In his program note for the American theatrical premiere of Incantata, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon notes that he wrote the piece in just three days. By the looks of it, though, adapting it for the stage took considerably longer.
A lyrical, harrowing meditation on loss, Incantata was first written more than 25 years ago, after Muldoon’s partner, the artist Mary Farl Powers, lost her life to breast cancer. Now, as presented by Irish Repertory Theatre, after acclaimed runs at the Galway International International Arts Festival and in Dublin, it is a 60-minute fever dream of a performance piece—a portrait of a man both crazed and inspired by grief, played by a ferociously committed Stanley Townsend.
While Townsend is the only person onstage, director Sam Yates and his design team have provided him, and Muldoon’s verse, with elaborate accompaniment. Audience members enter to find the actor crafting potato-print patterns—Powers worked in print, cast paper and paper sculpture—as recordings by popular artists from Buddy Holly to Blondie play, presumably reflecting a soundtrack of the couple’s lives or relationship.
A huge pile of potatoes sits on one side of Rozanna Vize’s set, while sheets showcasing more of such handiwork hang on the other. But the most prominent, creepiest scenic element is a sort of high-tech ghost the man constructs of a chair, cloth and a camera, with the last feature representing a head. When Townsend speaks into the camera, as he does frequently, his face becomes distorted through sheer feeling, which we witness at various angles; Paul Keogan’s lighting also reveals him in eerie silhouette. The performance requires enormous physical and emotional dexterity and attention to detail, and Townsend and Yates deliver on all counts.
The text itself is equally challenging, teeming with conspicuous literary and cultural references, from Burt Lancaster and Van Morrison to the Greeks and Beckett, who gets particular notice, with nods to Krapp’s Last Tape, Endgame, Waiting For Godot and the novel Watt. Mourning can be in part selfish, Muldoon seems to recognize, and the sorrow in Incantata is laced with frustration and anger, stemming from his partner’s decision to more or less accept her disease as fate, her refusal to seek out the treatments offered by modern medicine.
“You must have known,” the man insists, “as we walked through the ankle-deep clabber/with Katherine and Jean and the long-winded Quintus Calaber, that cancer had already made such a breach/that you would almost surely perish.” He begrudges his lost love’s stoicism, even, her “pretending to be as right as rain.” His memories turn to “how you lived with your back to the wall, of your generosity when all the while/you yourself lived from hand/to mouth.”
Townsend’s voice as he utters these lines is sonorous and hypnotic, especially in the repetition that Muldoon uses to reinforce the man’s—that is, his—emotions, in all their depth and breadth. “I thought again of how art may be made, I thought again of how art may be made, to wherever/to wherever,” he intones at one point.
If the staged version of Intantata can threaten to overwhelm us, both visually and with Muldoon’s relentless intensity and never-ending stream of allusions, that’s no doubt part of the point. Art can be made of such suffering, though given the excess on offer in this production, I’m grateful for its brevity.
