A selection of reviews from previous productions

Brian Keane STYX Review briankeanewriter@gmail.com

STYX Review

STYX is an experience. A work of multidisciplinary art that engages and challenges - inviting the participant to examine their passive compliance with Ireland’s Direct Provision system.

We are in a time when the world seems battered by a barrage of crisis. From war to economic crashes to climate catastrophe, yet all have a shared outcome: more displaced people - more refugees.

Beneath callous upon callous our society attempts to protect this tender spot, to desensitise it under endless numbers, strata of statistics, and soulless information. To awaken our humanity – to touch our soft white underbelly, despite its armour, is a genuine victory for STYX.

In the foyer the disorientation process begins. Poker-faced functionaries herd the audience into separate groups. Efficiently processed using colour-coded wristbands we are instructed where to go.

For the next hour we follow orders: “Stand there. Enter that room when called. Sit here.”

Each new setting proffers a discombobulation of experiences from the milestones marking a refugee’s journey: deciding to leave their home; arrival in the new country; navigating the bureaucratic minefield of the Irish asylum process while traumatized and struggling with communication; writing letters home explaining to children where you are, why you had to leave so suddenly, and what the future may hold for your family now that your mother lives on a different continent.

Under the constant direction of impassive administrators, each set offers the opportunity to lean in a little more, to touch the actual refugee’s experience of Ireland’s Direct Provision system. The process includes being fingerprinted and undergoing an identification sketch beneath a glaring spotlight. Even between processing rooms, waiting in a grey corridor, a florescent light buzzes noisily, flashing on and off, as participants stand obediently in designated spaces marked by white-taped squares on the floor.

Using a range of narrative techniques, refugees currently in the Direct Provision system tell their stories. Esmeraldo, an Angolan news cameraman fleeing death threats from a corrupt army general, invited our group to learn African dance steps. This dance class was continually interrupted by increasingly distressing phone-calls providing snippets of his story: his coverage of an illegal land seizure in Angola; the subsequent violent attacks; and finally his decision to leave his home. Later, his story was filled out further as we observed Esmeraldo’s interrogation by an Irish civil servant.

STYX drew closely from each performer’s personal experience. Esmeraldo is currently teaching African dance; the sketch-artist, Elton, is a Zimbabwean artist now studying at the Crawford College of Art; and Diana Siwela, a human rights activist also from Zimbabwe, reads actual letters she wrote her children while living at her current residence, Drishane Castle Direct Provision Centre in Millstreet, Co. Cork.

STYX attempts to walk a jagged path, though it certainly makes a statement as to the dispassionate, inhumane nature of the Direct Provision system, it does so without shaming or relying on hyperbole. Rather than paint clean black and white lines, it sits comfortably in the layers of grey. The experience simply presents the participant with a taste of the system as it is - drab, dry procedures undertaken by bureaucrats with deadpan faces institutionalised against an emotional toll for which they are thoroughly unprepared.

STYX succeeds in opening this crusty wound, inviting participants to recognise our own compliance with this system, exposing our armour and lack of humanity, perhaps just because the wound feels too tender to touch. 

Review of The Rooftops of Paris (original) by Caolan Gibbons available @ https://granary.ie/news/the-rooftops-of-paris/