A Woman of No Importance

The Gate Theatre

The only difference between a saint and a sinner, remarks Stephen Brennan’s morally flippant Lord Illingworth, is “every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”. In a play that, even by Oscar Wilde’s standards, seems to string such handsomely-cut epigrams together like gems on a necklace, with no urgent desire to advance anything as trivial as a plot, those words do point at the stakes of the play and at the method of Patrick Mason’s stately production for the Gate.

It is a play of obvious oppositions, where the rural, aristocratic retreat of Huntington Chase plays host to both the morally severe and the morally debauched, and every shade between them. Peter O’Brien’s costumes, while beautifully designed, signify this a little heavily. He gives us Aoibhín Garrihy’s puritan Hester in ivory white, and later Ingrid Craigie’s “woman with a past” Mrs Arbuthnot in jet black, at either ends of a scale measured in various shades of grey: a hard silver for Cathy Belton’s subversive and engaging Mrs Allonby, with her “clever tongue”, a gun-metal severity for Deirdre Donnelan’s indomitable Lady Pontefract, who polices social boundaries with acid regard.

Eileen Diss’s set pursues a similar correspondence with more satisfying subtlety, creating a realistic space that is neither quite inside or outside the walls of Hunstanton Chase; a gateway to high society in other words, between acceptance and ostracism, which is precisely where Craigie’s guarded character exists. There’s a similar balancing act throughout Mason’s production, which is at home with Wilde, but much more interesting when it looks outside his boundaries.

It isn’t saying much to suggest that Wilde’s depiction is artificial, but even the inflexibility of Old Testament morality and the fin de siècle decadence of the Dandy are simply poses. A wickedly well-constructed moment finds Stephen Brennan’s Illingworth and Belton’s Allonby in a mirrored posture, each tilting a cane, while she goads him, Marquise de Merteuil-style, towards a dangerous liaison. But Mason softens his commentary for the play’s later manoeuvres towards a Shavian drama of ideas, as Craigie’s penitent sinner unleashes her independent mettle, or its later swerve into melodrama. Some compensation seems necessary when the play’s distracted plotting, forgotten characters and familiar lines make it resemble a sketchbook for later works, which is why Brennan’s admirably sardonic performance tempers the self-content of his bon mots, Tom Hickey and Des Keogh embroider their supporting characters with delicate comedy, and Marion O’Dwyer, Aoibheann O’Hara and Belton each find arch motivations in their characters. The production may take her at her word, but even Mrs Arbuthnot doesn’t stand apart from affectation, as her assertion shifts the register of the play around her. Truth, reconciliation and acceptance, Wilde seems to say, are still just a matter of style.

Until Sep 22

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins

Vicar Street

Fife singer-songwriter King Creosote (aka Kenny Anderson) has a 40-album back catalogue that you’ve probably never heard. Being ultra prolific doesn’t necessarily mean your fanbase will grow exponentially, a state of affairs proven by the fact that the upstairs of the ambitious venue is closed off, and we are on stools at cosy tables on the ground floor.

Yet once the lights dim, and KC and his sunshine one-man band (comprising electronica producer/keyboardist Jon Hopkins) gently get started, the awareness of venue space disappears, and you’re rapt in the delicate spin of the music and the bitterness of the lyrics.

The commercial hook is last year’s Mercury-nominated album, Diamond Mine, which fuses Anderson’s tales of worry and woe (the overall themes are ageing and loss) with Hopkins’s pastoral piano, various ambient soundscapes and a drowsy humour.

All these are in the live show. Hopkins (who looks like a male model) takes a back seat (literally) as he adds his serene keyboards. Anderson, meanwhile (messed-up hair and beard, baggy T-shirt and loose jeans), provides the front-of-house entertainment in the form of askew jokes, beautifully fragile singing, deft acoustic guitar playing and a slew of often breathtaking songs.

Diamond Mine material such as Bats in the Attic, John Taylor’s Month Away and Missionary, older songs such as Home in a Sentence, Harper’s Dough and Cockle Shell, and odd, if wholly affecting covers of U2’s Running to Stand Still, Simon Garfunkel’s The Only Living Boy in New York, and Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren all add up to a listening experience that is low-key but intense, relaxed yet vigorous. You want some despair? Euphoria? Jokes? The realm of King Creosote awaits.

– Tony Clayton-Lea