The Lyric Theatre's production of Frank McGuinness' The Factory Girls is well received by Jane Coyle, while the National Chamber Choir's Ardee performance of a "well-devised programme" is reviewed by Martin Adams.
The Factory Girls - Lyric Theatre, Belfast
In other circumstances, they would probably never be friends: wise, widowed Ellen, covering the suppressed grief of three dead children with a tongue that could strip varnish; elderly spinster Una (the wonderful Barbara Adair), perpetually in the shadow of her bossy older sister; rough and ready Vera (Claire Cogan), a battered wife and devoted mother; attractive Rebecca (Jo Donnelly), who can never seem to find a man good enough; flighty teenager Rosemary (Cathleen Bradley), who reads Bunty and longs to ride away from it all on horseback.
But in spite of the differences in their private lives and circumstances, they share a single, unbreakable bond. They are all factory girls - and, as Vera puts it
between clenched teeth to their upstart boss (Drew Thompson), factory girls never grow old and never fade away. They have made an art form of big talk and dirty jokes, but it's all hot air, isn't it? Women like them do not take control of the shirt factory where they have spent their working lives, do not make decisions that will affect the livelihood of the whole community, certainly do not stand up to the men who, in various ways, have made the rules and bullied them into keeping them. Do they?
Frank McGuinness, who grew up in such a community, has an instinctive sympathy with and understanding of their hard station. His 20-year-old first play, which bears the hallmarks of a young writer learning his craft, leads director Carol Moore and this fine cast on a parallel journey of discovery, ultimately unresolved in its detail but triumphant in its sense of personal achievement.
Set in the late 1970s, when the cut-price emerging economies of the Far East were threatening the labour-intensive textile industry of the north-west of Ireland, the play covers ground painfully familiar to those working in what remains of that industry today.
Sinead O'Hanlon's set and dressings look absolutely authentic and the cast navigate the seams and buttonholes of a mountain of identical shirts as though born to the task. Eleanor Methven is admirable as Ellen, the shop steward, carrying on an old feud with John Hewitt's blustering union representative, Andy Bonner. On impulse and in the face of looming redundancies, she leads her flock into a dramatic protest, during which unspoken secrets are exposed, personality changes are undergone and power shifts from one generation to the next.
Underpinning it all is that sense of women doing it for themselves - ground that Methven and Moore covered extensively in their Charabanc days but that, in the deft, sensitive hands of McGuinness, takes on a different kind of poetry and resonance.
Jane Coyle
Runs until March 2nd; bookings at 048-90381081
National Chamber Choir/David Brophy -
Church of the Nativity, Ardee
La Guerre - Jannequin
Four Motets - Duruflé
O Sacrum Convivium - Messiaen
Salve Regina, Chansons Françaises - Poulenc
To Be Sung On The Water, Agnus Dei, Twelfth Night - Barber
In The Beginning - Copland
The National Chamber Choir visited Ardee on Monday night as part of a six-venue tour. In a well-devised programme, all the music except the first item came from the middle years of the 20th century.
The first half consisted of French music, the second of American. David Brophy conducted.
The limited resonance in the Church of the Nativity is not easy for performers. Nor is it fully satisfying for the listener. The singing seemed to take the acoustic into account, however, which helped to make this a satisfying concert.
One of the strengths of the first half was its stylistic identity. In Duruflé's Four Motets and Poulenc's Chansons Françaises, David Brophy and the choir concentrated on words, and despite some fast speeds and clipped phrase endings, the result was idiomatic for such declamatory music.
This approach even cast into a new light the squishy harmonies for which Messiaen's O Sacrum Convivium is so celebrated.
The American music on the programme also has a strong declamatory aspect, and the emphasis on that in In The Beginning, Copland's long setting of the opening chapters of Genesis, was
appropriate.
But such firmly Romantic music as Barber's Twelfth Night and Agnus Dei would have benefited from more leisure and lyricism.
The National Chamber Choir was responsive to the conductor's attention to detail and generally made a pleasing sound. One point that needed attention was a tendency, especially in the men's sections, to lapse into indefinite pitch
when singing rapid, text-driven
rhythms.
It was significant that this did not occur in the additional item that opened the concert, a lyrical responsorial psalm composed by the church's choirmaster, Paddy Neary. He had also helped to organise this concert - and was so effective that it attracted an audience of nearly 500.
Martin Adams
David Brophy plays tonight at Dánlann an Chláir, Ennis
