The Black Wolfe Tone review: A heavy-on-the-pedal psychodrama
The Black Wolfe Tone
Cube, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
How do you address something important that's right in front of you? For
Kwaku Fortune
, a charismatic actor making his playwriting debut, the instinctual approach to putting a solo play before an audience seems to be to break the fourth wall. 'You are real!' he says, delivering the line while scanning the auditorium.
If we feel seen, that's because The Black Wolfe Tone, Fortune's vigorous play for
Fishamble
, in Dublin, and
Irish Repertory Theatre
, in New York, where it premiered in May, is about dissolved boundaries of reality. The performer plays Kevin, a frustrated young man admitted to a mental-health service. We first see him stepping into a hospital courtyard to have a cigarette. An audience is just his latest hallucination – 'I created you. Delusions of grandeur? Check!'
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Kwaku Fortune: 'I always had an affinity with Wolfe Tone. Maybe because I was told I wasn't Irish'
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]
As Kevin takes us on a whirling journey between past manic episodes and his doctor's medical investigation, he has the same edge as the patients of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey's psychiatric satire, backtalking to hospital staff while leaning into unpredictable retorts and impersonations.
Fortune's satire critiques the horror of involuntary admission in a system that can make sick people feel talked down to by doctors, and make them suppress their emotions in order to escape. 'To rejoin society you have to act like a robot or a sterile eunuch,' Kevin says before tripping up over his own grammar – ''Sterile eunuch': is that a double negative?'
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Similarly, Fortune can also get in his own way, as some snatches of song and pop-cultural riffs feel like hard pivots detached from their satirical targets. The world he has created is tangled in intentions, but, admirably, he never stops pouring energy into it.
In one particularly random moment, when he transforms into a howling dog for no obvious reason, the actor casually lifts himself off the floor, out of the over-the-top canine and into a wry impersonation of a doctor: 'Your mind is wandering a bit now.' Fortune understands the cool of his own acting.
The greater ambition of Fortune and Nicola Murphy Dubey, the play's director, is to marry institutional critique with a personal soul search. Kevin conducts his own investigation into his illness, convinced the causes are external.
Did he inherit some emotional detachment from his father? Some unexplainable aggression from his grandfather? Was it an inhospitable white society where a stranger can sling racist insults on a bus? (Intriguingly, Kevin's mother, originally the only black person in their town, remains hush about her experiences.)
Despite a world surrounded by torments, the play's final insight into mental illness – who's responsible for its causes and recovery – suggests we could be architects of our own nightmares.
That doesn't mean Fortune lets go of a society that's quick to judge. During one scene where Kevin is racing with mania, in the pulsing ambience of Adam Honoré's lighting and Denis Clohessy's music, he runs through a list of Irish warriors, claiming to be Fionn Mac Cumhaill and Michael Collins. 'I am the black Wolfe Tone!' he eventually decides.
Coming from somebody's whose Irishness gets questioned by strangers, it feels like an affirmation.
The Black Wolfe Tone
is at
Project Arts Centre
, Dublin, until Saturday, June 14th, then
Mermaid Arts Centre
, Bray, Co Wicklow, June 17th and 18th; and Cork Arts Theatre, as part of
Cork Midsummer Festival
, June 20th and 21st
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