Director: James Riordan
Miles from home and trapped in his own quiet loneliness, the nameless Irish navvy in James Riordan’s Not a Word dreams of home while encased in the mud and clay of his heavy physical work. This poetic hour-long piece, part of MimeLondon2025 performed at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, explores the physical toll of heavy manual labour and the small, homely rituals men performed at the end of the working day. Yet, it finds a particular charge in the rich but ground-down interior life of the protagonist whose soul yearns for an Ireland he will never see again.
Brú Theatre’s wordless production is a fascinating exploration of a meagre and isolated working-class existence built on routine physical work and a poor existence. Looking around Andrew Clanc’s set, the central figure lives in a tiny two-room flat with minimal furniture, preparing food and washing himself in the same place. That sparsity is reflected in the activities Riordan applies throughout the performance, the continual checking and rechecking of his wages in a money tin, the single slice of buttered bread he plans to eat for tea and the limited life of the electricity meter that he tops up twice.
All of this paints a vivid picture of this life and its tribulations while the smallness of his world plays out in the lonely rituals that he follows. Coming home caked in mud, the beleaguered navvy is exhausted, feeling the pain in his joints and aching back affecting the multiple rituals of undressing and redressing that recur through the story. The process of shaking the dusty mud from his clothes as well as cleaning his body and rooms consumes time in his night while also offering a flicker of the real individual hiding beneath.
Ultan O’Brien’s soundtrack and live performance are essential to the shifting mood, emphasising the downtrodden repetition of the man’s life, one that becomes charged with danger as he considers a different future, unable to shake himself free of the present. O’Brien contrasts this with a lighter composition when the navvy plays his records, thinking of happier times in Ireland dancing and socialising in a community that echoes away from his mind.
Wearing Orla Clogher’s evocative lumpy clay head mask that is reshaped during the show, performer Raymond Keane finds deep empathy for his character whose singularity is sometimes very moving, particularly in the latter section of the play as a terrible hope develops that even as it unfolds the audience just know cannot be fulfilled. The desperate desire for company and the bone-deep weariness of his circumstances are conveyed through Keane’s whole physicality, maintaining a momentum in the performance that holds the attention almost throughout.
We often see representations of working-class lives in UK drama particularly in period representations of miners but those are almost exclusively told in words, and while there are consistencies in the visual language of Brú Theatre’s piece, there is a power in stripping the character of his voice and making him a faceless memory.
Runs until 25 January 2025