Continuing our look at some of the highlights of 2013’s Fringe Festival, we spoke with Bush Moukarzel on his new show Lippy.
Heralded as last year’s biggest breakthrough company after the success of their debut show Souvenir, Dead Centre return with something equally as light-hearted as Proust – a suicide pact. Bush Moukarzel tells us about the new show and our fascination with our own death.
Tell me about this true story of the suicide pact?
I suppose I heard the story four years ago, and it was a matter of reading all the public domain material, so all the newspapers reports of this aunt and her three nieces in Leixlip who locked themselves into a house and starved themselves to death. It lived with me for a little while and it’s that thing where inevitably you start to wonder why you’re interested in it yourself.
Why were you interested in it yourself? What does the show do with this story?
There’s a couple of ways ‘in’ I suppose. One, is if you see a story about death that has a degree of mystery about it, your interest becomes a cover up for your interest in your own death. This mystery, this fear of your own death can be masked and projected out onto a case like this. So the whole narrative of a case like this becomes cordoned off and understood as an isolated incident. The other way into the show is that when something like this happens all these readings come in – and they’re fine and might have a degree of truth in them, but they also serve as a cover up. A cover up for the mute impact of these deaths, the meaninglessness of their deaths and the waste of life, and all the reasons why it happened are suitable subjects for the media. But art is interested in meaninglessness, there is something to meditate on about that void at the centre of this story, and that’s the purpose of our show in a way.
It’s a big cast and quite a departure from your one –man show from last year. Dance and lip-reading play a part – what form has the show taken on?
We’ve got two dancers in the show Liv O’Donoghue who is just excellent, and Joanna Banks, who is this legend and grand dame of dance, now in her seventies. We’ve then got Adam Welsh, Dan Reardon, Gina Moxley, Catriona Ni Mhurchu, and myself. And Mark O’Halloran is what we’re calling a ‘cameo-playwright’. The idea is that playwriting is the ultimate fantasy of coherence, the noble fantasy is that we can say something clear about the world. So we’re foregrounding that the playwright arrives to save the day – and Mark’s a bit of a superstar, I’ve admired him since I saw Adam and Paul, he’s a man who can turn a phrase. One of the women will get to say her piece but when she speaks, it’s as Mark.
Lippy premieres at the festival with a show at 9pm on September 10th (€10) and then runs from September 11th to 14th (€14/€12 conc.) with shows nightly at 9pm and a matinee on Saturday 14th at 2pm.
