Irish Times writers review Transformations at the Wexford Festival Opera; Belfast Festival's The Treslet at Pope Lick Creek; Schreibstück at the Project Space Upstairs and Lamchop at Vicar Street.
Wexford Festival Opera, Transformations
Thursday was a day of contrasts at the Wexford Festival. The afternoon programme at White's of Wexford, titled Rossini's Menu, was an undercooked affair, an exercise in broad comedy, treating the relationship between the composer and chef Antonin Carême in words and music in a way that seemed more a kind of work-in-progress than a finished product. There were rough edges, loose threads and missed opportunities at all levels in this show for four singers, two actors, pianist, and a clutch of sous-chefs from local schools.
By contrast, the evening's production of Conrad Susa's Transformations worked a treat. Susa, who set Anne Sexton's reworkings of Grimm fairytales in 1973, doesn't call this piece an opera. He calls it instead "an entertainment", and he's right.
The music, skilful, polyglot, rich in tantalisingly elusive references, is too subservient to the text for the piece to work as opera normally does. It functions instead as a kind of platform on which the words are highlighted and magnified, made arresting through subtle shades in emphasis. This may sound like an arrangement that would be Monteverdian in effect. It's not. The music somehow remains too incidental for that.
Michael Barker-Craven's production is so minutely detailed, so responsive in its multi-layered echoing and filtering of the text, that you might expect the result to be manic. In almost any other work, it would be. In Transformations, what's often a collective, Jim Carrey-like hyperactivity provides a seamless experience, and, in tandem with Joe Vanek's never-ending costume changes and Paul Keogan's lighting, creates an imaginative, fluid wonderland.
The cast of eight (Fiona McAndrew, Sinéad Campbell, Paula Murrihy, nOah Stewart, Glenn Alamilla, Matthew Nelson, Peter Barrett and David Crawford) have honed their ensemble delivery to the fine timing of a high wire act, morphing in and out of character, vocal style and physical mode with the kind of ease you associate with the transformational extremities of computer graphics. And David Agler conducts the small ensemble with an alertness to match.
Yet, if you look to this Wexford Transformations for that fairytale emotional churning or crawling of the skin, you won't find it. Everything about the evening is too well done, too knowing, too complete. The precipices you might expect, the corners that might reveal the terrifyingly unknown, have all been filled in and signposted in painstaking detail. - Michael Dervan
Belfast Festival: The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek Old Museum Arts Centre
The setting is non-specific - a town outside a city somewhere in the United States. But the date is certain - 1936. This is Depression America and, through the chiaroscuro of Alan Farquharson's parched, dun-coloured design, John Comiskey's bleached lighting and Kevin McCullagh's haunting slide-guitar soundtrack, the atmosphere is of a dirt-poor Dustbowl town in the worst of times. Patrick O'Kane makes his directorial debut in this Prime Cut Irish premiere of Naomi Wallace's lyrical play, which does not flinch once from either the personal or political reality of emotionally and spiritually barren lives. This is a place where young people have no future and no aims. But 17-year-old Pace Creagan has discovered a thrilling way of challenging her narrow horizons - via the arrival of the daily 7.10 express train, which thunders at headlong speed over the trestle of the town's iron-clad viaduct.
Pace, bewitchingly played by the wide-eyed Pippa Nixon, has created her own strange, secret code around the daredevil game played between train and trestle. It is a game which has already dispensed with one unlucky victim and now it is the turn of likeable, innocent 15-year-old Dalton Chance to be drawn by Pippa into pleasures of the mind, the flesh and the imagination, which are doomed to end badly. Under O'Kane's persuasive direction, Nixon and Paul Mallon as Dalton forge a touching, passionate friendship, whose stakes rise steadily towards an inevitable climax. Maggie Cronin and Robert Jezek are a most effective pairing as Dalton's parents, a feisty hard-working mother and a father ground down and rendered impotent and invisible by long-term unemployment. Sean Kearns is the prison guard, who has his own reasons to hate and fear the trestle at Pope Creek and who plays on Dalton's tragedy for his own twisted ends. What should be a final heart-stopping sequence is so far missing a vital beat, but one suspects that this will be rectified once the pace and pulse of this beautiful and sadly topical play are allowed to break their shackles and fly. - Jane Coyle
Runs until November 4th, then tours to Castlebar, Monaghan, Coleraine, Lisburn and Newry.
Schreibstück, Project Space Upstairs
Previous performances of Distanzlos and It is better to . . . at Project have shown how choreographer Thomas Lehmen is more interested in systems than steps. But in Schreibstück (writing piece) he puts complete faith in a dance score that contains 39 merest hints for action. The production consists of three versions of this score, created independently by three groups who then come together on the one stage. Performing in canon gives a simple form to the work: one group begin on their own and are eventually joined by the other two, ending with the last group performing alone. This, and exact timings of one minute per action, mean that the result isn't an incoherent mess.
The varied responses by choreographers Rebecca Walter (Ireland), Anne Grete Eriksen and Leif Hernes (Norway) and Andrea Bold (Austria) lead to inevitable comparisons. Eriksen and Hernes cloak the score with abstract movement and so the intention of Lehmen's keywords for action, like "disco" or "dying", are diluted. Every response is valid, or course, but the clean technique and beautiful line of dancers Inger Malene Glette, Gry Beck Hansen and Lone Torvick seemed to conceal more than reveal. The Austrian group of Martin Tomann, David Ender and Cezary Tomaszewski blended impeccable part-song with whimsy and humour, so a lightbulb powered by three potatoes wired together was their "summary" of the co-operative essence of Schreibstück or a cyclical story of uninspiring studio hours with visits to the therapist depicted "working". Katherine O'Malley, James Hosty and Fearghus Ó Concúir were more straight-talking in their action and took Lehmen at face-value.
"Fucking" was exactly that and "personal philosophy" sounded genuine rather than acted.
But the beauty of Schreibstück is the sum of the parts, which together captured the sense of self-questioning that is at the heart of Lehmen's dogma. Whether responding to the score with fear, irreverence or honesty the multiple responses form a rich texture. And rather than stifling expression the rigidity of the score takes responsibility for form, allowing the three choreographers concentrate on essential and clearly focused expressions. - Michael Seaver
Lambchop, Vicar Street, Dublin
They're the yin to Randy Newman's yang: re-scripting the finer points of life's rich pageant with an ominous glee. Lambchop exist on a diet of distilled insights and jagged-edged velveteen vocals, careening from bass baritone to boy soprano in less time than it takes to draw breath. Lead singer, Kurt Wagner is clearly a man relishing this second-chance saloon, having survived a recent bout of prostate cancer and some serious facial surgery. Seated for the duration of the performance, he commanded an impressive presence from beneath his baseball cap, his easy on-stage banter with pianist Tony Crow hinting at a musical conglomerate at home in their own skin.
Much of Thursday's gig was populated by material from Lambchop's recent shadowy Damaged. Wagner's melancholy permeates every note and syllable, yet there's a fierce, illicit humour lurking deep within. From the foreboding of Fear to the crisp observations of Paperback Bible, Lambchop trawled through life's detritus and kept coming up with minor gemstones along the way. Their ace card is their bass line, all rugged lines and swish interiors, all the better to wrap their aptly Wagnerian vocals in the most comforting of swaddling clothes.
Mostly, Lambchop never raised their pace past a canter, and at times they were positively workmanlike in their arrangements, and yet what they lacked in momentum, they made up in sheer atmosphere. As Wagner basked in the soporific melancholy of My Blue Wave, he hauled his audience along with him, his lonesome vocals entreating them to yield to the sanctuary of the blues - at least momentarily.
It's as if Wagner's vocal cords are the progeny of Crash Test Dummies, Fine Young Cannibals and Tindersticks' Stuart Staples, but Lambchop's heart clearly beats to a funkier drum. This is cerebral music for punters who still want to use their eardrums for more than just keeping time. Forget Kurt's slushy delivery (that metamorphoses most song lines into a continuous lava flow of sound): Lambchop ply a vanishing trade in literate atmospherics that reeks of a posse of players who still simply love what they do. - Siobhan Long
