James Stephens's 1912 fable The Crock of Gold has an odd place in the firmament of Irish literary modernism.
Though it has hardly been out of print since its first publication, it is seldom considered by critics. This is partly because Stephens's quirky tale of a philosopher's adventures with leprechauns, fairies, gods and policemen seems out of keeping with the turbulent times in which it was written.
Stephens may have been a nationalist and a socialist but his major work seems too capriciously fanciful to tell us much about era of the Ulster Covenant, the Great Lockout and the 1916 Rising. It is also partly because The Crock of Gold has a large dose of the kind of 19th-century whimsy that went out of fashion a decade after its publication when Joyce and Eliot restructured the Western literary imagination, and that set the book up for Flann O'Brien's brilliantly merciless parody in At Swim-Two-Birds.
Yet it is worth remembering that Joyce chose Stephens to finish Finnegans Wake if he himself died before completing it. And if we remember that, we can also remember that, for all its passages of unbearable whimsy, The Crock of Gold is in a recognisably European tradition. Its tale of a seeker after wisdom follows on from Ibsen's Peer Gynt, from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and from Kirkegaard's philosophical fables. It is moreover recognisably modernist or even post-modernist in its promiscuous mix of narratives and contexts, taking in everything from William Blake to Buddhism, from socialism to theosophy, from Irish folklore to Greek mythology.
This very promiscuity of contexts is a challenge for the large-scale stage version presented here by Storytellers and the Civic Theatre. The director Fiona Buffini has to create a world which can contain gods and leprechauns, fairy women and peasants, allegorical personifications and at least notionally real people. With designer Kathy Strachan, she opts for a single set, an open wicker mound with projected backdrops above it, giving a half-figurative, half-abstract feel to proceedings. It works for much but not all of the action. While the story stays in a broadly mythic territory, the single set makes sense. When the Philosopher is hurled into an unfamiliar urban world or when Stephens wants to evoke real human horrors, the lack of contrast is problematic.
This limitation is emblematic of a broader uncertainty. Is The Crock of Gold to be seen as a period piece, a cosy fairy tale? Or is to be seen as a strange, angular essay in modernism? By and large, Buffini's production tends toward the former option, in that it avoids any real air of disturbance. Yet there are also hints that she would like to pull at some of the darker threads but worries that if she did so the whole fabric might unravel.
She might be right in that, for staging The Crock of Gold is a complex task that demands a clean narrative line. As might be expected from a Storytellers production, that is the strength of Buffini's direction. The 30 different roles are presented with great clarity by a cast of just eight, with Janet Moran and Joseph Kelly showing an especially impressive adaptability, and Bosco Hogan and Carrie Crowley bringing both vigour and humour to the main roles of the Philosopher and the Thin Woman.
Even though there are tedious passages, especially in the second half, the problem lies with Stephens more than with the production. In general, Buffini maintains a rapid pace and a light touch. She also gets the overall tone right: neither sending-up the fable nor talking it entirely seriously.
A more complex approach might well have got in the way of this fluency. But it is still hard not to wish for some evidence of a willingness to break out of the novel's prissiness. One of the strands of the story, for example, is undeniably about sex. Caitlin (well played by Moran) is part peasant's daughter, part Kathleen Ní Houlihan and part Little Red Riding Hood. She is seduced by the goat-god Pan. It is a fair bet that Pan doesn't want her because he needs a bridge partner. But Buffini keeps the encounter on a largely symbolic level. A lack of earthiness might not matter so much on the page, but it does matter on the stage, and the absence keeps The Crock of Gold at a distance. It comes across as an enjoyable trip into a idiosyncratic old imagination rather than a recreation of that distinctive mind for the 21st century. - Fintan O'Toole
Until Mar 25; then tours until May 20
Clarion Trio - NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Gordon Jacob - Trio; Rebecca Clarke: Lullaby. Morpheus. Bruch - Eight Pieces Op 83 (exc). Rebecca Clarke - Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale. Schumann - Fantasy Pieces Op 73. Mozart - Clarinet Trio.
The Clarion Trio brings together a number of players seen regularly in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, clarinettist Matthew Billing, viola-player Francis Harte, and pianist Fergal Caulfield.
Between the trios by Jacob, Bruch and Mozart they placed pieces for viola and piano (Rebecca Clarke's Lullaby and Morpheus), clarinet and viola (her Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale) and clarinet and piano (Schumann's Fantasy Pieces).
It was interesting to hear the work of the English composer Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), herself a viola player. She was an early female member of Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra and also the first female composition student of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London. Of the three pieces offered, the Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale, written in 1942 when the composer was making her living in the US as a nanny, is by far the most imaginative in its handling of instrumental colour.
The Clarion Trio's style was mostly nicely judged in its understatement, though the pianist, who admirably tucked away some of the busiest piano accompaniments, played some of the simpler ones rather too prominently.
The group's playing seemed to show a settling and a gathering of confidence, matching the rise in compositional aspiration from Jacob and Clarke to Schumann and Mozart. Paradoxically, because of the quality of the music, it was in the Mozart that the expressive diffidence of the always impressively fluent piano playing was most pronounced. This promising group's strongest musical connection seems to be between clarinet and viola. - Michael Dervan
