Styling itself as A Modern Myth, Dominic Montague’s Aurora at The Mac, Belfast taps into ancient beliefs to tackle a modern malaise for Prime Cut Productions as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival.
When gold is discovered beneath the fields of rural Northern Ireland, rapacious developers, their sights set on sinking a mine, are soon hoovering up land. It’s a get-rich-quick scheme whose short-term gains for impoverished farmers ignore the long-term cost to the landscape and the communities who live there. Only one small corner has yet to be acquired, and young Cass is determined to save it and her friend: the mighty tree that grows on it.
Trees have a special place in Irish mythology and on the Irish stage, a central character in Maura Laverty’s A Tree in the Crescent, in Charles Way’s Under the Hawthorn Tree, and, most conspicuously, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. On television, the Dark Hedges made an indelible imprint in television hit Game of Thrones. More than merely symbolic, they have elemental import, which explains Cass’s connection to her threatened tree: “you saved me once, now it’s my turn”.
Defiantly chaining herself to her arboreal soulmate, Cass live-streams her protest and enlists the help of the initially sceptical Drew to drum up local support against the tree’s destruction. Matters aren’t helped by the appearance of her brother, Conn, newly returned from America to sell the mining conglomerate's plans.
What follows is a collision between commerce and community, naked greed and brute survival that twines together myth, metaphysics and Mammon. It’s an ambitious amalgam depending too much on appreciable aspiration. Key to Montague’s argument and director Emma Jordan’s realisation is the much-vaunted high-tech contribution of the University of Ulster’s Gaming and Animation Department.
Projected onto Ciarán Bagnall’s imposing abstract tree, it rather lacks the poetry and power suggested by early publicity shots and falls short of the claim to being an immersive experience. Where it does succeed is in the delightfully foul-mouthed, scene-stealing animated badger—a proud “anarcho-communist” whose pugnacious voice is uncredited—and the final image of the tree’s roots spilling out over its tiered mound, its life-sustaining mycelial network neatly christened by Cass “the wood-wide web”.
Mary Tumelty’s lighting is eloquently complimentary, although the significance of her pastel washes conjuring the aurora that appears to halo Cass’s protest risks being lost if the glancing allusion to Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, is missed. So, too, the core argument about the threat to the environment from its exploitation and the potential of community action to refuse and resist its naked abuse for brute profit.
What sense of wonder and drama there is owes much to Katie Richardson's expressive sound design. Moving from enchanted delicacy to pounding expressiveness, it anchors everything here with becoming eloquence.
The striking use of Maria Connolly’s stern, caustically dismissive Interrogator as a projected face looming over Cass calls to mind the iris-restricted focus of Beckett’s Not I, Orwell’s Telescreen and the first, forbidding encounter with the titular magus in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
There is something of interest in that multiplicity of references, albeit the multiple, skilfully interwoven agendas at play in Montague’s assured, currently touring Callings are rendered without a wholly explicable focus here. Nor does the production’s technical innovation compensate for a narrative relying on comic moments to gloss over a lack of coherence that committed performances can’t fully negate.
As Cass, Meghan Tyler blends naïvety and idealism with youthful ardour as she takes a stand against the developers and for the land and the people on it. There’s a queasy convenience to the riot she eventually invokes, its realpolitik at odds with her philosophy.
Newly converted to the cause, Thomas Finnegan’s Drew metamorphoses into a woad-daubbed, antler-clad eco-warrior unfortunately calling to mind the “QAnon Shaman” who led the storming of the Capitol Building following America’s 2021 election.
Conor O Donnell’s Conn undergoes his own conversion to be left bloodied and bruised in the riots that erupt in an offstage environment that never seems fully present onstage.
For all its well-meaning intention and ambitious execution, Aurora falls short of both, surface sophistication unable to disguise the simplistic, unformed material beneath.