Chronically Hopeful
Smock Alley Theatre★★★☆☆
Chronically Hopeful is an interdisciplinary production from Musici Ireland exploring the experience of long-term health conditions and disability.
Founded in 2012 as a classical chamber music collective, Musici Ireland has since expanded into hybrid theatre, including 2023’s A Mother’s Voice, which tackled Ireland’s mother and baby homes.
An equal combination of theatre and musical performance, Chronically Hopeful’s ensemble comprises violinists Jane Hackett and Siobhán Doyle, violist Beth McNinch and cellist Katie Tertell. Eleanor Walsh, the sole narrator and protagonist, addresses the audience directly, accompanied by dancers Ali Clarke and Safire Hikari.
The performance begins with Walsh reclining on modular crates, bathed in sunlight. The morning reverie fades as her thoughts unwind, revealing that she suffers from debilitating fatigue. That day, she tells us, she must choose between showering and preparing breakfast. The assertion of this stark calculation is an eloquent moment in the production’s hour-long exploration of chronic illness.
As the performance gathers pace, its ire aims at doctors: they reduce her body to measurements, misdiagnose her, ignore her concerns and fail to connect her symptoms. Are we encountering, in the narrative, one patient’s frustration with a flawed system, or, through the narrative, a more broad indictment of the cruelty and incompetence of the medical community? It feels like the latter.
Stock characterisations offer little complexity. On a date, a religious man offers to pray away our protagonist’s autism. On another date, an art curator compares chronic fatigue to a dog’s tiredness. As Walsh impersonates the unfeeling woman, she acquires an exaggerated D4 accent. For a production invested in the difficulty of having individual experience taken seriously, this willingness to deal in caricatures is an uncomfortable contradiction.
Some moments elevate the show: one scene involving a violinist deprived of her instrument by wordless hospital staff strikes exactly the right chord. The dancers, largely underutilised, perform impressive choreography. I came away with the sense of a missed opportunity. Invisible disability and chronic illness are important subjects, but, as a work of narrative drama, the production strays into reductive tropes too often.
Runs at Smock Alley Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until September 9th