The Good Father, Druid Lane Theatre, GalwayThere are exceptions to the rule that young dramatists don't really find their voice until a first play has been staged. Christian O'Reilly, whose full début, The Good Father, is Druid's contribution to the Galway Arts Festival, is not one of them.
His play is a voyage of discovery, as much for the writer as for the audience. What makes the evening exceptional, though, is the sheer brilliance with which that journey is mapped out. Director Garry Hynes and the actors, Aidan Kelly and Dervla Crotty, make a great virtue of the necessity of cutting a way through to the play's heart.
The great compliment that is paid to O'Reilly's intimate story of a couple in search of a relationship is to take it entirely on its own terms. We are given a man and a woman in their early 30s. Tim is Dublin working-class, a painter and decorator. We are not told what Jane does beyond the fact that she has a good job, but she comes from much plusher coastal suburbs, Portmarnock perhaps or Malahide.
They do not belong together. They have drunken sex minutes after meeting for the first time at a New Year's Eve party. Their relationship thereafter is built around fantasies of fatherhood. Jane has an immaculate conception. Tim is like Joseph the carpenter, building in his own head a story that makes sense of the miracle. Neither ever really talks to the other because each is conducting a kind of interior monologue.
They are asking themselves the kind of questions an audience asks about a play. Why are these people on stage together? What are they thinking? Are they really connected or is at all just a trick of language?
In this sense, O'Reilly is thinking aloud about the whole idea of a piece of theatre, wondering whether it is really possible for characters on a stage to mean anything. If Tim and Jane know so little about themselves, how can they reveal those selves to us?
It is the kind of question that only a serious dramatist would ask, and it says much for O'Reilly's potential that this is where he has chosen to start. His handling of dramatic action is so obviously skilful that he could undoubtedly have written a much slicker but much less interesting piece. His great good fortune is to have found a creative team with the guts to push his questioning all the way.
As so often with the best of Garry Hynes's work, The Good Father is driven by a relentless disregard for danger. With an untried work by a still emerging writer, the instinct of most directors would be to build in as many safety nets and escape clauses as possible: elaborate sets, realistic props, all the comforting details of stage business that can fill in a play's gaps. Hynes's instinct is to do precisely the opposite, to cut away every convention that creates the illusion of theatre, to start, as O'Reilly himself is starting, from scratch.
The space created by Francis O'Connor's stage design and Rupert Murray's lighting is both naked and fiercely intimate. The audience sits in two rings of chairs around a tiny sliver of a playing area which has, at most, one or two pieces of basic furniture. The lighting is stark, monochrome, relentlessly refusing any hint of mystery or magic. There is nothing for us to go on except the words and movements of two people who are struggling and generally failing to communicate themselves to each other.
We rely completely, then, on the nerve and integrity of Aidan Kelly and Dervla Crotty. Everything depends on their willingness to remain exposed to the play's uncertainty, to resist the temptation to fill in the blanks and join up the dots.
There is no one you would trust more with this task than Crotty, who as well as being the finest Irish actor of her generation is also the bravest. She seems always to walk a millimetre above the ground on an invisible high wire, giving her a taut alertness that commands absolute attention.
There is no finer compliment that could be paid to Aidan Kelly, then, than to say that he rises perfectly to Crotty's level. Kelly is a revelation. He has the ability to work his way completely inside O'Reilly's language, so that every phrase, however rhetorical, is fully embodied. The gap between the actor and the role is so narrow that he hardly seems to be acting at all.
This is just right for a piece of theatre whose power lies in its refusal to pretend. It is what is it is: the bones of a play, stripped bare, exposed to the light that shines through it, but identifiably, unmistakably human.
• The Good Father runs at Druid Theatre, Galway until Sunday, July 28th
West Ocean String Quartet
By Fintan O'Toole
An Grianan Theatre/ Earagail Arts Festival
While the fusion of Irish traditional music with contemporary musical influences can still lead to heated debate, the result when it's combined with classical influences tends, for some reason, not to raise eyebrows - and blood pressure levels - to quite the same extent. Perhaps this is because there is a long history of cross-fertilisation between the two genres. Didn't Turlough O'Carolan's music reflect what was happening in Italy at the time, in the same way as Kila's draws from the many diverse musical sources available in our digital age?
The performance by the West Ocean String Quartet saw locally based Seamus Maguire, whose traditional pedigree is long-established - stretching back even beyond the days when he played with brother Manus and box player Jackie Daly in Buttons and Bows - join forces with violinist Niamh Crowley, viola player Joy Beatty and cellist Neil Martin for a mellow and enjoyable evening of contemporary and traditional music, reinterpreted, of course, through the string quartet format. And, certainly, the inclusion of cello and viola in the arrangement of traditional music is as least as valid as the use of bass guitar and djembes.
Several of the original compositions drew their inspiration from the Co Donegal landscape, and the history which is so inextricably bound up with it. Two in particular stood out, both musically and in terms of their emotional and historical impact. Seamus Maguire's millennium composition, based on Glenveigh House, has a majestic beauty but also a darker meaning in terms of local life, while Neil Martin's composition, Droichead na nDeor, is a moving piece inspired by the bridge of the same name at the back of Muckish mountain, to which departing emigrants were traditionally accompanied by their families.
The West Ocean String Quartet was also joined by Belfast-based virtuoso guitarist Colin Reid, and by poet Cathal O'Searcaigh, who gave several dramatic readings, including the first performance of a new poem he has written in response to the Droichead na nDeor piece.
Delivered in the inimitable O'Searcaigh style, and against the backdrop of a stunning visual projection - a feature of the performance which added to the sense of occasion - it was a moving and evocative incantation that added to the poignancy of the music.
By Mary Phelan
Angie Stone, Red Box, Dublin
It has taken her quite a while to get here (this date was postponed from March), but when Angie Stone limbered up and shimmied down onto the stage, you got the distinct impression that the capacity crowd had been waiting, praying for each day to pass very, very quickly.
Backed by an intuitive, inventive 10-piece band - keyboards, percussion, wind instruments, guitarist, backing singers - Stone came across as the kind of soul singer who takes her cues from the classic soul of the 1960s/1970s/1980s. A little bit of Tamla and Stax mixes with the shimmer of Philly sound and a smooth wash of Supremes/Four Tops/Curtis Mayfield/Sade that segues into Wish I Didn't Miss You, a song that underpins her influences with its O'Jays' Backstabbers sample.
Yet despite the underlying familiarity of the music, Stone's approach is all her own.
"The beauty of recognition is appreciation," she said in one of her several extended between-song chats, and you could sense that Stone is the kind of person who takes what she says very seriously. Her onstage persona is laced with the old-fashioned values of truth and honesty, which gives her a form of clarity rarely seen in a performer.
Other songs from her superb Mahogany Soul album were played, including More Than A Woman, Mad Issues and Makings Of You, and the scene was set for an indoor first-class-tickets-only soul train with the safety buffers removed.
If the mood was usurped and broken by the standard and quite boring meet-the- musicians section - we know how well they can play, so why spoil it all by putting us through an extended flute solo? - Stone could be forgiven by virtue of her undeniable class.
Three words: Sweet. Soul. Music.
By Tony Clayton-Lea
