It’s not often you see an actor, his mother and their therapist share a stage, but that’s exactly what will happen during the 10th anniversary PuSh festival’s Have I No Mouth.
When Feidlim Cannon’s father died a sudden, preventable death 11 years ago, the loss caused a fissure in his family, and became the basis for his performance piece, which runs Jan. 30 to Feb. 1.
Cannon, co-artistic director of Irish theatre company Brokentalkers, always knew he would attempt to keep his father alive through art.
“Two weeks after his death I made a video piece and I’ve got some tattoos that are a tribute to him,” he said.
But when his co-artistic director of Brokentalkers, Gary Keegan, suggested they fashion an autobiographical piece with Cannon’s mother, Ann, he immediately said no.
“I’d seen a lot of autobiographical work where the artist had worked with their parent and some of those shows are really good and some of them weren’t, and the ones that weren’t good were very sentimental,” he said.
But Cannon changed his mind after a couple of hours.
He visited therapist Erich Keller for advice on bereavement therapy.
“Very early on in the conversation I just thought, God, it would be very cool to have this guy on stage with us,” Cannon said.
He was drunk when he asked his mother, who’d never previously been on stage, whether she’d appear in an intimately autobiographical show. He got sloshed on a cheap bottle of rosé on a vacation in Spain and asked her.
Trusting her son and Keegan, she agreed.
Cannon and his mother saw therapist Keller individually and together. They recorded their sessions, Keegan and he listened to the recordings and picked bits around which to devise a performance.
“So much stuff came up from those sessions,” Cannon said. “Stuff that I never had spoke about before, my mother had never spoke about before.”
Their resulting work, Have I No Mouth, sees Cannon and his mother “attempting to bring dead memories back to life.
“And the audience will help us in those attempts,” Cannon said. “So it’s a bit like a theatrical séance.”
The trio reenacts their therapy sessions.
“It’s different most nights because it’s not completely scripted,” Cannon said. “Particularly the opening scene… depending on how we’re feeling on the night that changes all the time.”
The production incorporates song, movement, video, audio and actual medical transcripts. Keller not only plays himself and therapist, but also morphs into a representation of Cannon’s dad. The performance delves as well into the death of Cannon’s brother, Sean, who died young.
Have I No Mouth follows in the vein of Brokentalkers’ production The Blue Boy, which deals with the experiences of men and women who were incarcerated as children in Catholic residential care institutions in Ireland.
Norman Armour, artistic and executive director of the PuSh festival, was taken with Have I No Mouth the first night he saw it in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2012. He saw it a second night to test his response.
“I’m half Irish so I hope I can say this, but [it’s] particularly Irish in that it’s fierce, it’s tender, it’s humorous, it has a sense of wit about it, but there’s also a sense of [a] begrudging kind of resentment, an unresolved tension to it,” he said. “It goes places that you wouldn’t imagine it ever going… In the end, it’s incredibly moving and ultimately celebratory.”
Have I No Mouth runs at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. The PuSh performing arts festival takes place at various venues around the city, Jan. 14 to Feb. 2. For more information, see pushfestival.ca.
