Reviews include Copenhagen at the Project and Bizet's Carmen by Opera Ireland at the Gaiety.
Copenhagen - Project
First things first: Rough Magic's production of Michael Frayn's international hit play Copenhagen is very good. Rather better, indeed, than Michael Blakemore's much-praised production on Broadway - more engagingly acted, more fluently directed, with a less sterile design and a greater sense of intimacy. Played in the round, with a superbly supple lighting design by John Comiskey, it feels less heavy, less static.
Since Blakemore's productions in London and New York have given great pleasure to large audiences, it seems safe to assume that Lynne Parker's production will give at least as much pleasure to audiences at the Project in Dublin.
The problem with Frayn's play, however, is that the pleasure an audience gets from it is not the laughter or terror or pity that usually comes with a successful piece of theatre. It is, first and foremost, the pleasure of self-satisfaction.
Copenhagen is an international hit because it makes audiences feel good about themselves. You leave the theatre thinking not "I am moved" or "I am sick laughing" or "My view of the world has been altered".
Your main thought is: "I've just sat through 2½ hours of a play about two nuclear physicists and not been too bored. Amn't I great?"
Copenhagen examines, with a stunning command of narrative structure, the relationship between two of the founders of modern physics, the Dane Niels Bohr and his German protégé and collaborator, Werner Heis-enberg. Bohr developed the quantum theory of the atom, Heisenberg quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. In the course of Copenhagen, Frayn provides a crash course in these concepts.
The core of the play, however, is the mystery of a visit by Heisenberg to Bohr's house in 1941, when the former was a leading figure in the German atom bomb programme and the latter was a half-Jewish citizen of a country under Nazi occupation. The possible interpret-ations of Heisenberg's motives that Frayn explores range from an attempt to pump Bohr for information on the American nuclear bomb project to an attempt to warn the Allies that the Nazi bomb was becoming a genuine prospect.
All of this is laid out with formidable ingenuity. Copenhagen is, in its own way, as cleverly structured as Frayn's justly celebrated farce, Noises Off. What makes the latter not just a more theatrical play but also a more intellectually daring one, how-ever, is that while Copenhagen is about physics, Noises Off is physics, a dance of space and time. The reason Copenhagen is regarded as a great intellectual enterprise and Noises Off is not is that audiences don't feel flattered by a farce.
For all its explication of matrix mechanics, complementarity, spin and the critical mass of U-235, there is much less to Copenhagen than meets the eye. Its form is that of two very smart men explaining hard sums to a woman. It has some of the clumsiest dialogue ever written by an adept playwright. Large parts of the text are dramatically undigested wodges of explication. The constant resort to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a governing metaphor for the attempts to reconstruct the meaning of the meeting becomes heavy-handed.
Most seriously of all, Frayn keeps a kind of mandarin distance from the questions of politics, science and morality that spin around the action. There is no real point-of-view, no passionate engagement, no urgency. The form is didactic, but there is no lesson, nothing that Frayn desperately needs to tell us. There is, as a result, a strange hollowness at the heart of the play.
This production exposes this absence all the more clearly because it is itself so good. The three actors - Owen Roe's big-hearted Bohr, Declan Conlon's sorrowfully mysterious Heisenberg and Ingrid Craigie's sharply intelligent Margrethe Bohr - bring as much flesh and blood passion and as much skill to the roles as anyone could. What they reveal in the process is the irony that a play about a breathtaking revolution in our conception of the world should be so theatrically timid.
Fintan O'Toole
Carmen - Opera Ireland
It wouldn't be surprising for Calixto Bieito's production of Carmen to be remembered most of all for a couple of theatrical gestures - Carmen's unexpected entrance via a telephone kiosk or the clutter of dusty motor-cars rolled into and out of the smugglers' hideout in Act III.
Bieito's production, updated to the later 20th century and using the version with spoken French dialogue, fills out some of the opera's lesser moments. The soldiers involved in the changing of the guard are portrayed with ugly, intrusive masculinity. The crowd assembled for the bullfight of Act IV face the audience as they push and jostle at the front of the stage, restrained by a thick rope, ogling and beckoning like a star-struck crowd watching the actors file into a gala film première.
The Carmen of Patricia Fernandez is an alluring presence, though it's not quite clear how well the often detached Don José of Emil Ivanov really registers the fact. There's something zombie-like about his physical demeanour, though, happily, this is not really reflected in his strong voice presence and sound musical responses. Fernandez would have made a strong musical impact, too, I suspect, if she'd been given any room to manoeuvre by the all too consistently rigid conducting of David Heusel. Whatever happens on stage, Carmen's attractiveness, her freedom and sensuality, are normally conveyed through the music. But Heusel was having none of it.
Peter Edelmann's Escamillo, burdened with early appearances in a business suit, took time to register. And Franzita Whelan's sweetly-attired Micaëla didn't really convey with any depth the innocent appeal of the life Don José had left behind. The Opera Ireland chorus and the children of Piccolo Lasso took to their allotted tasks with relish, and the smaller roles were all strongly characterised, though Kathleen Tynan's Frasquita was a squally presence in ensembles.
The theatrical vision behind this Carmen will probably fuel many a conversation and debate. With a different and more sympathetic musical approach it could well also have been one to recall with real affection.
Michael Dervan
