Counter Culture - Village Magazine

May 2015 59

CULTURE Review

Counter Culture

Enjoyable agitprop with no sledgehammers.

Review by Lorraine Courtney

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.