Reviewed today are Lloyd Cole and Colin Devlin at Vicar Street, Dublin and theWelsh National Opera at the Grand Opera House, Belfast
Lloyd Cole and Colin Devlin
Vicar Street, Dublin
They are two pretty boys from two different decades: Lloyd Cole is the bestubbled, well-read 1980s roué who sang about lost weekends in Amsterdam and girls with perfect skin; Colin Devlin is the poetic, fresh-faced Irish rogue from the 1990s, whose band, The Devlins, sang gentle, inoffensive indie tunes about waiting around and not doing much at all. They have joined together for a short Irish tour, and are sharing the stage at an expanded Vicar Street, accompanied by nothing more than their acoustic guitars and an occasional guest appearance by Hothouse Flowers guitarist Fiachna Ó Braonain.
They could be father and son, these two handsome devils plucking at their guitars, and presumably plucking the heartstrings of the older and younger girls in the audience. "In fact, Colin is my son," confirms Cole, "but when we're on tour, I'm his mother." He's joking, of course - they're plainly blood brothers.
Cole takes the first set, performing songs from his new album, due to be completed by Christmas, which he later describes as "more songs you don't wanna hear". After this short set, Cole returns to the stage to perform songs the crowd does wanna hear, including Brand New Friend, Hey Rusty, Like Lovers Do, Unhappy Song and Lost Weekend. In the meantime, local lad Devlin keeps the audience in their seats with a tightly reined set of tunes from his less well-known back catalogue. There are cheers of recognition for Consent, Almost Made You Smile and There Is A Light, but mostly the mood is one of quiet, patient respect.
Cole's second set is a mix of familiar hits and selected album tracks, stripped down to their simple, folksy structures. There are few things more boring than watching a fading pop star busking his past hits, but Cole's easy manner and loose songwriting style save the evening from complete torpor. Since Cole and Devlin have become a sort of mutual appreciation society, it's only proper that Colin comes on again and sings No Blue Skies. And it's only natural that Lloyd reciprocates with a rendition of Devlin's finest song, Waiting.
Kevin Courtney
Welsh National Opera
Grand Opera House, Belfast
Die Fledermaus....Johann Strauss
Catalan director Calixto Bieito has a reputation for courting controversy. And his new Fledermaus for Welsh National Opera, which was seen at the Grand Opera House in Belfast on Wednesday and Friday, seems to have had a fair degree of iconoclastic intent.
The spacious marbled set by Alfons Flores is handsome (it's modelled on the music room of the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, designed by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann), and the costumes by Mercé Paloma also evoke the luxury of an era long past.
What makes Bieito's production striking is the degree of dissipation that's constantly suggested. Formally-dressed revellers who have passed out lie around in the opening scene, champagne is thrown around with the abandon of a Formula 1 celebration, and the prison scene of Act III is grafted directly on to Act II (the jailer Frosch is removed entirely), with the suggestion that the entire proceedings are some sort of decadent charade in which the characters are trapped. Bieito suggests two films as points of reference, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel and Visconti's The Damned.
There's new dialogue by Mark Ravenhill, with updated and Belfast-specific references, and the sort of language that's kept off television screens until after 9 p.m. Wednesday's audience greeted the first "fuck" with a stunned silence, but soon took the colourful language in its stride, and revelled along with the onstage observers at the excesses of imbibing (including champagne out of chamber pots), substance abuse, and groping (within as well as between the sometimes cross-dressed sexes). Plausible as the goings-on were in the first two acts, the staging quite fell apart in the non-prison setting of the third.
And what of Fledermaus as the tuneful, vaudeville-rooted romp of lasting appeal? Geraldine McGreevy, outfitted to look like Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film, and Natalie Christie, sounding altogether too well-bred, were oddly less than convincing as Rosalinde and her chambermaid, Adele.
Philip Lloyd Holtam was fine as the gauche tenor with the high notes Rosalinde finds so irresistible, and he certainly cut a more attractive figure than Paul Nilon as her philandering husband. The manipulative, revenge-seeking Falke of Richard Whitehouse had a not quite convincing ring-master air.
Donald Maxwell, as the prison governor Frank, probably gravitated more strongly than anyone else to the familiar character of the work, and, while Anne Mason captured the world-weariness of Prince Orlofsky with ease, she, no more than anyone else - including conductor Gareth Jones - seemed attuned to the Viennese indulgence of the music which has kept this work close to audiences' hearts for over 125 years.
Michael Dervan
