Katie Davenport’s shiny plastic set offers reflective surfaces against which Sarah Jane Shiels’s lights shimmer and dance as we move from the various Dedalus homes to the educational institutions that inspire the hero’s intellectual journey. The hero's constant rebirth in the shape of another actor thrusts us beyond the book's national interests, however, revealing Stephen not just as an artist but as an Everyman. In Ronan Phelan's exhilarating, restless contemporary production, the emerging artist is brought to life through a relay of rotating narrators and reinvented Stephens.Īs the energetic ensemble swap the bright-green jersey of the Italia '90 soccer campaign between them, Riordan's version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reaches out beyond the novel's modernist origins to ensure Joyce's coming-of-age tale is as relevant to conceptions of Irishness now as it was then.
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire ★ ★ ★ ★ "The personality of the artist refines itself out of existence," argues Stephen 5, the fifth young Dedalus we meet in Arthur Riordan's ingenious adaptation of James Joyce's seminal autobiographical novel.
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