If Irish people of a certain age find it hard to believe that the good times will last, it is because they have already experienced the grim aftermath of a boom. On the most immediate level, Tom Murphy's fierce 1985 play Conversations on a Homecoming demands attention as the bad dream that haunts the sleep of the Celtic Tiger.
Conversations on a Homecoming
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Fintan O'Toole
What we have on stage is the wreckage of the 1960s boom washed up on the bleak shores of an east Galway town in the early 1970s. A decade after the high aspirations of Sean Lemass and the high-flown rhetoric of John F Kennedy, the once-golden youth is dwindling into a sour middle age of lost hopes and corrosive cynicism.
The setting, brilliantly imagined at the Lyric in Monica Frawley's hyper-real designs, is a decrepit pub which once aspired to the status of HQ for a cultural revolution against gombeen politics and a narrow-minded church. Its owner, the JFK lookalike J.J. Kilkelly, is off on another batter. His former protégés - the caustic schoolteacher Tom, the bumptious auctioneer Liam and the gentle, unaffected mechanic Junior - gather to greet the return of one of their number, Michael.
He is an actor in New York, the one who got away. If he has been a success, they will hate him for mocking their failures. If he has failed, they will hate him for dimming the last ray of hope. From one angle, then, Conversations is a tangy slice-of-life, an exceptionally vivid and well-observed enactment of the mating rituals of the Irish male with the Irish pub.
At the psychic level, the play continues one of Murphy's favourite metaphors: one whole, healthy personality split between two half-men, the bitter realist Tom and the ineffectual, romantic Michael.
At the political level, meanwhile, the play is as timely for its dissection of the US aura of world leadership as it is for its more local resonance. In a delicious irony, one of the Kennedy speeches specifically recalled by Michael is literally engraved on the walls of the Lyric itself, testament to the enduring power of the rhetoric Murphy is subverting.
The joy of the play, though, is that these more convoluted currents all flow naturally from the mainstream of a readily recognisable reality. If the rhythms of Murphy's language and the clarity of his characters are looked after, they will emerge by themselves. The power of Conall Morrison's production for the Lyric is that it is a finely-tuned engine, revved up with expert timing and then let rip. The ride is hair-raising and exhilarating.
There are one or two false notes, and Morrison almost throws away one of the key moments when Peggy, Tom's perpetual girlfriend, finds a voice that carries the echoes of lost dreams. But the electrifying intensity is never lost.
The performances, from Vincent Higgins's grotesque but all too believable Liam to Frankie McCafferty's sly, subtle Junior, to Barbara Adair's stinging servility as JJ's missus and Lesley-Ann Shaw's luminosity as his daughter Anne, are as sharp as the play itself.
Runs until May 4th. Booking: 048-90381081
Paddy On The Road
The Playhouse, Derry
Derek O'Connor
In staging a theatrical celebration of the life and art of Christy Moore for Dubbeljoint Theatre Company, author Brian Moore and director Pam Brighton have fashioned as amiable a crowd-pleaser as one can possibly imagine.
Thanks to a one-man tour-de-force - in multiple roles - from actor/musician Terry O'Neill, it also manages to make for a compelling, surprisingly satisfying piece of theatre.
The framing device is at best perfunctory: in the present day, we encounter a teetotal Moore, inadvertently locked into a friend's pub after a late-night music session.
Alone with his memories, our troubadour begins to recount a remarkable musical journey - one that takes him from the grind of the British folk circuit to the stage at Carnegie Hall, by way of stints with Planxty and Moving Hearts, a penchant for wanton overindulgence and an ever-developing political conscience.
Paddy On The Road dwells largely upon the latter element of Moore's complex psyche, striving to rekindle those memories of Christy as anti-establishment radical. Any serious examination of his personal life is largely ignored in favour of the remarkable public one: as the man himself has stressed so often perhaps, in the end it's all about the songs.
And what songs they are: the work of Jimmy McCarthy, Ewan McColl, Shane McGowan, Bobby Sands and Moore himself, brought beautifully to life in O'Neill's full-blooded, impassioned renditions. Staged with the co-operation of its subject, this is an affectionate, entertaining and worthy tribute.
On tour until May 31st. For further information: Belfast 04890202222
Vogler String Quartet,
Ib Hausmann (clarinet)
St. Stephen's Church, Upper Mount Street
Douglas Sealy
Clarinet quintet in B minor, Op. 115Brahms
String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor, Op. 144Shostakovich
The Vogler Quartet chose to open each half of Tuesday's concert in St Stephen's Church with a fugue by J.S. Bach, as arranged by Mozart. This was to attune our ears to the sound of that particular group in that particular church but Bach's genial little exercises, for so they seemed, were, with difficulty, related to the two great brooding works they prefaced. These were both written in the composer's final years, both in a minor key, and one could be excused for reading into them a premonition of death.
Brahms's Quintet, frequently described as "autumnal", looks backwards with great nostalgia; Shostakovich's last string quartet is as bleak as winter and looks forward towards a terrifying emptiness. Whereas in Mozart's celebrated Quintet the clarinet is the cream on the cake, in the Brahms Quintet the cream has been cooked into the cake, creating an extraordinarily rich texture.
Ib Hausmann performed not as a soloist but as a member of the ensemble; he never called attention to his part in all he did. He coloured the tones and responses of the strings so that his contribution could hardly be separated from theirs.
There was beauty of tone, certainly, but it wasn't the first consideration, it was a by-product of a shared approach to the composer's beguiling translation of emotion into sound.
To play Shostakovich's six movements, all marked adagio, and all of unremitting bleakness, without faltering and without relaxing the tension, cannot have been easy. The Vogler Quartet played the taxing Quartet No. 15 with exemplary intentness, capturing the music's obsessive quality.
It is a long work, but when the Vogler put down their bows it was a disappointment the concert had ended.
