Donnacha Dennehy - The Hunger
The Abbey Theatre, 2019
Alan Pierson, The Crash Ensemble, Tom Creed, Katherine Manley, Iarla Ó Lionáird
The Abbey Theatre, Dublin - 23 August 2019
The subject of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52 is a very big subject for any Irish artist, one that touches deep on the most fundamental emotional, social and political levels. For an Irish composer whose roots lie within the idiom of Irish traditional music there's something here then that must be delved into. Irish traditional music is the language of the common people and has its roots in the culture and the community, speaking of suffering, adversity and oppression. It's essentially this that Donnacha Dennehy approaches head-on in The Hunger.
Whether it's opera or a song cycle or something else, like all of Dennehy's forays into the lyric theatre (The Last Hotel, The Second Violinist), The Hunger doesn't fit into any easy categorisation. The work draws on writings by an American 19th century reformer Asenath Nicholson, who witnessed some of the worst privations in Ireland during the height of the potato famine. Dennehy weaves these observations and impressions into songs that feature his familiar Steve Reich-like repetitive percussive rhythms built this time even more evidently around Irish traditional melodies and laments. Video clips of interviews with academics on the subject of the Irish Famine are used to present the subject in the wider context of economic market theory and contemporary society.
What isn't there to speak of in The Hunger, or at least not in any traditional operatic sense, is dramatic action. The main figure is Asenath Nicholson, the narrator, who is witness to a number of horrific scenes. She sees a man digging in the ground, not for potatoes but to bury his daughter. He sings a piece based on a keening lament and an old-style (sean-nós) song, 'Na Prátaí Dubha' (The Black Potatoes). Her sense of helplessness, uncertainty about how to help in the face of such abject poverty and suffering is in contrast to the video interview commentary that describes how the English accepted this as a necessary consequence of a market economy and how they felt or admitted to little in the way of guilt for importing product from Ireland at the same time that people were dying of starvation there.
It doesn't take much imagination to see the relevance of The Hunger to what we see today in a world where similar attitudes exist, where inequalities are greater still, where people are dying in the sea to escape poverty and starvation while others fly around in luxury jets and book holidays in space; where people are using food banks while politicians and bankers work the market in their own personal favour. It's undoubtedly why the piece is called The Hunger, not The Famine. It's about expressing the underlying reality of one of the most inhumane forms of inaction in letting people die of hunger, and worse, in some cases there's a conscious acceptance that it's a necessary consequence of living in the modern world. It's probably for the same reason that Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 Hunger Strikes is also called Hunger, a film about Ireland again and what some would see as a similar confrontation with English indifference, the idea of someone dying of hunger recognised as an act of ultimate desperation the world over.
Evidently then the subject of The Hunger is potentially miserable and there's no point pretending that there's anything uplifting here, but there is something stoical in the perspective of the man whose laments are observed in contrast to the observations of a witness and academics. Conducted by Alan Pierson, the Crash Ensemble's playing holds a consistent musical narrative structure with an occasional dissonance that expresses a cruelty within the social structure that gives rise to such conditions. It's in the sean-nós and keening lament that gives this a human voice, an authentic voice that comes from within, that touches on the roots of the Irish condition and can't be expressed any other way. Its weaving in and out and repetition has much the same impact as Gavin Bryers' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
The use of amplification was evident, but the singing performances by Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird come from those emotional depths. For its stage performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, director Tom Creed strives to find a variety of means to add other levels and dimensions as an alternative to traditional dramatic action. It's not so much the accumulation of individual elements for visual interest - the video clips, the landscapes, the plot of rocky land, the mountains and cloudscapes - it's how they come together to paint a bigger picture that extends out beyond the confines of the Irish Famine to make a point about the deeper human drives that cause hunger and that hunger causes.
Dennehy's music works very much in the same way, adding layers, blending and mixing instruments and songs, striking notes and sounds that reflect the complex and painful situations that are described here and the human feelings behind them. For such an ambitious subject Dennehy covers all the bases, from the outside eye-witness account of Nicholson's texts, the modern perspective that puts it into historical context and highlights the contemporary relevance, but it's Dennehy's music that touches on and expresses the most vital viewpoint of what the Famine means to the Irish, something that has not been lost, but has been preserved in Irish traditional music and still has the power to speak to us today.
Links: The Abbey Theatre
