas their sight dims once more, the couple retreat from reality, until the chance to regain their sight is offered once again. Hhowever, as the Ddouls resist a second curing, the villagers turn from indulgence to censure, with Vicky Orton as the saint modulating alarmingly between saintly calm and stinging vituperation. Iin condemning the couple, the communitydemonstrates its own ‘wilful blindness’ to the desires and needs of the individual, unwilling to recognise that some may not belong to the world of ‘working and sweating’.First performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1905, Ssynge’s dark tragicomedyuses the symbolism of sight and blindness to explore the boundaries between illusion and reality, sight and insight, and the place of those who chose neither to toil nor spin. The play’s thematic stress on the uneasy struggle between real and imaginary worlds is reflected in the rich rhythms of the dialect which characters speak, blending homely country speech with the language of folklore and legend. The Beckettian savour to the couple’s blind bickering is sweetened by their comic mutual preening and the rich, mythopoeic idiom of their speech, which creates worlds of sound to rival the seen.However, myth is both friend and betrayer. Iits role as both comforting fantasy and cruel deception is one of the play’s main concerns: the villagers’ pranks take on a darker hue when the Ddouls’ illusions about each other are cruelly shattered, as Levy mutes the text’s comic elements in order to draw out the tragic potential of the first act’s apparently innocent deceptions. Hhowever, after the trauma of the visual, we are reminded in the last act of the regenerative power of myth-making, as it becomes a tool for the tentative reconstruction of the couple’s fractured intimacy. Ttatton-Brown and Sstewart express the couple’s awkward affection with sensitivity. they build an increasingly vivid aural landscape, gesture and movement become more fluid and expansive, their bodies move closer, and Sstewart’s agitated, ankle-clutching rocking subsides.The sparse, impressionistic staging of the production aids the sense of a slightly surreal dislocation which the drama cultivates: this is play as parable, and the symbolism often swamps the characters on stage. Levy’s decision to bring Ssynge to the Oxford stage is a bold move, and a definite departure from the standard repertoire of Wwilde, Ccoward, Mamet, Sstoppard et al. The Wwell of the Ssaints denies us that happy grounding in reality we expect from these dramatists, as characters inhabit a world of emblem and sign, in which an idealised peasantry speak a language infused with the rhythms and motifs of folktale and song.Though amplified sounds of birdsong and brook try to involve the audience in the experience of the blind protagonists, when the action has concluded, we are still left grasping after the play’s final meaning, with an uneasy awareness that the blindness we are experiencing penetrates beyond the eye. Levy’s production may be strange, but it is a strong and thought-provokingenchantment nonetheless.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005