Danse, Morab

Danse, Morob in the Project Art Centre follows the story of a woman searching for her deceased father’s missing corpse. The world of the play is bleak and dark with Olwen Fouéré, as leading actress, searching for her father. She is accompanied only by a pack of dogs. It features beautiful design and an elegant, yet wordy text.

Judith Roddy and Emmanuel Obeya give engaging performances as their characters, seamlessly switching between sides of the stage as an ever watching presence to the mother and the prisoner Seamus respectively. However, neither of them can be compared to Olwen Fouéré. Every word uttered by Fouéré oozes with passion. She is a powerful presence commanding the audience’s attention and I could not take my eyes off her.

Nonetheless, a problem I tend to find with long form monologues as a play format, is that they can be difficult to engage with, sadly Danse,Morab was no different. One really has to pay attention to every single word that is said, and this can be a struggle. If you enter the theatre unaware of this, it can quickly become exhausting. I often found that I was zoning in and out of what was being exclaimed and would find myself lost, realizing that I had not been paying attention to the past ten minutes and then would desperately try to catch up with where we were in the plot. Saying this, the words held a certain dreamlike quality, even tending toward the realm of nightmares. As a result the piece felt tense and exciting.

With regard to the design, the entire performance was assisted by astonishing AV, accompanied by a booming soundtrack. This was felt reverberating through your bones thus serving to heighten the tension of the piece even more. Although this was by no means a dance piece, it included fantastic physical work with one particularly powerful moment at the beginning with all three actors on stage fighting for their lives, this effectively set the intense tone for the rest of the play as we joined Fouéré on her search for her father’s remains.

Sinead Wallace’s lighting design was another fantastic feature, effectively creating the evocative haunting atmosphere: the space felt huge at one moment, then tightly enclosed the next. She cleverly brought an otherwise simplistic and somewhat underwhelming set design alive and transformed it in ways you would least expect.

Danse, Morob is certainly not for everyone. As wonderful as the acting is with a genuinely incredible and beautiful design, the text tended to feel impenetrable and off-putting. If you are not prepared for this when you enter, you may find yourself just as lost in the woods as Fouéré’s character.

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