"It's the silence that's the enemy," whispers the Private Gar O'Donnell, as he urges his public alter ego to keep a stilted conversation going with his uncommunicative father.
Philadelphia, Here I Come!
Millennium Forum, Derry
It's their last, vain chance to reach out to each other, no matter how falteringly, in the final hours before Gar leaves Co Donegal for a new life across the Atlantic. But silence is the very currency of the fraught relationship between the two and the heartbeat of Adrian Dunbar's production for the newly formed Association of Regional Theatres NI. Dunbar has shone a beam into the dark corners of the play and, with Friel himself making subtle modifications to the text, has crafted an intensely unsettling and emotionally charged evening.
Instrumental in its success are Ruaidhrí Conroy and Marty Rea, cast respectively as the Public and Private Gar O'Donnell. In an inspired piece of casting, they are no mere clones of each other - where the Public Gar is stocky, rumpled, tongue-tied and socially clumsy, the Private spirit is tall, glinting, sharp-witted and nattily dressed. Together with Walter McMonagle's emotionally crippled S. B. O'Donnell, their conflicting recall of happy father-son outings, way back in the past, raises difficult human truths upon which the audience is an uneasy intruder.
Not that it is all entirely plain sailing. On an opening night, full of high expectation for Dunbar's directing debut and familiarity with one of Friel's most lyrical plays, the strain showed in some crucial scenes. There is still work to be done, for instance, on Gar's encounter with his former schoolteacher Master Boyle (John O'Toole) and on the arrival of the bizarre trio of Americans - Aunt Lizzie (Stella McCusker), her husband Con (Peter Holmes) and their friend Ben Burton (Nick Hardin). Monica Frawley's straight-angled, pea-green set is an unwieldy creature, allowing only the palest glimpse of the outside world and giving Eileen Pollock's lippy, urban-accented Madge a single shuffling route between scullery and kitchen.
But it and the whole of Gar's world lights up when love, in the shape of Pauline Hutton's sweet-faced Kate, briefly crosses into it, throwing events into confusion and freezing the final moment on the cusp of almost unbearable indecision and uncertainty. - Jane Coyle
At the Millennium Forum, Derry tonight then tours to Burnavon Arts Centre, Cookstown; The Market Place, Armagh; Riverside Theatre, Coleraine; Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen; Gaiety Theatre, Dublin; Dean Crowe Theatre, Athlone; Everyman Palace, Cork; Liverpool Playhouse; Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford; Palace Theatre, Westcliffe; Theatre Royal, Brighton
Oh When the Hoops
Liberty Hall Centre
A house built on sacred ground is just asking for trouble. Frank Allen's sentimental new play sees Glenmalure Park, former home to Dublin's Shamrock Rovers, as one such hallowed turf, now desecrated by a yuppie housing estate. Dispossessed in 1987, "The Hoops" and their fans were condemned to wander. Allen wonders how Glenmalure's new residents could sleep at night. Not very well, he decides.
With the battle already over, even Peter Reid's production bristles at its setting: the bright bourgeois kitchen of newlyweds Robbie and Debby Dolan, our unwelcome protagonists. When benign trespasser Peter King (winningly played by Tony Morley) appears in their garden, steeped in horticulture and Hoop lore, Mary Murray's spirited Debby takes a shine to the old salt and his tales. But Robbie, protégé and nephew to a cartoonishly villainous property developer, wants to banish the football veteran along with all traces of the past. Boo! Hiss! Tormented by slide-show apparitions and reverberating football chants, Debbie soon learns to love the Hoops unconditionally (right-thinking individual that she is). But will the soulless property developers get their comeuppance and learn to respect the sporting past? Oh, take a wild guess.
It may seem odd for a play based on football to leave the action so one-sided. Such lack of ambiguity allows Allen (clearly a Hoops fanatic) to fashion an effective piece of nostalgic propaganda, rewarding a partisan crowd with private jokes and fond remembrances. Similarly P.J. Dunleavy smirks and wriggles through an unabashedly venal performance, confirming our every bitter suspicion about property developers.
Unfortunately such dire lack of subtlety doesn't make for an involving drama. Too heartfelt for satirical bite, too reverential to challenge preconceptions and too clichéd to offer compelling characters, the play doesn't so much preach to the converted as chant along with the home team. - Peter Crawley
Runs until February 8th
Galway Baroque Singers, RTÉCO/Proinnsías Ó Duinn
NCH, Dublin
Handel - Israel in Egypt.
On the evidence of Thursday's performance at the National Concert Hall, Galway, Baroque Singers are clearly capable of meeting the extraordinary range of challenges that Handel's Israel in Egypt presents.
That fact alone should have made for a rewarding performance of an oratorio which has long remained in favour for the richness of choral invention that Handel lavished on it. On this occasion, however, it didn't.
Instead of working to point up the extraordinary contrasts of compositional strategy and musical effect to be found in this work, conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn seemed to draw the music into a grey middle ground where, although the notes were clearly and cleanly delivered, the variety of Handel's conception simply failed to materialise.
It was as if the shaping and scaling of the music were being imposed from outside rather than growing from within. The formula that was being applied was in its own way both intelligent and musical. But it seemed to lack the necessary responsiveness to the changing topography of the score; the playing of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra was tailored to the general manner of the evening.
The solo numbers were taken by a trio of singers, tenor Robin Tritschler pleasing in tone and manner but with an Achilles heel in the form of strange lapses of intonation, soprano Ailish Tynan more than a shade too generalised and operatic in her approach (and requiring a re-take after attempting to launch off on the wrong note in the final chorus), and mezzo soprano Bridget Knowles, altogether more stylistically apt as well as more clearly communicative of the text. - Michael Dervan
