Irish Times writers review a new comedy based on James Jaoyce and the return of veteran Italian duo Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia
Jimmy Joyced!
Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin
The title of Donal O'Kelly's new hour-long play is a gag. To be Jimmy Joyced means to have one's existence subsumed into Joyce's work, as Oliver
St John Gogarty was under the name of Buck Mulligan. It is set in 1904, an eventful year in the life of the great writer, here seen through the eyes of J. J. Staines, a stallholder in a Rathmines market and an obsessed fan.
It is a surreal play in which Staines first appears wearing black wings and, after a manic introduction, flies off to north Dublin to spy on the Joyce family. The dominant character at first is the drunken father, and the narrative dives back a bit to trace his roller-coaster life from downmarket accommodation to a posh neighbourhood and back again to the lowly northside.
James gets through good schools, from Clongowes to Belvedere, and thence to university. Some of his friends there are duly Joyced, he spends time with Gogarty in the Martello at Sandycove and meets Nora Barnacle to embark on a turbulent sexual relationship. They go on their fabled walk of June 16th and take flight from Ireland later in the year. Staines wraps up the story with a final flight of his imagination.
The play tunes neatly in to the Joycean pattern of word games and mind-hopping, more easily followed by the dedicated Joyce reader but not impenetrable to the drop-in member of the audience. O'Kelly has clearly soaked himself in his material, and he brings to its interpretation the kind of mercurial performance for which he is noted.
Runs at lunchtime until June 19th
Gerry Colgan
Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia
Sugar Club, Dublin
Sunday's visit of the veteran Italian duo of the clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and the accordionist Gianni Coscia unveiled two accomplished musicians new to Dublin audiences. And their skills were not only musical: despite Trovesi's limited command of English - and Coscia's was virtually non-existent - they were adept at seducing an audience through Mediterranean charm and an almost vaudevillian sense of humour.
In fact they played off each other with a sense of humorous timing worthy of stand-up comedians - which was just as well, as the music needed an extra dimension or two to sustain interest over a full concert. Not that, instrumentally speaking, Trovesi and Coscia were anything but impressive. Both virtuosi, they never used
technique simply for its own sake, and their impeccable control of dynamics was ample evidence of the adage that less is more.
What resulted was an elegant, deftly played, highly melodic music, an evocative mixture of folk, light classical, jazz and a Mediterranean equivalent of the music hall. As far as this goes it worked well enough. But it was hard to escape the sense that it was also merely decorative and that both musicians were playing well within themselves.
Unsurprisingly, there were longueurs, leavened not by any sudden accession to depth but by musical jokes. Quotes turned up to often hilarious effect: a deliriously off-centre La Cucuracha or Glenn Miller's In The Mood, to pick two of many. And on a Spanish-tinged piece by Coscia the audience was encouraged to shout olé at appropriate - or inappropriate - points. It was that kind of night.
Ray Comiskey
