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May 2015 59
CULTURE Review
Counter Culture
Enjoyable agitprop with no sledgehammers.
Review by Lorraine Courtney
P
OLITICAL art is often charged
with achieving the impossible:
producing real, tangible change.
Artists don’t pass laws or have a finger
on the button, so what can they possibly
do to influence governments or dislodge
the structures of power? Will they ever
save the world through ideas, objects
and images alone? ‘Counter Culture’ is a
play trying to do this.
The play was first launched by the
Fishamble Show-in-a-Bag scheme for
the Dublin Fringe in , and has
toured widely in Ireland ever since. It’s a
hilarious yet hard-hitting social realist
fairytale, that’s set in the fictional
Macken’s Department Store in Dublin
on the busiest day of the year: a snowy
th December. It’s also the day manage-
ment decide to introduce zero hours
contracts for their workers.
The murky world of life on zero-hours
contracts hit the headlines here with the
recent strike in Dunnes Stores and we
learned what it is like not to know how
big next week’s pay cheque is going to be
– or if they will receive one at all. Katie
O’Kelly was inspired by an old photo-
graph though.
“I came across a picture. It was of my
Granny, on strike, holding a placard
outside Clery’s in Dublin in . She
worked there for over years. She was
campaigning for better pay and condi-
tions for workers, and the right to form
their own union. It was a side of my
granny I had never known about, and it
all seemed so different to the world of
retail that I knew, where employees
were treated almost like replaceable
commodities”. And so O’Kelly flings her
audience into the world of fashion retail,
a web of hangers, sales targets and bun-
ions, where the workers realise they as
disposable as the fashion they sell.
O’Kelly begins and ends her multi-
character journey as a personified
snowflake who flutters about and alights
in the palm of the outstretched hand of
Jim Larkin’s statue. This is the story of
four employees (and a few other transi-
tory characters) on a normal working
day. It’s skillfully if a touch schemati-
cally done, and energetically performed
by O’Kelly, who manages effortless tran-
sitions between the protagonists. We
meet Gemma, a heavily pregnant young
woman who is not allowed to sit down
during her long shift in the bedding sec-
tion, and her frail grandmother, Bridie,
who has never missed a day’s work at
Macken’s since she started out working
there at just eighteen.
“Amidst all the chaos of contracts and
consumerism, at the core of ‘Counter
Culture’ is the personal story of a
granny and granddaughter, and their
journey together
through the day in
Macken’s when
zero-hours con-
tracts are brought
in. I think it’s
important that the
central two char-
acters are female, as the majority of
retail workers affected by zero and low-
hour contracts are women, and their
story should be told”.
Through this kaleidoscopic story of
inequity in the modern workplace, nos-
talgia, bribery, struggle, and half hope,
told with the utmost industriousness by
the pitch-perfect O’Kelly, the plot brims
to the point of overflow for such a short
play. The storytelling is not always suc-
cessful. The characters (and this
production) seem trapped on a rounde-
lay, turning in ever decreasing circles. It
is indulgent in its way – it could run at
less than the apportioned time without
losing anything.
Yet O’Kelly’s baggy, blackly hilarious
script is marked by a great joy in writing
and a love of her characters. She imbues
it with a beautifully watchable rhythm
that only flags a little. Still Donal
O’Kelly’s direction is taut and there are
beautiful scenes like the brilliantly
imaginative use of an empty metal
clothes-rack.
O’Kelly believes ‘Counter Culture’ can
make a real impact this year in Edin-
burgh – the biggest international
theatre window in the world, and focus
attention on the issue of decent working
conditions. It could. This enjoyable
piece of agitprop makes no apologies for
doing so. You see the truly political
artist can insinuate and subtly subvert
opinion without sledgehammer ser-
mons, engaging the public
consciousness on a deeper level and
infiltrating the lifeblood of culture. Poli-
tics in art is still possible; in this age of
apathy is vital. •
O’Kelly flings
her audience
into the world
of fashion
retail, a web of
hangers, sales
targets and
bunions, where
the workers
realise they as
disposable as
the fashion
“
‘Counter Culture’
is part of the James
Connolly Festival
and plays at the New
Theatre, East Essex St,
4-10 May.
60May 2015
60May 2015
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