Gary Mitchell's new play Remants of Fear currently running at The Rock Theatre in Belfast is reviewed by Peter Crawley, while Martin Adams went to St Michael's in Dun Laoghaire for a recital by Malcolm Proud featuring Bach and Byrd.
Remnants of Fear. The Rock Theatre, Belfast
"My weapons are words," the playwright Gary Mitchell told The Irish Times late last year, in the heated aftermath of a UDA attack against his home in north Belfast. It is tempting, then, to view his new play, Remnants of Fear, as Mitchell's retaliation.
Set among a family of working-class Protestants torn apart by their association with the UDA, the play is now performed under the shadow of its author's continuing exile. In Pam Brighton's production for DubbelJoint, Mitchell's response is delivered neither in rage nor defiance. Instead he has sought out the space that drama provides to explore and to understand.
Through the story of Tony, a troubled Belfast teenager from a broken home, pivoting between the strait-laced renunciation of violence offered by his father, Charlie (Lalor Roddy), and the corrupting allure of terrorism as advertised in the swagger of his uncle, Geordie (Kieran Lagan), Mitchell exposes the pathology of paramilitarism, the cancer that consumes a community.
Shot through with mordant humour, and tracing a situation that melts a family dilemma into a social metaphor, the play is brisk and engaging. But if Mitchell's mind seems unclouded by rage, he succumbs to another form of revenge in his humour.
There is something splenetic but depthless, for instance, in Darren, a teenage loyalist hoodlum with a cartoonishly over-pronounced lisp, which spoils the point about how disaffected youths can be inducted into an ideology of hatred. There is something enjoyable, but similarly overstated, in the caked-on irony of such proclamations as: "If the UDA says it isn't involved in criminal activity, it means exactly that. Even if we have to petrol bomb them into submission."
More insightful is the affected charisma of Lagan's UDA man whose sales pitch - "I own my own house. I have my own car. I work for myself. I answer to no one" - will always seem more attractive than the honest penury which hangs heavy on Lalor Roddy's shoulders.
Eileen Pollack, too, is convincing as the mother to Charlie and Geordie, addicted to the protection and money her UDA son provides.
If Tony's induction to the UDA loses a tragic arc it is no fault of Sam Murdock's excellent performance, but rather because the character takes to violence with implausible speed, his humanity withering without a twinge of guilt or uncertainty.
It may have been harder to humanise or understand his teenage attackers than Mitchell thought. But, as easy as it is for a west Belfast audience to accept his portrait of a corrupt UDA employing flimsy rhetoric and extreme violence toward petty personal grudges, that depiction is harder to reconcile with an organisation that has apparently been incensed by something as abstract as the work of a playwright. Mitchell's words in this context may not provide a devastating counter-attack, but in the catharsis they provide, and in the sardonic laughter they allow, the play proves that he will not allow fear to smother them. - Peter Crawley
Continues from Aug 10-19 at the Rock Theatre, then Aug 24-25 at Craic Theatre, Coalisland and Aug 26 at Iontas Theatre, Castleblaney
Malcolm Proud (organ). St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Bach - Fantasia in C minor BWV562. Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam BWV684. Byrd - Praeludium and Fantasia. Hughe Ashton's Grownde. A Fancie. Bach - Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot BWV678, 679. Fantasia and Fugue in C minor BWV537.
This programme was uncompromising in the best sense. As Malcolm Proud explained, he had designed it partly around the fantasia; and as Thomas Morley explained some 400 years ago, in the fantasia or fancy, as the English called it, may "more art be shewn than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing".
With impressive consistency, Malcolm Proud conveyed that desirable combination of intellectual rigour and free fancy. In the imitative textures of fantasias by Byrd and Bach, his striking ability to sustain slow or steady speeds was underlined by a knowing disclosure of the contrapuntal textures.
Not many players can show that type of control; and it is a backhanded compliment to point out that, although Bach's Fantasia in C minor BWV562 felt too slow, it never dragged or sat down.
Purists need not worry over the principle of playing Byrd's music for virginals on the organ. But transferring music designed for a non-sustaining instrument to the ultimate sustainer gives the player plenty to fret about. Proud did it without any obvious effort.
The increasing contrapuntal and harmonic elaboration in the Praeludium and Fantasia (C and LII) from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and the steady tread of Hughe Ashton's Grownde from My Ladye Nevells Booke, showed that this musician knows exactly what's involved, and can deliver.
The programme's three chorale preludes by Bach included the two settings of Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot, BWV678 and 679.
The text of this chorale is about the 10 commandments that were delivered from heaven to earth. So beautifully were they played that they achieved one of the ideals of Baroque music - they transported you from earth to heaven. - Martin Adams
