Reviewed today are the The Drawer Boy, the Killaloe Music Festival and Hugh Tinney (piano) with National Symphony Orchestra and David Brophy.
The Drawer Boy, Town Hall Theatre, Galway
Images of farm life retain a great hold over international theatre audiences, in spite or perhaps because of the fact that those audiences are overwhelmingly urban. Even tough, unsentimental rural drama tends to be suffused with nostalgia. One of the great strength of Michael Healey's gentle, subtle and reflective The Drawer Boy is that it keeps soft theatrical memories at bay by making both theatre and memory its problematic subjects.
Healey, a Canadian writer whose first full-length play this is, was inspired by a key moment in his country's theatrical history. In 1972, the innovative Theatre Passe Muraille company sent its actors to the farmlands of southern Ontario to develop a play based on the lives of the farmers they interviewed. The Drawer Boy takes this idea as its starting-point, with the gormless urban actor Miles entering the lives of Angus and Morgan, who have worked their farm since they came home from the second World War.
To put it in Irish terms, The Drawer Boy is thus a cross between Lennox Robinson's Drama at Inish and Sebastian Barry's Boss Grady's Boys. It exploits the humour implicit in the confrontation between thespian grandeur and rustic earthiness. It also draws an affectionate portrait of two country men, one wry and astute, the other astray in the head.
To this largely comic mix, however, Healey adds a notion borrowed from Hamlet. Shakespeare's hero, whom Miles has played (his performance was panned by the critics for being too Canadian) and whose story he tells to the brain-damaged Angus, believes that the play he stages at the court can bring the truth to light. In a quiet, accidental way, Miles's own presence has the same effect.
The lies he tells on stage begin to bring back the memory that Angus lost when he was caught in a wartime explosion.
All of this could be formulaic, even a little twee. Healey, though, handles his characters beautifully, allowing them the contradictions that are the tang of life. Miles is no romantic truth-bringing artist, but a well-meaning fool. Morgan, whose care for Angus makes him automatically sympathetic, is also cruelly exploitative of Miles's innocence.
Above all, Angus is written not just with the tenderness that is to be expected in the portrayal of a mentally disabled man, but with a deep sense of respect. Neither idiot nor idiot savant, he is a full personality.
Around these sharply etched characters, Healey weaves a complex but gossamer-light thread of reflection about theatre, fiction and imagination.
While Miles is writing down what Morgan says so he can bring it into rehearsals for the improvised play, Morgan is also becoming a kind of author, playing Miles for a fool. Angus, who had liked to do architectural drawings before his brain was damaged, is a kind of artist, whose loss of memory forces him to continually reinvent his world.
And the play ultimately unfolds around the weaving and unweaving of the stories in which Angus and Morgan have lived.
This is, then, a complex play with the guile to appear simple. It demands a production of quiet depth. It does quite dramatic things very undramatically. Under Lynne Parker's lovely direction, it moves with just the calm dignity it needs.
John Mahoney's Morgan is elegantly restrained, with a deadpan, poker-faced surface, and unknown layers of pain beneath. Conor Delaney's Miles is a perfect foil, with an innocence that begs to be exploited and an arrogance that almost deserves it. But the key performance is David Calder's Angus.
Calder is one of those terrific English actors whose face everyone recognises from TV and films but whose name most people forget. This is the price of selfless submergence in the role, and here he is, if the contradiction is not too much, brilliantly unostentatious. Playing people with mental disabilities is the holy grail of many a Method-acting star, and if The Drawer Boy is ever filmed, the queue for the part will be long.
But Calder refuses to turn Angus into a set of tics and quirks. He gives us 99.9 per cent of the man, and 0.1 per cent of the man with a hurt brain. It is unheroic acting of the most heroic kind, a quiet, deeply moving and utterly unsentimental exploration of what a life is like without memories.
This Drawer Boy is sketched with a masterly hand.
• The Drawer Boy, a Galway Arts Festival/National Theatre co-production, finishes its Galway Arts Festival run at the Town Hall Theatre tonight, previews at the Peacock in Dublin on Saturday, opens on Monday and runs until August 10th.
By Fintan O'Toole
Hugh Tinney (piano), National Symphony Orchestra/David Brophy
National Concert Hall
Douglas Sealy
Nocturne- John Kinsella
Concerto No 1 in B flat minor, Op 23 - Tchaikovsky
Symphony No 3 in E flat, Op 55 - Beethoven
Nocturne, his own arrangement of the slow movement of his Violin Concerto No 2, had become one of his most frequently performed works, and it is not hard to see why. Beautifully adapted for string orchestra, it is not hard to grasp at first hearing and marks a sensitive rapprochement between composer and listener. David Brophy guided the strings of the NSO through it with a sympathetic touch.
Hugh Tinney is an aristocrat among pianists and the sort of showmanship called for by Tchaikovsky's Concerto No 1 doesn't seem to come naturally to him. His playing was a delight - clean, rhythmic and alive - but it hinted at another dimension from that of the orchestra, which was more embroiled in earthbound passions. A rivalry between soloist and band is a function of this concerto, each outdoing the other in showmanship, but Tinney is not, I think, particularly interested in this aspect of the work. His refinement therefore made the orchestral parts sound more than usually overwrought.
Last Friday's concert in the NCH ended with the work that Beethoven himself called Sinfonia Eroica. Of its four movements, three are marked Allegro; they are Allegro con brio, Allegro vivace, and Allegro molto. David Brophy's speeds erred on the side of caution, with the result that the brio, the vivace and the molto could not be said to register; and that feeling of sustained purposefulness with which Beethoven leads the listener through his extraordinary network of sounds was enfeebled.
The Funeral March (Adagio assai) seemed to have attracted the fast movement in the direction of its orbit.
By Douglas Sealy
Killaloe Music Festival
major work in Saturday's evening concert at the Killaloe Festival was the String Sextet in G, Op 36, by Brahms. It is a piece from the composer's early 30s, in which, he explained, "I have freed myself from my last love", a reference to his jilting of Agathe von Siebold.
"I love you!" he told the young soprano, with whom he is said to have exchanged engagement rings. "I must see you again, but I cannot wear fetters."
She, however, did become fettered, to the Sextet in G, where the composer ciphered her name into the melodic material.
Sadly, Saturday's performance at Killaloe gave little hint of the depth of meaning the work held for the composer. The playing, as it had been in Mendelssohn's Second String Quintet before the interval, was dutiful, routine, the sense of leadership or musical spur from the impassive-seeming first violinist, Federico Agostini, hard to spot.
The opening item in this disappointing concert, Mozart's Duo in B flat for violin and viola (Agostini with Bruno Giuranna) was more persuasively regulated, though still expressively shy.
The lunchtime slot on Saturday brought the festival's first organ recital, given by Gerard Gillen on the newly-restored 1885 Nicholson and Lord organ of St Flannan's Cathedral. Just as the size of a dog tells you nothing about its likely ferocity, the compact case of this organ suggests little about the loudness of its voice or the forwardness of its projection.
Gillen chose a motley programme (Guilmant, Bellini, Bach, Stanford, Deane, Gigout and Franck) in which the quieter and more reflective moments tended to work best.
Friday's lunchtime recital was devoted to music for violin and piano, played by Sarah Sexton with Heejung Kim. Richard Strauss's youthful Violin Sonata proved an unwise choice, taxing the pianist in particular beyond her ability to prioritise meaningfully within Strauss's profusion of notes. The two young players still have issues of balance to sort out in Mozart (they offered the Sonata in G, K301), but their playing of the two most overtly showy pieces, Lutoslawski's Subito and Sarasate's Introduction and Tarantella was gutsily persuasive.
By Michael Dervan
