Irish Times writers review the latest concerts and shows.
Ashes To Ashes & The Mercy Seat Lyric Theatre, Belfast Jane Coyle
Two attractive middle-class couples navigate a rocky path, strewn with the guilt-ridden survival of catastrophic events; sexual tension fuels their conversations and skews the balance of their relationships. There is much that binds the two plays in Prime Cut's judiciously chosen double bill - and much that separates them, too.
Harold Pinter's terse Ashes To Ashes confronts us with a woman whose lovely face and tightly controlled body have suffering and trauma etched right through them. In answer to the probing questions of her partner, Devlin (Patrick O'Kane), Michele Fairley's beautifully modulated Rebecca speaks in a slow, halting mantra, her responses unchanging, until the mundane present disrupts her thought and speech. Pinter throws out clues to why she is the way she is: her name, her vivid recollections, the expletive hurled at Devlin when he asks a question too many, the memory of an adoring lover who indulged in sadomasochistic ritual and tore screaming babies from their mother's arms. In contrast, O'Kane is all coiled frustration, desperately trying to wrench from her the secrets she's withheld all these years, before descending to the depths of that sickening sexual ritual as a means of turning the key.
Owen McCafferty makes an impressive directing début with this finely paced, disciplined production, which is only slightly marred by overuse of an echo device when Rebecca re-enters the dark horror that has haunted her for so long.
In The Mercy Seat Neil LaBute confronts the uncomfortable fact that some people used September 11th as an escape route, an opportunity to disappear and turn their backs on marital difficulties, debt, criminal charges, whatever. "Whatever" is Ben's standard response when his lover, Abi, gets too smart and intellectually demanding for his limited intelligence. Abi is 12 years his senior and his boss. When the Twin Towers collapse right outside the window of her smart Manhattan apartment, they have just snatched an early-morning moment of forbidden pleasure that has gone on a little longer than usual. Hence he is not in his office, where his wife and young daughters probably imagine he is.
Under Jackie Doyle's crackling, clear-sighted direction, Kate O'Toole and Brian McCardie are superb as this mismatched pair, an older woman hung up on a flaky young charmer who is unexpectedly offered the chance of a new life free of responsibilities. From David Craig's dramatically designed eyrie, connected to the unfolding disaster only through a television set and an unanswered mobile phone, the swirling dust and billowing smoke remind us there are bigger questions to be answered and issues to be faced.
Runs until April 24th
Cassard, MacGregor, Tinney Bantry House, Co Cork Michael Dervan Beethoven - Piano Sonatas 23-28
Quite a number of Beethovens were on display in Wednesday's penultimate recital in the Beethoven piano-sonata cycle at Bantry House.
The Sonata in F minor, Op 57, known as the Appassionata, was played by Philippe Cassard as the work of a man in a state of fury, frequently railing against his fate.
Cassard also essayed, with some unsteadiness, the lyricism of the Sonata in F sharp, Op 78, which, after a four-year gap, Beethoven produced in 1809, and he also tackled the Sonatina in G, Op 79, a work whose backward- looking nature has been likened to the classicism of Prokofiev's much later Classical Symphony. The strain of lyricism, almost Schubertian at times in its expansiveness, returned in the beautifully songful second movement of the Sonata in E minor, Op 90, where it was handled with more thoroughgoing sympathy by Hugh Tinney.
Joanna MacGregor, whose poorly controlled playing has been one of the disappointments of this series, turned over a new leaf for the opening two movements of the Sonata in E flat,
Op 81a, one of only two of the sonatas to which Beethoven himself appended a title, in this case Das Lebewohl (The Farewell).
He headed the three movements in turn "The Farewell", "The Absence" and "The Return", all tied in with the enforced absence from Vienna (in the face of Napoleonic threat) of his young pupil and patron the Archduke Rudolph. The natural fluidity of MacGregor's loose-limbed lyricism, a feature that has been too much absent from her performances in this cycle, fitted the music well, although in the third movement the exuberance that
conveys the joy of return was rather edged out by the pressure of heavy tonal projection.
The lyricism returned for the opening movement of the Sonata in A, Op 101, but the energetic clatter of the march that followed was achieved at the expense of clarity. The slow movement was touchingly done, although the neo-Bachian contrapuntal writing of the finale - the 46-year-old Beethoven was already showing the interest in counterpoint that was to become an increasing concern in his final decade - was allowed to sound too cluttered.
