Reviewed: Whereabouts, Fishamble's erratic but riveting assembly of short, site-specific plays at Temple Bar; Brian Kennedy at the Olympia Theatre and NCC/Antunes at the National Gallery.
Whereabouts. Meet at Temple Bar Information Centre, Dublin
Voyeurism, that time-honoured act of secretly watching the private activities of others, may be socially reprehensible, but it is also essentially the driving force of theatre. Whereabouts, Fishamble's erratic but quite riveting assembly of short, site-specific plays, chooses instead to reward you for sticking your nose in other people's business. In fact, as soon as you join one of the tours through Temple Bar - there are separate daytime and evening trails - you are even given a medal . . . Congratulations.
At the far end of Temple Bar, where the cobbles resolve into tarmacadam, there is a pleasant cafe. Here, in a quiet section at the back, a government mole slips explosive information about Ireland's complicity in the war on terror to a sceptical journalist, with no one to see them apart from a handful of waitresses and about 12 tourists wearing gold medals.
The tone of Colin Murphy's Dublin Noir might best be described as "hard-boiled absurdum": as the whistleblower, Enda Oates, seems serious and paranoid enough (and, without wanting to spoil the surprise, this thing goes right to the top), but why is he entrusting this information to Ronan Leahy's tetchy hack, an "investigative journalist" whose most pressing duty that day is to finish a profile of Samantha Mumba?
Short form drama is a tricky business and the plays that comprise each of these trails find different ways to adjust to its confines. Some, like Jody O'Neill's Lament for Joseph (in which a distraught inner-city mother desperately seeks her runaway son) and Louise Lowe's Eclipsed (in which a distraught inner-city junkie/prostitute itemises her many travails) take the form of street-corner declamatory monologues.
Temple Bar, however, is rarely in short supply of street corner declamatory monologues, and so the performances of Fionnuala Murphy and Aoife Duffin, overwrought as they are, weave themselves into the fabric of the city - reality and fiction blur.
Shane Carr's Mean Sweeps has a more considered immediacy, placing Eamonn Hunt as a Kerry exile living rough in Dublin, temporarily employed to lead us to our next destination. Carr constructs an understated and fluid progression for Hunt, allowing the details of his character's life and history to ebb out amusingly, then poignantly.
Under Jim Culleton's direction, Hunt engages directly with his audience, and as he points out the district's overlooked sights or comments on CCTV surveillance, Temple Bar becomes as vivid and compelling as he does.
At once seamy and lyrical, Tom Swift's The Other Woman manages to convey all the hollowness of the sex industry together with the obstacles impeding human connection, without ever resorting to those inadequate communication devices commonly known as words. Andrea Irvine, as a frustrated cleaner, and India Whisker, as a lap dancer, instead perform a dance in which air-fresheners and compacts become involved partners through Mojisola Adebayo's direction. Each understands that some things are best left unsaid.
If the fractious changes of contemporary Dublin are implicit in Swift's piece, they become more overt in Belinda McKeon's Drapes.
"This isn't me," begins John Olohan's solemn father, investigating the wares of a boutique store, while his daughter - played by Olga Wehry - bubbles up within the fitting room. McKeon isn't the first playwright to look at the nation's identity crisis, from cheery penury to hollow consumerism, but, like Anna's winter ensembles perhaps, her short piece has several layers.
Anna is too sympathetically drawn to be metaphor with a credit card, and director Karl Shiels ensures that neither the story nor the allegory eclipse one another. Shiels fares less well with Bernard Opens Up, a loud, crashing, coke-snorting piece of gibberish about the VIP-strewn opening of a new club, written by Jack Olohan, but charmingly serves Jacqueline Strawbridge's Eggshell, in which a dragged-up Neil Watkins plays a diva descending a staircase.
The pieces that linger in the mind longest, John Grogan's perspective-switching Blind Spot and John Cronin's wonderfully bizarre Twenty Two - both expertly directed by Róisin McBrinn - best exploit the nature of site-specific performance. Grogan's brings shades of Edward Albee to the low-lit setting of a club, where a relationship plays out like a dark, twisted game. Just as Charlie Bonner and Olga Wehrly slip the expectations of their roles with disorienting results, the corner mirrors of their private booth split our perception four different ways.
Cronin's Twenty Two, meanwhile, is certainly one to catch. Along a narrow, sheltered laneway, José Miguel Jiménez and Dylan Tighe have an arrestingly surreal encounter. A discomfiting lesson to would-be Good Samaritans everywhere, it puts Jiménez in our position: the observer who becomes too involved with the curious story of a stranger - and, in Tighe's performance, few come stranger.
Selected from submissions to a Fishamble competition, these plays of disparate tone and style don't quite join up - but that, it seems, is the point.
In a city abounding with fractured stories - some shouted, some whispered, and almost all unresolved - the guided tour is the only way to navigate, slipping unexpectedly down side alleys, losing us around corners.
And when it stops, you see the city in a different way: a place teeming with narratives, if you just take the time to look.
• Until July 16. Daytime trail at noon, 12.30pm, 1pm, 1.30pm; evening trail at 6pm, 6.30pm, 7pm, 7.30pm. Sold out, but possibility of returns. - Peter Crawley
NCC/Antunes. National Gallery, Dublin
Gesualdo - Deh, come in van sospiro. O dolce mio tesoro. Resta di darmi noia. Brahms - Fünf Gesänge Op 104
Seóirse Bodley - An Bás is an Bheatha. Schumann - Vier Doppelchörige Gesänge Op 141
Celso Antunes's programme-building strategy with the National Chamber Choir has long been the obvious and effective one of working with contrasts. His latest series, titled "Eros and Thanatos", is true to form. It has to be one of the simplest challenges he has undertaken. Think about it. A choral programme that somehow didn't treat love and death would be about as unlikely as a World Cup final without a free kick.
Thursday's programme at the National Gallery juxtaposed 19th-century works by Brahms and Schumann with the altogether more modern-sounding worlds of Seóirse Bodley and Gesualdo, though none of the works involved is exactly new: Bodley's An Bás is an Bheatha dates from 1960, and the three Gesualdo madrigals from the early 17th century.
Antunes's approach to Gesualdo was more modernist than expressionist, missing out on the spine-tingling effect of dissolving through radical harmonic shifts in favour of a blunter, more clipped style.
The music itself, of course, remained as dizzying in its journeys as ever, and the texts blended the conductor's chosen themes into an inseparable amalgam.
Bodley's setting of five striking anonymous Irish texts, rich in a kind of ancient, sometimes un-PC wisdom, predates the radicalism that would invade his style later in the 1960s. His alert textual responsiveness strikes an unusual note in the last poem, where his slightly giddy handling of the Latin word "Finis" contrasts with the music's affirmative close.
It's often been the technical demands of 20th-century music that have brought out the best in the National Chamber Choir. This time, unusually, the singers sounded most comfortable in the warmer regions of the Brahms and particularly the interplay of Schumann's rarely-heard, late Op 141, for double chorus. - Michael Dervan
Next concert in series is on Thursday, July 27th
Brian Kennedy. Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Brian Kennedy is introduced onto the stage to the sound of Monty Python's Brian Song from The Life of Brian, a swirling Shirley Bassey-style tribute to all things Brian. It is not quite the funniest thing about the performance, but it is possibly the best song played all evening.
Post-Eurovision, Kennedy's profile has never been higher, and his devoted fan base appears to be growing. This is one of five nights at the Olympia, and while the stalls are only two-thirds full, his crowd are true believers, hanging on his every word, from the name-dropping (Kennedy might as well change the lyrics to "Have I told you lately that I used to sing with Van Morrison?") to the anecdotes.
What this performance proves, however, is that Kennedy is merely a proficient peddler of cliche, from his lyrics to the music to the delivery.
No song dares to leave the heart unmentioned and the emotions untugged. Christopher Street, for instance, with its cloying lyrics and uncomplicated storytelling, betrays his populist ambitions all too obviously.
Kennedy, for all his years in the business, is an awkward performer. His forced hip wiggles, groin thrusting, clenched fists and elaborate hair-tossing appear to be a simulation of what he thinks a performance should be.
A solo version of The Ballad of Killaloe (sample lyric: "Drifting through the hills of Spain/Oh God, I'd love to see you again") takes an amusing detour, squeezing in digs at Daniel O'Donnell and a few lines from the Streets' Dry Your Eyes, both rapturously received.
This juxtaposition is unintentionally the most revealing moment of the night - Kennedy resembles nothing so much as O'Donnell for the under-50s, while the Streets' Mike Skinner possesses the sort of lyrical dexterity that Kennedy can only dream of.
What Kennedy might lack in lyrical sophistication, however, he should be able to compensate for with his strong voice. But his singing style is full of over-earnest trilling that happily ignores the song's feel and lyrics for some vocal acrobatics.
He finishes on an astonishingly over-the-top You Raise Me Up. Unaccompanied by instrument, we can hear his voice in all its showboating splendour.
There is plenty of room in this world for simple, inoffensive music, but what Kennedy offers is too often simplistic and maudlin instead. - Davin O'Dwyer
