[caption id="attachment_70393" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Dermot Crowley in Paul Durcan’s “Give Me Your Hand.”"]
“Give Me Your Hand,” by Paul Durcan * Played by Dermot Crowley and Dearbhla Molloy * Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd St., NYC * Through April 1
There’s very probably no single hour on any New York stage at the moment as rewarding or as charming as “Give Me Your Hand,” playing through April l at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s studio theatre.
Actually, the show, which was first done in London in 2010, lasts a solid 70 minutes, with an additional one or two to allow for the responses of the capacity audiences the production has been attracting.
The program describes the event as “a poetical stroll through the National Gallery of London,” which doesn’t touch the richness of what’s actually on the Rep’s subterranean stage.
To begin with, there’s a text, and a good one, by the Dubliner Paul Durcan (who has published 23 volumes of poetry) read by two of Ireland’s most appealing actors, Dermot Crowley and Dearbhla Molloy, both in particularly radiant form. The word “read” is applicable because the actors haven’t been required to learn the script.
Instead, they stand at lecterns alongside a screen on which a generous group of paintings from the London’s National Gallery are projected. Durcan’s text, made up of poems and anecdotal material, after all, is about the paintings and the painters.
Some of the painters, Thomas Gainsborough among them, are familiar, but most are not -- at least not until they’re illuminated by Durcan’s anecdotes and attitudes.
The text is difficult to describe, racing as it does from Durcan’s fresh poetry, written for the occasion, to his opinions and back again, often without clear transition, but always with wit and charm in abundance.
The modest production has been directed with great skill by Richard Twyman, who clearly had a strong sense of precisely what the audiences would want and need to see when the paintings were projected.
It’s all really quite magical. If a dog or a child appears in the corner of a painting, it’s likely to be followed up by a close up or even an arrow indicating where the audience should be directing its attention.
Daniel Grixti is credited with “video filming and editing,” which seems to indicate that the paintings are all on tape, including the seemingly random details.
In a valuable program note, Dermot Crowley comments that he had first read “Paul Durcan’s extraordinary collection of poems” more than 10 years ago, and found that the huge attraction of the poems was their accessibility, which “Paul had achieved by writing the poems in the voices of ordinary (and extraordinary) men and women. They speak directly to us, displaying all the passion, arrogance, vulnerability, humor, joy and sorrow that makes us human.”
It began to dawn on Crowley that the poems would lend themselves to performance, or at least to recital. Crowley approached his friend Molloy, which is how “Give Me Your Hand” was eventually born, with time out for other jobs that came their way.
The lengthy relationship between the stars enriches the production in surprising ways. On a recent evening, Molloy found herself scrambling during one particular descriptive passage to the point where she had to turn to Crowley and ask for help, which he supplied with skill and grace. It was one of the performance’s warmest moments.
