A contemporary Gabriel García Márquez adaptation touches down in Toronto
iPhoto caption: Manus Halligan in Dan Colley's adaptation of 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'. Photo by Ste Murray.
It’s a common saying that the best magicians never reveal their secrets. In theatre, the opposite is true.
At least that’s the approach Irish artist Dan Colley has taken in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, an adaptation of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s short story of the same name. Directed by Colley, and adapted in collaboration with Manus Halligan and Genevieve Hulme Beaman, A Very Old Man premiered in 2019 and has since toured Ireland and the world, including a couple of stops in Canada. This November, the Canada Ireland Foundation will present its Toronto premiere at The Theatre Centre.
Colley first read Márquez’s story in 2015. Subtitled “a tale for children,” it begins when the titular elderly figure crashlands in a couple’s courtyard. The winged being — bald, ragged, and nearly toothless — quickly becomes the talk of the town, which treats him like a circus act. It isn’t long before the couple starts charging admission.
Colley didn’t initially understand the story’s appeal. “It seemed morally ambiguous,” he recalled in a Zoom interview. “It seemed not to have much of a point and to be unclear [about] the nature of the old man.” On repeated reading, however, he realized that this ambiguity was the heart of the tale. “The beholders of this man bring their own prejudices, desires, and interests, and project it onto him,” he said. “I thought it was darkly funny. There’s something quite similar in the Irish sense of humour and the Colombian sense of humour, in that [way].”
Other similarities were the figure of a priest as “a subject of ridicule,” and the way the story touches on religious mania. “[The old man] becomes a kind of pilgrimage site,” Colley said, going on to compare him to the Knock Virgin, a vision of the Virgin Mary that supposedly appeared in County Mayo, Ireland, during the 19th century.
Colley even found parallels in the short story’s rainy setting. “I was [imagining] the northwest of Ireland,” he said. “Turns out everybody can read their own landscape into it.”
That both the old man and Márquez’s story spark a host of differing interpretations “seemed to me like a perfect metaphor for theatre itself,” Colley said. “The audience does 80 per cent of the work. We just do 20 per cent, to suggest the way that pictures get built in the imagination.”
Colley favours sustained development processes that give him and his collaborators ample time to play around with that remaining fifth. He, Beman, Halligan, and composer Alma Kelliher began devising A Very Old Man in February 2019, and premiered it that September as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. During the first workshops, the team “did lots of recordings of very long improvisations,” said Colley: “much longer than the show ended up being.” Explorations with a Go-Pro camera and a loop pedal led the team to “layer each element of the story on top of each other quite gradually,” he explained.
“We start with the relationship with the audience and the actors,” he said. “Then we bring in a little bit of sound, then props [and miniatures], then lighting, then video.” This careful, minimalist introduction of technical elements lets audiences’ imaginations lead the way.
In the same spirit, Colley and his collaborators decided to never show the old man his entirety. “You get little suggestions,” Colley teased. “He takes different forms [and his] image is fragmented” across different mediums, from projection to puppetry. “You have to put [his appearance] together in your mind.”
For Colley, letting the audience co-create the theatrical magic is more satisfying than technical wizardry or dazzling tricks.
“I like magic shows, but I can only take so much,” he said. “Because the whole thing about a magic show is that you’re not supposed to know how it’s done. I’m much more interested in the kind of theatre that will do the magic trick, [while] showing you how to do the trick, [because] you get to be both inside it and outside it. I think that’s where theatre has a unique edge on other [art] forms.”
A Very Old Man has toured internationally since 2022, with a shifting cast of performers. Halligan and Beaman, the original actors and co-adaptors, will reprise their roles for the Toronto premiere. Over the years, Colley’s noticed how this open-ended story of a town’s response to the unexplained has spoken to a range of histories and headlines.
“For better or worse, we are creatures of our own story-making,” he reflected. One story might be “that there’s an angel living in this chicken coop. Another might be that crime is at an all-time high, when in fact it’s at an all-time low.” His comments echoed multiple false claims about increased crime rates made in recent years, in countries such as Ireland, the United States, and Canada.
“These kinds of strangenesses take hold of people,” said Colley. It’s a phenomenon that “bypasses the stable, rational world that we think we live in.”
In opposition to that dangerous sort of certainty, A Very Old Man makes it clear from the outset that it’s not peddling any simple morals or lessons. “At the beginning of our adaptation we say ‘There is no lesson, so don’t go looking for one,’ as a kind of provocation,” said Colley.
That hasn’t stopped certain audience members from trying their darnedest to pin one down.
“Certainly we did have somebody say that there’s actually a lesson in it,” Colley remembered. During a post-show talk, one man insisted that the story must be “‘about a demagogue and how not to trust them.’”
Despite the audience member’s insistence, Colley remained steadfast in his desire not to pin down the show to one single meaning. “I was like, ‘Oh, thank you,’” Colley joked. “‘I didn’t know that. That’s really helpful.’”
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings runs November 27 to 29 at The Theatre Centre. Tickets are available here.
The Canada Ireland Foundation is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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