●●●●●
Dylan Coburn Gray
Tiger Dublin Fringe
The New Theatre
At one point during the production of Briseis After The Black, Dylan Coburn Gray asks his volunteer actor (on the night I attended, the brilliant Amy Conroy) to play a tape – any tape – from a small pile arranged onstage. Both the audience and guest performer are held equally in thrall, totally ignorant of what music is going to play, and of what its significance may be. This is just one way in which this intensely clever production makes a point about the viscerality and unpredictability of live performance, amid its treatment of the nebulous nature of agency, and notions of ignorance and permission. He also asks Conroy “Can I take your photograph?” – a question which introduces the idea of consent, which is interrogated throughout the show. The set is furnished sparsely, only a few functional props employed. Most notably, there is a board upon which he pins the polaroid photograph which he has just taken, where it joins the pictures of the other guest performers. His guest is asked each night to read from a script that she has never seen before, and follow its stage directions and instructions for the duration of the performance.
The performance in question is a show about several different things all at once, taking as one of its main sources the overlooked play Briseis by the unknown playwright Maria Black (who is evasively absent from online sources and criticism), written just before her purported suicide in the 1990s. It concerns itself with the female character Briseis who is introduced at the start of the Iliad to motivate Achilles, only to disappear without further mention. The show also presents Black as a character, examining her experience of writing the play and subsequent suicide, aligning her story with the oft tragic intersection of life and art, through a variety of perspectives prompting searing questions about female agency and representation. Yet, from the moment that Coburn Gray tells us that “this is the prologue” with a wry smile, we are ushered into a sphere where what is being shown and said onstage is not merely presented, but relentlessly explained and examined, where perspectives are played with and played out in front of us. Intensely theoretical references are delivered with a knowing look – the show acknowledges its own analysis within the scope of its performance. Bravely, it wilfully denies itself any sort of artifice to hide behind. This is theatre that is not just aware of itself, but aware that it is aware of itself.
Coburn Gray is an excellent mediator. He guides his guest performer with calm assurance through the script, which is literally embedded in the set – first read from a folder and series of texts, and then written on tshirts, mugs, even unscrolling from within a packet of cornflakes. This playfully calls attention to the functionality of the props – their presence is literally required so that the show can continue – as well as playing a banal yet significant role in addressing the life of Black herself. The cleverness of the concept aside, the script is masterfully constructed. The words are carefully chosen, fragmentary and spliced together at moments, yet allowed to flow in a poetic tumble at others; some borrowed, some original, all affecting.
Everything in the show is unquestionably bare, relentlessly interrogated to the point where what we see and hear ceases to be merely a performance and becomes something arguably transcendent, propelled onwards by the probing questions it asks of itself. Dense and deployed with a masterful control, Briseis After The Black is a show quite without precedent that resolutely defies categorisation, and demands of us that we consider fundamental questions about female agency and representation in life, as well as in art.
