Irish Times writers review The Gist of It at Dublin's Project Theatre, Zanon, UO/Handley at the NCH, Dublin, the Seagulls Dance at Blanchardstown's Draíocht Theatre and Whitehead/Mirabassi at the Boom Boom Room in Dublin.
The Gist of It
Project, Dublin
Fintan O'Toole
In the age of electronic media, the use of film and video in theatre productions has become commonplace. Directors such as Conall Morrison have made it integral to their work. But Irish playwrights have tended to be far more wary. Nearly 20 years ago, Thomas Kilroy made film - shot, in the original production, by Thaddeus O'Sullivan - a central part of his play, Double Cross, but few Irish dramatists have done so since. The strength of Rodney Lee's The Gist of It is that he puts the interweaving of video and drama at the core of the piece. The weakness is that he fails to follow through on this idea.
The Gist of It is a first play, part of Fishamble's splendidly productive project of introducing new voices to the Irish theatre. It certainly shows promise. Lee's telling of his story displays a well-honed sense of structure and has an easy fluidity that carries it through its 90 minutes with relative ease. He also follows the standard advice to new writers: write about what you know. Himself a film graduate, his play is about Orla (Amy Conroy), a film student trying to complete her graduate movie. The basic notion offers the obvious but potentially intriguing possibility of using Orla's film as a broken mirror of her life.
The limitation of the piece is not that this doesn't happen but that it happens in a way that is rather too obvious. This is partly because Orla's movie is such a patently dreadful concoction of heavy-handed symbols, with butterflies, a dolls' house and a heart bathed in amniotic fluid, that any stirrings of psychological subtlety are strangled at birth. The ghastliness of the movie is, of course, deliberate, and Lee milks it for comic effect, knocking a good deal of well-worked fun out of the travails of her reluctant actor, Liam (Paul Reid). But by making it into such an immediate joke, he stunts its potential to reveal anything very interesting about Orla, other than her pretentiousness and immaturity.
The source of this immaturity is also rather obvious. Philip O'Sullivan plays her widowed father, a self-centred schoolteacher whose main aim in life is to stop his 22-year-old daughter from growing up and leaving him alone. Again, this is all pretty clear from the first few minutes after O'Sullivan's entrance, and again, it sacrifices plausibility on the altar of comedy. It is a nice twist to have the conflict between selfish parent and yearning child played out between father and daughter instead of mother and son, but this is nevertheless a variation on a theme that was well-worn 50 years ago. The high-tech bourgeois Ireland so visibly on stage - an Ireland where nice middle-class boys and girls aspire to be film directors rather than teachers and nurses - ought to have made some difference to inter-generational relationships.
The most interesting parts of the production are those in which the film-making process, however ludicrous, is most to the fore. It's not just that Lee has a sure grasp on this world, but also that Jim Culleton's production escapes the confines of what is otherwise a fairly standard comedy of domestic manners. Sonia Haccius's ingenious designs and the projections by One Productions create a visual environment in which the play is lifted into another dimension, acquiring a much richer texture.
Conroy and Reid respond accordingly, and their performances are energised. For a first-time playwright getting a sense of what he can do, the message must be clear enough: use everything you've got.
Until Mar 11
Zanon, UO/Handley
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture. Rodrigo - Concierto de Aranjuez.
Elgar - Symphony No 1
"Let us now rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, and not only in this country," was the conductor Hans Richter's famous cry before starting work on Elgar's First Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra in December 1908.
The symphony was new (Richter had just conducted the world premiere in Manchester) and it made its way quickly to Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and other important centres. But the momentum was not maintained, and the composer's symphonies (he only completed one other) have long suffered in the public mind by comparison with his Enigma Variations, Dream of Gerontius and his concertos for cello and violin.
What Elgar called his "stately sorrow" is not readily self-sustaining over the long spans of his symphonies (the First runs for over 50 minutes, the Second even longer), and they need sensitive handling to avoid the effect of tangled recursiveness in performance.
Vernon Handley, who conducted the First with the Ulster Orchestra, is a man of proven track record in Elgar, and he laid the work out for his listeners with a clear and fervent cogency. He captured its grandeur and nobility while holding on to its sense of loss and regret, without neglecting its flashes of more upbeat feeling.
The Ulster Orchestra has long had a brass section of sterling quality, and their contribution was one of heroic strength, which Handley mostly managed to balance successfully against a small string section.
The conductor secured moments of great delicacy in Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the most foot-tappable of 20th-century guitar concertos. However, the soloist, the very able Fabio Zanon, was electronically amplified out of all proportion, making his contribution sound artificial in tone and insensitive in balance, with an apparent giant of a guitar given inappropriate dominance over the full orchestra.
The opening performance of Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture was delivered with easy, al fresco flow and some well-integrated detailing, though the musical balances between the various sections of the orchestra were less finely adjusted than in the other works.
Seagulls Dance
Draíocht Theatre, Blanchardstown
Gerry Colgan
Consider a play set in a village in the west of Ireland some 200 years ago.
It is ruled by a predatory landlord, who exercises a droit du seigneur over the local girls, and has a thuggish manager to extract penal dues from the peasantry. An innocent father is sent to Botany Bay, and his family are left to fend for themselves. His wife dies in his absence, but he eventually returns to seek and have revenge.
What does that limited summary remind one of? Why, Boucicault, of course, the 19th-century king of melodrama. But this musical, with book by Larry Tracey based on his own novel, is meant to be taken seriously today. The lavish production, which puts more than 20 people on stage to sing and dance, has an eye-catching set, an eight-piece band, an experienced director in David Hayes and subordinate directors for music, stage and choreography. In brief, the works.
The creative line-up also features music and lyrics by John Hurley and Pat McDonagh, but any hope that their talents might impose some alchemy on the manifest dross of the plot is soon dispelled.
The sentimentality of such songs as Corryann, a love duet to the village, contrasts with the manager's Curse You Macken directed at the father who married the woman he lusted after. And it gets worse.
The music is rather better than the lyrics, but not a lot; it is sometimes pleasant, but never inspirational, yielding nothing to take home and savour.
A couple of dances are reminiscent of a barn dance in old Western movies, energetic but pedestrian. The cast work so hard that it would be nice to praise their efforts, but they are committed here to a failed exercise in silk-purse-making.
Until March 4
Whitehead/Mirabassi
Boom Boom Room, Dublin
Ray Comiskey
The first high-profile event of the Trinity College Jazz Society's festival featured two notable visitors new to this country in tenor saxophonist Tim Whitehead and pianist Giovanni Mirabassi, who joined local musicians Damian Evans (bass) and Kevin Brady (drums) for a concert which improved as the evening moved on.
The circumstances were hardly ideal. Whitehead and Mirabassi's flight was late and all the quartet could manage for rehearsal was a brief run-through at a workshop. Moreover, the repertoire included a few standards and much of the material used was originals.
None of this, including some of the standards, would necessarily be familiar from a playing point of view to Evans and Brady. This meant a lot of sight reading just to get the basics right, before taking into consideration any improvisation. To say that everyone concerned, particularly Evans and Brady, dealt well with this situation is something of an understatement.
Unsurprisingly, the first set was careful and, at times, uncertain. Whitehead's ballad, Tenderness, introduced by a long unaccompanied tenor cadenza, lacked the precision a slow tempo needs, although it was graced by fine solos from Mirabassi and Evans.
In contrast, the familiarity of Whitehead and Mirabassi with each other's playing was evident in their chorus-long duo introduction to There Will Never Be Another You; it had the inner tension and confidence missing elsewhere, and both tenor and piano solos in the quartet context were outstanding - and in Mirabassi's case, despite the fact that electric piano gives only a faint indication of what this marvellous pianist can do.
At the start of the second set it was clear the music had moved up a level. Whitehead and Mirabassi opened with a duo investigation of John Lennon's Imagine, whose line was subtly reassessed by the tenor and graced by delightful chordal choices by piano. Although Ladies In Mercedes started warily, it settled and the quartet began to groove on Swallow's attractive piece, with Brady pushing the soloists hard.
That the group was beginning to gel was demonstrated by another ballad, You Don't Know What Love Is. It was everything the first set's ballad was not.
Opening with just tenor and piano senza misura, with tenor gradually suggesting tempo, the quartet then moved into some of its finest playing of the evening. Tight, cohesive and controlled, it allowed the soloists to show what they could do; lyrical and inventive, piano and tenor were particularly stunning. They finished with exuberantly grooving performances on Whitehead's eponymous Lucky Boys from his and Mirabassi's new CD and Walton's Bolivia.
