Fintan O'Toole reviews On The Way Out at the Glen Centre, Manorhamilton, Tony Clayton-Lea reviews Jack L who played in the Olympia in Dublin, while Michael Dervan heard a performance by mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli at the National Concert Hall.
Irish theatre tends to go against the grain of Irish society. When rural Ireland was dominant, the playwrights raged against it. When it died, they began to write elegies for the world they had helped to bury.
The figure of the old countryman, almost alone in an emptying landscape, has become an icon of recent Irish theatre, through plays such as Sebastian Barry's Boss Grady's Boys, Conor McPherson's The Weir and Tom McIntyre's The Gallant John Joe.
Vincent Woods's On The Way Out, which opened in Manorhamilton on Tuesday night and is now embarked on an adventurous tour mounted by Mary McPartlan's Skehana company, occupies a somewhat anomalous place in this development. It is a newly extended version of John Hughdy/Tom John which was presented as a lunchtime show by Druid in 1991. What was strikingly original a decade ago is now rather familiar. The work of a leader seems more like that of a follower.
The familiarity extends to both the content and the form. The death of a way of life is embodied in the separate deaths of a father and son in Co Leitrim, each of whom addresses us as he stands on the threshold of extinction. The shape of the play - essentially two monologues - was quite innovative in 1991 but the form has now become, through over-use, almost a cliché of the Irish stage.
Form and content are connected. The rise of the monologue relates, in part, to the decline of traditional Ireland. When it was alive and kicking, the struggle between tradition and modernity was the stuff of epic drama. When the struggle was over, there was no drama any more, just a valedictory voice recording its receding presence from the edge of the grave.
John Hughdy/Tom John was one of the first plays to make this connection, though its originality was largely missed in the justified acclaim for Woods's epic drama on sectarianism, At The Black Pig's Dyke. A decade on, however, that sense of novelty is no longer available.
The monologue has become a leash that constrains Irish theatre. On The Way Out shows all the limitations that have become so obvious: the smallness, the absence of a feeling that we are, as an audience, embarking on a voyage of discovery, the sense that too little is at stake.
An awareness of these limits is manifest in the play itself. As well as the father and son, Woods gives us a third voice, the Storyteller. She is, at one level, John's memory of his wife and Tom's of his mother. At another level, though, her fractured, nonsensical stories are meant to suggest the decline of an oral culture that once made sense of a community's life.
In spite of Fiona Kelly's strong presence in the role, however, the device does not work. The stories are too strained and self-consciously obscure to lift the play into the realms of myth and metaphor. The rather simpler device of intercutting the two male narratives might have created more effectively the bigger resonance that Woods is seeking.
As it is, we are left with two monologues, too men revving up on the runway for the last flight into oblivion. They occupy the same room, dominated by the same double bed in a setting by Monica Frawley which subtly conveys the feeling of domestic solidity declining into decrepitude.
They are, however, brilliantly contrasted, both in the writing and in the superb performances of Des Braiden and Maeliosa Stafford, who also co-directs with Woods. Braiden's John is ancient, craggy, defiant, his long hawkish face like an old photograph of Sitting Bull in captivity. He is sardonic, sceptical, unsentimental, beholden neither to God, his children nor his neighbours. Like Macbeth when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, he knows that he is doomed by the "blasted pines like black ghosts" that are eating up the land, but he chooses to go out in style.
Where Woods is at his best is in his ability to suggest that even death itself is dying out. Where John goes out in a blaze of defiance, Tom's death is a bitter sigh of despair. He has soft tissue where his father had hard bone. The memories that kept John alive leave him cold and empty. The rage that filled the old man's loneliness drains away his will to live. Yet self-pity is kept at bay by Stafford's masterly delivery of Woods's hypnotic rendition of Leitrim dialect. In the hard sounds of the words, Stafford finds the toughness that gives Tom dignity.
We are left with a small but irresistible opening into the imaginative life that lingers after death.
On The Way Out tours the country in September
Jack L
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
By Tony Clayton-Lea
Jack L and his associates are very adept at repackaging and reselling what is essentially the same product: Jack L, his voice and several good songs.
This time, the outing goes under the umbrella title of the Little Universe Show, and for people who haven't seen the likes of a mini-theatrical Tom Waits gig (for example) it's an engaging production spattered with effective low-budget innovations. For people who have, it's a witless embarrassment.
The underlying problem, let it be said from the start, is not with the minor star of the Little Universe Show. Jack L remains a notable presence, his voice thankfully allowed to peek through the falling glitter, star-spangled backdrops, angel wings, soundtrack snippets and back projections. Songs such as Rooftop Lullaby, So Far Gone and several others prove once more how strong and expressive a vocalist he is. Also, this time around there's a somewhat mellower sound, which means that previous harmful histrionics are displaced. Sadly, such highpoints are neutered by material such as the faux-country song, Tie Me Up But Don't Tie Me Down, a good title ruined by a hackneyed, amateur approach that seeps throughout the set.
The major flaw here is the actual attempt at placing the songs outside a normal, theatrically based rock-show context. Ambition has to be allied to execution if you want worthwhile results, but big ideas count for nothing if there are holes the size of footballs in them. Back to the drawing board, then, and maybe back to basics? But even after that, where to go?
Jack L's Little Universe Show runs in Dublin until Saturday and Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork, September 12th-14th.
Cecilia Bartoli
(mezzo soprano), Le Musiche Nove
National Concert Hall
By Michael Dervan
The long-overdue Dublin début of the Italian mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli could be summed up in a few words: she came, she sang, she conquered. And she did it in spite of her avoidance of prima donna-ish stereotypes. She's a mezzo, not a soprano. She never sings louder than she needs to. She devoted the entire programme to a rather out-of-the-way repertoire: a first half all baroque, accompanied on period instruments, the second half mostly 19th-century Italian song, accompanied on piano.
Bartoli is one of those performers who is always being something or somebody else while at the same time remaining quintessentially herself.
She can fill a phrase with a sense of wonder, joy, tenderness, pain or surprise, or turn emotions on just a single note. More importantly, she can conjure these senses almost as a presence into which she then projects her voice. People like to talk of certain performers as singing actresses. But she is more - a vocal actress with a physical presence equally accomplished in the skills of the stage, and fully independent.
Her baroque repertoire, which ranged from Caccini and Monteverdi to Riccardo Broschi and Vivaldi, covered a gamut of drama and emotion that would have been regarded as well nigh implausible in this sort of music just three decades ago. And it covered that gamut with a vocal flair, a repertoire of unexpected gestures and an improbable perfection that clearly took the audience's breath away.
The Italian music of the second half - songs by Bellini and Donizetti, and a scena by Rossini - proved rather less amenable to the singer's touch. The music is slight, the accompaniments are mostly banal, the melodies often undistinguished, in songs which representthe composers well off the peak of their achievement. Bartoli's elaborate treatments were almost like a disguise, a ruse to hide by decorative craft the plainness of the raw material, but actually only serving to place the deficiencies in more obvious relief.
A pair of songs by Pauline Viardot (one of the great mezzos of the 19th century) bucked the trend, and two by Bizet included some amusing and effortless seeming insect-emulation.
The evening was as generous in length as the singer was in the unfailing concentration and enthusiasm of her performances - one of Bartoli's most endearing characteristics is the way she communicates that most elusive of states, the sheer joy of singing. Even after three encores, it was clear that the audience was left hungry for more.
