BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
October 30, 2012
this take on bondage gets tied in knots
Source: Independent.ie. - Independent.ie - Ireland
IRELAND - DUBLIN - Gary Duggan's Shibari at the Peacock is more interesting than it is successful. The author tries gamely to reflect a society in flux, in this case Ireland's capital city; the result is a lot of flashes that indicate it's about to take off, but they usually descend into slightly predictable monotony. The result is a play that is little more than a parade of episodes, the supposed interlinking of the characters entirely coincidental, almost to the point of irrelevance.
The word shibari in Japanese indicates a tie-ing together, but in the west is limited, apparently, to the narrow connotation of sexual bondage. Duggan is attempting to give it the more universal interpretation as he opens the play in a bookshop where a minor film star from London (Michael Yare) strikes up a conversation with the Romanian manager (Alicja Ayres) about the bondage content in a book she is looking at. He goes to a club where he meets and later beds Eva (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh). He wants to pursue things, but she is more interested in continuing her cocaine-loaded sexually free journey through life. But in the pursuit, Nick meets Hideo (Orion Lee) in his Japanese flower shop, little knowing that the latter is about to form a relationship with Joana from the bookshop, with whom Hideo will indulge his as yet untried fantasy of shibari.
Meanwhile Eva's sister Marie (Janet Moran) is grieving the death of her husband by suicide, only to find out that Eva had an affair with him, while their brother Liam (Ian Lloyd Anderson) dumps the about-to-be bondaged Joana because he feels restricted by the frustrations of a live-in relationship. I know, it's confusing.
The would-be sophistication rings a bit false as being about Dublin, which is supposed, after all, to be the point of it. At least one supposes that's the point: "how far we've come." The trouble is that the point isn't made very successfully; there's a sense of deja vu, of yet another take on La Ronde, except with characters who are merely cut-outs fashioned to fit the concept. Frank Conway's set design is effective for the most part, with strong Japanese influences as the characters enter and exit through a screened window, although the upside-down device of furniture attached to the ceiling seems rather pointless. Tom Creed, a director not to be fazed by sophisticated content, does his best to bring cohesion, but is defeated by the lack of conceptual rigour. The production is lit by Sarah Jane Shiels with music and sound by Denis Clohessy.
