Not a Word
Not a Word premiered as part of Galway International Arts Festival, July 2023.
Winner of the OFFIE award (UK) for Best Design at the 2026 OffWestEnd awards
Not a Word Production Information
Overview
If you never return to where you’ve come from, is this place you are now home?
Not A Word invites you to sit with a silent man on another unexceptional evening. A day’s labouring done, in a place that has never quite felt like home, he plays a beautiful old tune as memory dances amongst his dirty walls and cherished trinkets.
A piece of physical theatre merging mask, music and movement in a celebration of those who took the boat – worked hard, faltered and slowly faded from memory. This excavation of a forgotten class of Irish navvies – those emigrants who helped build a country not their own, seeks the beauty in the banal, the poetry between the concrete cracks.
Performed by Raymond Keane, with live electronic and traditional music from Ultan O’Brien, Not A Word offers a moving portrait of one emigrant echoing many people’s stories today. This ode to a self exiled laborer, making his way in this small space between places, is directed by James Riordan with mask design by Orla Clogher.
Production Team
Director: James Riordan
Producer: Jill Murray
Performer: Raymond Keane
Musician: Ultan O’Brien
Poem-Exile is Not a Word by Peter Woods
Set Designer: Andrew Clancy
Mask Design: Orla Clogher
Lighting Designer: Sarah Jane Shiels
Sound Designer: Jenny O’Malley
Costume Designer: Saileóg O’Halloran
Production Manager: Mark Carry
Stage Manager: Sorcha De Faoite
Assistant Stage Manager: Madison Carpenter
Chief LX: Michael Foley
Sound Engineer: Ellen Culloo
Technical Manager: Michael O’Halloran
Technical Assistant/Intern: Shane McDonagh
Crew: Mark Byrne, Denis Browne, Matthew Cunningham, Simon Daly,
Irish Language Advisor: Caitlín Ní Chualáin
NOT A WORD TRAILER
Winner of the OFFIE award (UK) for Best Design at the 2026 OffWestEnd awards
NOT A WORD Reviews
Deirdre Falvey
The Irish Times
Not a Word: An evocative, heartrending play about yearning and forgotten lives.
In the hour-long show there is physicality, mask and music, but there’s not a word.
It’s a tough gig, performing solo with a lump of concrete on your head. That he effectively and movingly evokes the pain and loneliness of an Irish navvy in England, while encased in Orla Clogher’s headmask, is down to Raymond Keane’s expressive physicality and skill.
Jul 19 2023
The Guardian
4 Stars
Superbly strange tale makes the mundane mesmerising.
Little happens in this wordless show about an Irish navvy who lives a lonely existence and yearns for home but it is oddly affecting.
The Stage
4 Stars
Devastating
With direction from James Riordan, this Irish ode to the navvies who built Britain is a simple, quietly crushing tale of lost dreams.
London Theatre 1
5 Stars
I’m writing this to try and give a sense of what you’re missing
Visually the piece is absolutely engrossing. Raymond navigates the stage as a navvy with exquisite grace, poise and spot-on mimetic realism. Every gesture feels just so.
Chris O'Rourke
The Arts Review
Despite being regularly pronounced dead, language seems impossible to kill. Take Brú Theatre’s extraordinary Not A Word. A production performed without words, for the most part, the title’s malleability might well have said all that words needed to say.
Not a word about home. Not a word from home. Not a word about how tough it is away from home. Nor a word about those countless souls who disappeared into the dusty diaspora of the twentieth century. Builders, miners, manual labourers who resided in twilight bedsits, shadowed in exhaustion, covered in concrete grey dust. Their pained limbs and aching joints locked in endless discomfort. Nights alone spent cheating at solitaire. Tunes from back home played on scratched LP’s inspiring longing, loneliness, pleading waves towards half known strangers through the prison of a window. The loaf of bread releasing an aroma of memories slathered with hopes of a return. But would they recognise the grey, gargoyled face buried beneath its mask of cement?
If there is much going on in Not A Word, it’s all rendered to near perfection. Orla Clogher’s extraordinary mask and Saileóg O’Halloran’s detailed costume capturing the unknown immigrant’s harsh experiences. Andrew Clancy’s pitch perfect set as much prison cell as bedsit, in which the weighed down present of rent and coins for the gas meter is haunted by the grass green past. Embodied in Sarah Jane Shiels shadowed lights, bursting with the freshness of lavender as memories soar, before crashing into the dark. Jenny O’Malley’s sound design an industrial backtrack of passing cars heightening longing and loneliness. Vividly brought alive by Ultan O’Brien’s extraordinary fiddle playing. O’Brien playing live throughout, accentuating mood and memory, reaching beyond easy nostalgia or a maudlin Disneyfication of Irish immigration. Here, heart and soul are made to sing and keen. The whole perfectly balanced under the inspired direction of James Riordan.
One could cite multiple influences from kabuki to clowning, mime to mask work, which inform Not A Word. But the simplest description lies in two words: Raymond Keane. Over many years Keane has evolved a signature, physical practice defined by understated eloquence. A less is more, seemingly effortless effort in which movement is made powerful through simplicity. No heavy exaggerations or easy tropes, but rather articulations of the heart given direct physical expression. Engaging the audience by coaxing them into investigating that space between the stated and the imagined. A space defined by Keane with extraordinary sensitivity.
One actor, one musician. Both extraordinarily mesmerising. Not all will gravitate towards Not A Word’s slow, methodical pacing. Its comfort with silence. Its simple tale told simply and beautifully. But questions of taste have nothing to do with whether a work succeeds, artistically and theatrically, in terms of the standards it set for itself. In this regard, Not A Word is an artistic and theatrical triumph. In which language again proves hard to kill, resurfacing at the end like an embarrassed child. Sounding inelegant and immature next to Keane’s physical vocabulary, the words not rich enough to hold their own when speaking of exile. Yet what of those exiled at home by the doomed clanging of the Angelus bell? The poverty of worn souls and worn out soles and the multitude of shames visited on those unable to leave? Crippling those who couldn’t escape, motivating those who could, imprisoning those who wanted to return? It’s all there in Not A Word. Along with much, much more. A remarkable piece of theatre.
Jul 21, 2023