Berlin Love Tour | Cork Midsummer Festival

Star Rating: 5/5

Berlin Love Tour | Cork Midsummer Festival
Directed by Tom Creed
By Lynda Radley
Starring Hilary O'Shaughnessy

Offering an alternative tour of the Berlin-via the streets of Cork, Berlin Love Tour used the history of a city, ruined yet rebuilt, as a parallel to a hearts road to recovery, where our tour guide, a devastating Hilary O'Shaughnessy, shares the horrors of the Holocaust and the Cold War before baring her own personal war story. An allegory on remembrance, the scars the state share through their constant memorialising of past horrors, is mirrored by O'Shaughnessy. She's haunted by the ghost of her failed relationship at every landmark we 'visit', so that the question of what we remember, why and how becomes essential pondering as we move from historical monument to relationship milestone, the past, present and future in constant collision.

Lynda Radley's script is a veiled enchanter, where her seemingly inconspicuous tour guide vernacular stirs the embers of empathy within the human heart, before switching silently, but turbulently, to poetic rawness when O'Shaughnessy is overwhelmed by thoughts of her lost love and lets us in. Her startling performance, starting standoffish before warming, waning and retching up her incredibly sad story, seduces us into the belief that this is your average sightseeing tour before piercing our heart as this once stoic figure goes to pieces. Just as she makes you see the Brandenburg Gate where a dole office stands and a clunk of cement becomes a plaque remembering murdered Jews, she undergoes a remarkable transformation, in the process opening you up, breaking you down and reshaping you.

Every city should have a Berlin Love Tour to avail of its ability to make you see and question a city - its components and their meaning and how they relate to the greater scheme of things. Tom Creed brings out the aesthetic of the city in a way that takes you out of yourself, doing away with any convictions you might have so you are open to O'Shaughnessy's musings, while the heartbreak hymns provided by Ray Scannel's mysterious busker provide welcome relief when things become to much for our guide, but whose words, in the end, only intensify the sadness.

Review by: Caomhan Keane
 

Story by EI Team | 09:00 | Wednesday 27th June 2012 | Theatre

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