Review: Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark – Of pigs, legends, and human quality

Oona Doherty’s full-length work, Specky Clark, made for a strange night, beautiful too, in which Sadler’s Wells felt much more like a friend’s house than a theatre. Starting with a dramatic moment in which the young boy “Specky” (he’s later given this nickname by a strange postman because of his spectacles) cries for his dead mother as he’s forced to move to Belfast with twin fairies, the Clarks. The show is surtitled, and I was not entirely sure of the necessity of this until the first scene with these sisters, which was both sharp, funny and slightly painful to watch—they undressed and dressed Specky while tutting and repeatedly saying “God love him!” and other, less intelligible (but happily readable), expressions. There verged on the too caricaturesque, but they still made us laugh. The beautifully entangled “Irishness” of the show clearly varies from the very obvious to the nuanced, judging by the few moments in which only a few members of the audience laughed, so I did feel like a missed something at points, but at the same time somehow it did not subtract from my experience, Doherty really made us all feel welcome.

There is clearly a darkness to Doherty’s work: it held us in space and time while Specky, beautifully played by Faith Prendergast, shivered and shook of cold and grief and uncertainty. It gave us a strange sense of peace and the sublime in the final scene where legend and myth and reality clash and conflate. It gave us a sense of a context, of families working in abattoirs, in which the future is just a word and the present is grim and bloody. The strongest scene is possibly the moment, during Samhain, when Specky starts to let go of his emotions by dancing them out and due to the thinning of the veil the pig he killed earlier in the show comes back to life. There is a sense of hope there, even if it might seem odd. The pig is lively, excuse the pun, and wise. He sees Specky as the conduit through which others who have passed might be able to come back to the world, he links Specky, and us, to a sense of magical realism.

The work doesn’t fully gel yet. There seem to be some issues of synchronisation (mainly between voice and movement) and rhythm. The first and second halves of the work don’t quite merge together, even with the final scene trying to bring them there. Although it looks like Specky doesn’t quite get to see his mum in Samhain, a devastating end to the work followed by another shooting of a pig giving us even more of a despondent feeling, things are not completely clear.

It feels important to say, however, that there is no sign of conceited artistry here. What we saw on stage is very clearly Doherty and her cast and her collaborators. The humour and rawness that was in the work was there in the post-show talk. And Doherty demonstrated a grace and an honesty, even with difficult questions from the audience, which was commendable. Both on stage and in the talk, she gave us, in her own words, “all the bits hanging about me”. I considered giving this work 3.5 stars, but then I thought that in this day and in this world, artists should also be given stars for being truthful, and brave, and honest both on and off stage. In a time when it is getting increasingly difficult to respect an artist as well as their work, we need to think of human quality, and not just products.

Gramilano Editor

Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.

Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.

He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.