What Ever Liberty Hall, Dublin is reviewed by Fintan O'Toole and  the performance of Paul Fanning, Niall O'Loughlin and Rachel Quinn at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin is reviewed by Douglas Sealy

What Ever

Liberty Hall, Dublin

Fintan O'Toole

It was good that the Dublin Theatre Festival culminated with What Ever, for Helen Woodbury's extraordinary one-actor epic was full of reminders and revelations.

It showed us that, in the theatre, scale is a function of the size of the imagination, not of the cast. That there is no clear line between the telling of a story and its enactment. That it is possible to draw on rave culture and Shakespeare, on Homer and New Age mysticism and still be coherent. That complexity can be woven from the simplest of elements. That, above all, the best artists make their own rules.

Having reviewed one evening of Woodbury's show at the Galway Arts Festival, I wanted to see the full eight-hour saga over four nights. It is not that any one episode is incomprehensible or unsatisfying on its own. It is simply that Woodbury's American odyssey shares the most basic common element of Homer's: the listener wants to know what happens next.

This is a very simple desire, but a pretty important one. Too often, in contemporary culture, the narrative impulse has been surrendered to the purveyors of undemanding entertainment. What Ever arouses all the primitive curiosity of a good soap opera, but satisfies that curiosity in a rich and complex way. Like any good soap, Woodbury's saga has a number of distinct groups of characters, whose lives gradually overlap and interlock.

Instead of the enclosed domesticity of a soap, though, Woodbury spins her story across a continent. Skeeter, the 16-year-old raver, who starts out in California, visits his mother in Seattle, his father in prison in Illinois, and his mother's sister in New York, before crossing the continent again to find the two girls he adores, Sable and Clove.

His aunt in turn is the mistress of Paul, a retired corporate executive, whose southern belle wife and environmental radical daughter also become entangled in the tale. So too do Bushy, a low-rent Irish-American prostitute in New York and the wonderful Violet, an ancient bohemian lady who has seen most of what the 20th century had to offer and who gives the epic its emotional and moral centre.

As well as the dazzling range of people and places, Woodbury gives us a sense both of historical context and of social class. Through Violet's insistent memories, the texture of the story is enriched with the vestiges of events ranging from the rise of fascism to the black civil rights movement. Through Bushy on the one side and Paul on the other, we touch both the jagged bottom of American society and the plush, claustrophobic pinnacle.

What allows Woodbury to hold all of this together is her command of a range of vocabularies. The registers of speech she employs are drawn both from different ends of the cultural spectrum and from different jargons. Thus, as well as rave-talk, we get marketing-speak. As well as Bushy's street profanity, we get the vapourings of New Age magic. And the voices of America's vast diversity of peoples get a hearing: east coast, west coast, Hispanic, black, American Indian, the musings of drug-addled old hippies and the letters home of illegal Mexican farm workers, the voices of truckers and fishermen, of cops and jazz musicians.

In form, too, Woodbury draws on a promiscuous array of sources, with rave and Kurt Cobain at one extreme, and Shakespeare at the other. The delirious last episode, where all the strands come together is self-consciously reminiscent of both The Tempest and Twelfth Night. And it has something of the effect of these plays, a journey through madness and confusion that ends in a magical glow of resolution.

All of this is possible because of Woodbury's own awe-inspiring combination of wild daring and fierce control. The daring is obvious in the sheer nerve of creating an epic that is at once broad and so deep. But the control is no less important.

Woodbury's performance is built on a relentless refusal to do anything more than is utterly necessary. There is no linking narrative, no showing-off, no self-indulgence. Every gesture, every word, earns its keep by delineating a character and pushing the story forward.

This is the precision of a great conjurer, who knows one false move in the recitation of the spell could call up demons that will destroy the whole ritual. Weaving the spell with such attention to detail, Woodbury conjured up a memorable magic.

Paul Fanning/Niall O'Loughlin/Rachel Quinn

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Douglas Sealy

Sonata for violins and piano; Trois mouvements perpetuels, Trois novelettes, Trois pieces for solo piano; Sonata for cello and piano .....................................................................................Poulenc

The six pieces for solo piano which Rachel Quinn played at Sunday's noon recital in the Hugh Lane Gallery, written between 1918 and 1928, have the geniality and relaxation of music designed for private performance, or for the delectation of a few friends. The performance gave all the pleasure it should, the character of the pieces being light not solemn.

The Sonata for Violin and Piano (1943) is dedicated to the memory of Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered in 1936, and its dimensions are those of a public statement, to be delivered in a concert hall. Paul Fanning (violin) and Rachel Quinn played it with the necessary force, making the instruments speak the rhetoric of grief.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano (1940-1948) was commissioned by Pierre Fournier and is also a public piece, Naill O'Loughlin (cello) played its four movements with animation.