Irish Times writers review A is for Everything at the Project Cube, Richard Thompson at the Olympia Theatre and Stefan Frank at St Michael's, Dun Laoghaire.
A is for Everything
Project Cube
Caitlin Murphy's 80-minute play is an exploration of the minds of two women who lived in the shadows of genius. The author takes Lucia, schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce, and Suzanne, long-time partner and eventual wife of Samuel Beckett, and sets them talking. What they have to say is not overtly dramatic, but there is some truth and much theatre in the way they say it.
Their fictitious connection here has roots in the fact that Lucia was in unrequited love with Beckett when she was 20. He chose the older Suzanne, now world-weary from the knowledge that her husband has been routinely unfaithful and is in hiding from the world. She often had to liaise between him and his actors, one of whom told her that the man didn't really want his plays staged; it was too much of an intrusion on his thoughts.
Lucia is constantly in psychological as well as physical spasm, sometimes with clear insights into her condition, at other times illogical and frantic. Love will not now come her way, nor will the hoped-for careers in drawing or dancing. She has no friends, only people who are interested in her. Her future is pointed towards the private
hospital in England where she will spend most of her life locked away.
Suzanne, in entering Lucia's world through a series of invented meetings, discovers an emotional landscape as bleak as anything created by her husband, one she can empathise with. She becomes for a time Lucia's friend, mother, confidante and even lover. Under her influence, the girl tests her talents in dance, song and comedy; but the menacing darkness awaits her.
Gemma Poole, all sunken eyes and prominent teeth, offers an insider view of Lucia, a fascinating portrayal. Rose Marie van Gaalen plays Suzanne with authority, an interpretation to complement the other. Tony McCleane-Fay's direction, set and lighting make a significant contribution to a play that, while something of a curiosity, still has meaning and depth.
Runs until August 3rd. Booking: 01-8819613/4
Gerry Colgan
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Richard Thompson
Olympia theatre, Dublin
Ere he stands, a man, his guitar and his beret, a UK singer/songwriter who has circuitously traversed the routes of folk and rock and all corners in-between over the past 35 years. Richard Thompson remains a constant reference point for anyone who wants to have a lengthy and credible career, although it's a moot point whether he's a commercial advantage to the corporate accountants that stalk the corridors of the major record companies.
Whichever way it turns out, it looks likely that his regular solo attacks across the UK and Ireland will remain a feature of his own commercial campaigns, the kind of gigs where he plays to the converted, mentions his website, plays expert guitar and cuts straight to the heart of the matter.
Songs such as Dimming of the Day, Withered and Died, Beeswing, Ghost Of You Walks and Cold Kisses highlight Thompson as a writer of genuinely heartbreaking scenarios, cross-cutting sheets of poignancy with slivers of deceit, jealousy, desperation and teeth-clenching sorrow.
But it's not all hard-luck stories and dark hands over the heart: he's such an old lag at this that he chips away at the pain with a lacerating, ironic wit and the occasional humorous ditty. (For Madonna, a song about Maddie's wedding in Scotland, and My Daddy Was A Mummy, his Egyptologist tune for kids.)
Despite the droll humour and quips, however, Thompson will inevitably be measured for his material that exposes the weaknesses and strengths of the human condition, the ones that strip away the veneer of composed facades.
And he's not content to rest on his considerable laurels, either. A new song, She Said It Was Destiny, continues his singular quest for honesty, while in his cover of Britney Spear's Oops. I Did It Again he focuses on the line "I'm not that innocent" in a way that unties Britney's pig-tails, loosens the hair out and cuts it with a sharp pair of scissors.
Richard Thompson - a singer/songwriter not to be messed with.
Tony Clayton-Lea
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Stefan Frank (organ)
St Michael's,
Dún Laoghaire
Prelude and Fugue in E minor BWV548 ............................... Bach Fantasy in F minor K594 ......................................................Mozart
Four Sketches Op 58 ...................................................... Schumann
Scherzo in D minor Op 65 No 10 ........................................... Reger
Canzona in E flat Op 65 No 9 .................................................Reger Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor ............................. Reger
STEFAN Frank, who gave Sunday's organ recital at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire, hails from Bavaria and offered a programme that ranged from the 18th century up to the beginning of the 20th, from Bach, through Mozart and Schumann to Reger. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E minor, called the Wedge (the nickname from the shape of the fugue subject on the printed page), showed Frank to be a clear-headed, articulate player, who allows the music to breathe, and takes care with the shaping of rhetorical material.
His chosen pieces by Mozart and Schumann are not actually for the organ as we know it - the Mozart was written for a mechanical, clockwork instrument, the Schumann for the pedal piano, a piano equipped with a pedal-board which, like an organ pedal-board, was played with the feet.
Mozart's F minor Fantasy probably benefits from the greater possibilities of a regular organ - Frank played it with real affection - and the Schumann Sketches certainly miss the dynamic flexibility of a piano. Frank seemed to be working hard to master the organ's limitations of choir voicing and phrase shaping, but the familiar faintly fairground effect of these pieces on the organ was not completely avoided.
It was actually in the final three pieces that Stefan Frank seemed most fully at home. He offered something light (a Scherzo full of side-stepping), something sweet (a lingering Canzona) before letting rip in the Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor, where Reger the traditionalist and Reger the forward-looking chromatic wanderer find a striking balance. This, he seemed to be saying, is what organ music is really all about.
Michael Dervan
