Irish Theatre Magazine

Below is an extract from Thomas Conway's article 'The World on their own Terms' from the December 2010 issue of Irish Theatre Magazine.

Una McKevitt’s work is marked by a keen instinct for the fecundity of available text. And the more she goes in its pursuit, the more she discovers in text its sensuous values. Her work is shifting theatre instinctively along an axis from sense to sensuality. Text is not just the words spoken, but the music – cadence, pitch, tonal qualities – of that utterance. Not alone the music, but the movements, gestures, signatures of “non-professional” performers – as they are, for the most part, with her work – in space and time. Not alone signatures of her performers, but of audience members summoned to stand, so to speak, alongside them by virtue of their witness. McKevitt evidently loves to read people.

The spare design she favours would appear, however, to answer to a different impulse: to keep each text distinct, to hold back from supporting one text above all others. You might say her theatre consists in teasing into the open the manifold text-scapes of performers, sound and space, and momentarily holding them together in unique combinations. Victor and Gord (Dublin Fringe 2009; revived, Project Arts Centre, February 2010) took two young women, friends in childhood, perhaps less so as adults, and put them through what must be described as rhetorical tasks. She then further struck a distance between them and herself by concentrating on the unfolding of each as rhythm. She has, over time, introduced other people into the piece, and the effect has been to amplify rather than dilute what she has already achieved.
Such are the possibilities of her form, McKevitt looks to have only got started. In 565+ (Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival 2010) she finds a self-reflexive potential for performance in the avidity of her aunt’s theatre-going: Marie O'Rourke has seen more than 565 plays in seven years; she believes theatre has saved her life. McKevitt once again insists on a distance between form and confession. However, here the point of interest is the combinations of story blocks – for each performance the ordering of the story is remade – and we discover ourselves seeing with our ears, listening with our eyes to the text of Marie.
Most recently, in The Big Deal (Queer Notions, Project Arts Centre, December 2010) McKevitt takes the diary of a transgender individual, written in the days leading up to and following her sex reassignment surgery, and breaks it up between two stand-in female performers. Here, testimony lives independently of the performers, yet takes on a human weight owing to their mediation of it. It is perilously without affect, yet the utterance of a line, “this morning [the morning following surgery] what defines me, above all else, is that I love my wife”, or the physical appearance of a letter, has the power to make me fearful of what theatre does, all over again.