An eclectic mix including theatre and ballet in today's reviews.
Rockaby/Eh Joe
Gate, Dublin
One thing that is not said often enough about Samuel Beckett's late, short plays is how beautiful they are. With their rhythmic, mesmeric language and minimal, precisely calibrated movement, they have a classical severity and a ghostly elegance. Beckett turned the ageing writer's fear of his declining powers into a rich subject matter, making decline itself a conscious, rigorously shaped process. The diminuendo makes a heart-breaking sound, the dying fall becomes a graceful movement.
The first two productions of the Gate's Beckett festival - Loveday Ingram directing Sian Philips in Rockaby and Nick Dunning directing Harry Towb and Peter Cadden in Ohio Impromptu - both capture this beauty though neither does so perfectly.
Rockaby is one of Beckett's most apparently simple pieces: an old woman in a consciously anachronistic black ballgown sits in a rocking chair, while her disembodied voice recounts her desire to see through her window "one other living soul". But it is marvellously structured. The words keep time with the rocking of the chair, lulling us into a kind of trance. The woman chimes in with the voice on occasional phrases, especially the repeated "time she stopped", creating a resonant counterpoint. She eases downwards towards death.
Philips's recorded voice has a wonderfully warm, lilting quality, her physical presence has a monumental gravity that is sternly impressive, and the contrast between the two creates a richly textured performance. She eschews the hints of ferocity that I've admired in other performances of the role, but her interpretation has its own integrity. Ingram's direction, though, is somewhat oddly modulated. The gradual softening of both the taped and live voices is not clearly evident, and, perhaps to compensate, the final movement, when the woman's head is "slowly inclined" to indicate death becomes a rather exaggerated gesture.
The poignantly evocative Ohio Impromptu has a similarly split protagonist, this time an old man who is played by two actors "as like in appearance as possible" - a feat well accomplished by Towb and Cadden. Towb is The Reader, a mysterious messenger from someone now dead and once loved by Cadden's Listener. The book Towb reads evokes the dead one until the story is told for the last time and "nothing is left to tell". The Listener does not speak but regulates the reading by knocking on the table, trying to delay the closing of the book and the onset of death. Dunning's production moves exquisitely and delivers its final moments of silent looks superbly. But it might have been better if Towb had not been made to take the idea of reading so literally. There is a kind of realism to the way he works through the pages as if deciphering a script he has not read before, and he does so with great skill. The mesmeric, incantatory quality of the reading is, however, diminished in the process.
The real jewel of this first tranche of plays is Atom Egoyan's startling production of Eh Joe, with a towering performance by Michael Gambon and, through her recorded voice, the riveting presence of Penelope Wilton. This is a moment of genuine innovation. Eh Joe is a television play written for the BBC in 1966. Its whole structure, both aesthetically and philosophically, is built around the TV camera. Joe, a man in his 50s, is alone in his room, when a woman's voice comes into his head, speaking of a lover who was driven to suicide by his coldness. In nine carefully calibrated moves, the camera gradually moves towards his face. Philosophically, the play draws on Biblical passages and on Berkeley's notion of God as, like the television camera, the one who sees everything.
Since the camera is so central to the play, the idea of staging it is obviously problematic. Egoyan's production is therefore something that is seldom available with Beckett: pure experiment. His radical solution is to have Gambon appear behind a translucent screen. As the voice enters, a hidden camera then projects Gambon's face, in a slowly increasing close-up, onto the screen, so that we see him "live" in two senses: as a physical presence on the stage and as an instantly recreated electronic image. This notion is not in itself new, but it is brilliantly imagined by Egoyan and breathtakingly performed by Gambon.
What Gambon does is to create a physical parallel to the ghostly technological operation. Just as the camera projects his face on the screen, he makes that face itself a screen on which the words of the disembodied voice are projected. He does not speak at all, but he attains an astonishing eloquence through the set of his jaw, the movements of his lips, the tension that stretches the folds and wrinkles of his face, the fear and agony that flit across his eyes. It is a magnificent piece of acting and a dazzling addition to the Beckett canon.
Rockabye closes tonight. Eh Joe tonight at 8.30pm and from April 12th-15th at 6pm.
Fintan O'Toole
Joel Harrison Quartet,
Whelan's, Dublin,
There's a thin line, sometimes, between muzak and cutting edge innovation. At times in the earlier stages of his set, New York guitarist Joel Harrison teetered dangerously close to the brink, as he burrowed his way into the repertoire of his namesake, George Harrison. It was as if he was having trouble calibrating the mood of each piece, the mercury rising and falling with abandon.
But Dave Binney's alto sax provided a magnificent fulcrum on which the music ultimately turned, aided and gently abetted by Seán Carpio's subtle percussion, and Dave Ambrosio's inventive basslines.
Harrison's tendency to trawl the depths of others' work yields mixed results. His exploration of George's All Things Must Pass pursued a rainbow's spectrum of tones, as he playfully tossed the particles of the melody in the air and gloried in their disassembly, only to return them to a state of utterly disciplined structure before the final note sounded.
Borrowing Harrison's Within You Without You (from The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album) and rendering it anew, complete with a taut bass line from Ambrosio, was initially spine-tingling in its energy, but ultimately dissatisfying as it meandered down too many cul de sacs in search of a fresh identity.
His mining of Appalachian/bluegrass was refreshingly unprecious: Harrison jousting boldly with one of roots music's stalwarts, Shady Grove and making it all his own, although his success was undoubtedly marked by his willingness to push the melody line to its outer limits. In places, his compass remained perilously close to the original song's magnetic field, and it was here that he faltered, sacrificing the belly-deep sentiment of the song for the more cerebral demands of his jazz instincts.
Harrison's own guitar was impressively content to yield ground to Dave Binney's spellbinding alto sax, tracing spellbinding curlicues around, under and sometimes straight through the music. At times unsettling, at others unpredictable - but always challenging.
Siobhán Long
Crash Ensemble
Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD
Cage - 4'33"; Feldman - Why patterns?; Philip Glass - Company; Peter Adriaansz - XIII;
Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
It fell to the Crash Ensemble, as part of TCD's Beckett Centenary Symposium on Thursday, to begin the unusual April focus on the music of Morton Feldman which has arisen through the month's Beckett celebrations.
The first half of the programme opened with John Cage's 4'33", his notorious, "silent" piece, the inverted commas necessary because the impossibility of pure silence is the very point of the work. Performances of 4'33" tend to have an unusual air of anticipation, of people waiting for something to happen to interrupt the background stillness. On this occasion that background included the almost ubiquitous quiet hiss of modern buildings, traffic noise making its way into the Samuel Beckett Theatre from outside, and what sounded like an audience member's mishap with some baggage.
The anticipating and the waiting have clear resonances in Beckett. So also does the patterning of Morton Feldman's 1978 Why Patterns? for flute, glockenspiel and piano. Here the players explore their lines independently of each other, so the larger patterns emerge from the loose juxtapositions of smaller ones rather than tight co-ordination. The performers dwell on their material as if it were something hovering in their consciousness, requiring to be turned over and turned over, again and again, until some not quite grasped lock may offer release.
Philip Glass's String Quartet No 2, Company, was created out of music written for Beckett's play of the same name, and sounded inconclusively poignant in the hands of the four Crash players.
The second half of the concert seemed less concerned with Beckett. Seattle-born Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz's new Structure XIII created the effect of a collectively woven drone with electronic overlay.
And the rigour with which Philip Glass's early Music in Similar Motion sticks to what its title promises levered attention on to Simon Doyle's busy video, obsessed with round things. These included clocks, plates, plaques, labels, wheels, dials, coins, globes and fruit among a vast array of rapid-fire images.
Michael Dervan
Swan Lake,
Cork Opera House,
Wickedness brings out the best in all of us and it is as Odile, the black swan, that ballerina Kristina Terentieva shines most brightly in this production of Swan Lake. The role offers an opportunity to match technique with personality; when a little acting ability is required, Terentieva can supply it. This is crucial to the success of a ballet of such visual scale and musical grandeur in which performances, however delightful the costumes and atmospheric the settings, can be so reliable as to be almost stale.
Evghenii Tkach's Court Jester however can't be accused of lack of freshness - he dances with verve and energy throughout this story of a prince and two rival princesses, transformed by enchantment into swans.
Even allowing for the scene in which Prince Siegfried falls in love with the white swan Odette, which is danced by both principals (Alexei Terentiev as the Prince) with such grace as to animate both the beauty and meaning of Tchaikovsky's writing, the ballroom virtuosity of the Black Swan is the most memorable aspect of this ballet.
The work was designed as a show-case; the succession of suites - cygnets, pas de trois, solos and folk-dances - and the expanse of a well-drilled corps de ballet substitute for the narrative coherence, which here is sacrificed anyway to an unexpected and early ending.
Conductor Svetlana Popova extracted a good sound from her orchestra for this Ellen Kent and Ballet International touring presentation featuring the Chisinau National Ballet.
Closes tonight.
Mary Leland
