Controversial Blackbird offers no easy answers
“Life is complicated and Blackbird is a play that show how complicated it can be,” says actress Emma O’Grady of Mephisto Theatre Company, who is currently rehearsing for a revival of David Harrower’s hit play.
Mephisto Theatre will tour Blackbird to venues in Galway City and County in early June, following their critically acclaimed production of Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan last year.
They begin on the main stage of the city’s Town Hall Theatre on June 5 with one of the most controversial plays of the last decade, in which two people who had a passionate affair 15 years previously cross paths again.
Una has tracked Ray down to the factory where he is working as a middle manager. He hasn't seen her in 15 years and has no desire to revisit the past. He has a new job, a partner and has moved on. But Una is unable to do that, which is why she has pursued him. She’s not a 12-year-old now and she wants to take charge of her own destiny.
“This autopsy of a relationship between an older man and a young girl is uncomfortable to watch,” observes Emma. “Before you go in to see the play, the issue is black and white,” she adds, referring to paedophilia for which this character has done time.
“But then you start to see that this is a grey issue and you get really uncomfortable as an audience.”
Blackbird, first produced at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe, also asks the question ‘can someone change?’ as in does society allow people to change,” says Emma, who stresses that David Harrower is not an apologist for the character of Ray in the play. Blackbird is a work that raises more questions than it answers and that is why it is one of her favourite plays.
Mephisto, which is run by Emma and Caroline Lynch, has been creating work in Galway since 2006 and is one of the most significant younger companies on the Galway theatre scene.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.