Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Sanctuary Lamp at Riverbank Arts Centre

A few of us went to see "The Sanctuary Lamp" in Riverbank Arts Centre last night.
The production was directed by Tom Murphy and produced by b*spoke Theatre Company.

I really didn't like the first half, and the second half was really excellent. So overall, I really liked it. The set and lighting was really beautiful. The sound was excellent, they created a reverb to make it sound like a Church and it really gave the production a sense of space in a relatively small performance space. All of the performances were good, a special note has to go to Declan Conlon who for me anyway was exceptional and lifted the whole production. B*spoke have put together a really good touring piece of theatre that will hopefully be a great success for them.

So where was the problem? It was all with Murphy's direction. The was a real sense of the writer and none of the director. Murphy seemed way to caught up in the beauty of his own words that he seemed to forget he was meant to be directing a play. There was a huge amount of actors having their back to the audience, and I could see no real artistic need for that. It almost seemed that Murphy didn't care about the audience.

For me it brought up the question, should a writer direct their own work? For me it has to be a no. They are two different creative processes and need to be treated as such. Now, of course there exceptions to that rule and some writers are really great at directing their own work. But in this case I think Murphy should just stick to what he is best at and leave the directing to someone else.

1 comment: