Irish Times critics review A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Project, Dublin; White Raven at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and a performance of The Magic Hat at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast
A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Project, Dublin
Temple Bar on a Friday night could well have been the setting for Barabbas theatre company's Dublin version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, what with characters forgetting their own names, passing out and having alfresco sex with strangers. Thankfully, the approach here is a lot less realistic: director Veronica Coburn and designer Niamh Sharkey have created a fantasy Ireland where the present and the mythological past are playfully scrambled.
Local references, mostly absurd, pepper the text, which nevertheless retains Shakespeare's rhythms: substitutions such as "Dublinians" for "Athenians" don't interfere with the original metre. Social comedy is provided by making Theseus an English earl, his betrothed, Hippolyta, an ascendancy grande dame, while the two pairs of young lovers are upwardly mobile Dubliners. The fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, are reimagined as Celtic deities: Aed Aengus and Brigit na Gig. These two groups, "poshes" and "pagans", double up as "peasants", the gormless labourers who stage the play within the play.
So all members of the cast (Seán Kearns, Frankie McCafferty, Deirdre Molloy, Mary O'Driscoll, David Pearse and Helen Norton) play at least four characters, constantly switching role and adding fairy wings or baggy sweatshirts, as appropriate, to their costume.
Sustaining this high-speed versatility is a challenge, and things unravel a little by the end, as if the cast have run out of energy. At times the character-switching seems cumbersome, the price paid for the overall comic effect. Among so many strong performances, Kearns's stands out. As Theseus, Oberon and Quince, he has an extraordinary capacity to change his accent and body language in seconds.
And just when there's a danger that the work is being played wholly for laughs, the scenes between him and his fairy queen, Titania/Brigit na Gig, re-establish Shakespeare's dreamy, magical mood: Molloy has so much sensuality in her voice and body that the couple's embraces have a real erotic charge. This fairy realm of immortal love is placed at the core of the production, enhanced by Mark Galione's swirling, violet-in-to-orange lighting design, projected on to Sabine Dargent's simple set of plain white wall and floor, opened out like the pages of a book.
Runs here until June 12th, then tours
Helen Meany
The Magic Hat at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast
There can be few more enlivening ways of passing an hour on a dull, damp morning in Belfast - or any time of day, anywhere - than in the madcap presence of Cahoots NI's new show.
This is easily its most ambitious and complete undertaking so far, encompassing just about all of its huge lexicon of performance skills: mime, live music, magic, illusion, circus skills, storytelling and pure, unadulterated entertainment.
Directors Paul Bosco McEneaney and Zoe Seaton have set the company along an exciting path of exploration, offering all kinds of tantalising possibilities for the future. In unfolding the cautionary tale of naughty Albert, who sends his dear little sister Victoria to Never Never Land by persuading her to try on a hat marked "Don't Dare Wear", they have embarked on a style that combines European expressionism with scaled-down Cirque du Soleil spectacle. Add to that Paul Boyd's droll narration and plinky score, played live by Boyd, Georgia Simpson and Kelsey Long, and the result is a show with enough wonder and suspense to keep young imaginations on tenterhooks and older, world-weary customers laughing their legs off.
At the centre of it all is shock-headed Seamus Allen as Albert, his supreme physical performance here reaching new levels of engagement. Hugh Brown, Diane Kennedy and Paul Quate are a beguiling trio of black-and-white cartoony clowns, who plot the most dastardly and grotesque methods imaginable for removing the offending hat from the head of the mischievous Albert. Georgia Simpson is a plumply glinting Molly Middleton, the wannabe magician. And when Kelsey Long puts down her fiddle and launches in to Victoria's visionary return to this world her graceful, fluid gymnastics on a scarlet aerial silk transport us in to another universe, full of wonder, beauty and new horizons. This show will surely knock the socks off audiences when it travels to the Asian Theatre Festival for Young Audiences in Seoul next month.
At the Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen, tomorrow and Thursday, McNeill Theatre, Larne, Friday and Saturday, then An Grianan, Letterkenny and Burnavon Arts Centre, Cookstown
Jane Coyle
White Raven at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
The three voices that make up the White Raven vocal trio are as pleasing as you will hear anywhere.
Tenor David Munderloh, an American whose first professional position was with San Francisco's outstanding male-voice ensemble Chanticleer, sings with warm purity and easy, unfussy projection. He performs with London's Consorte of Musicke alongside White Raven's baritone, Raitis Grigalis, from Latvia. Grigalis matches Munderloh like a vocal clone, just with a deeper register.
The two men arrived in Switzerland in 1999 to study singing at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where they met the Macroom-born singer and teacher Kathleen Dineen. Dineen, a beautifully clear-voiced soprano with a special interest in medieval, renaissance and Irish traditional music, formed White Raven with Munderloh and Grigalis in 2001.
The now nearly three-year-old trio sang at Sunday's Hugh Lane Gallery concert with a remarkable oneness of breathing, phrasing, enunciation and emphasis. Words were clear, stories told and emotions expressed. Their programme, a change from that advertised and entitled To The Waters And The Wild, ranged from arrangements of Irish traditional songs, including one in sean-nós style, to renaissance love songs to Robert Burns and settings of Yeats.
The three-part arrangements, many of them by Dineen herself, were expertly crafted and delicately effective, mostly in a fauxbourdon style, with the three voices moving up and down together in parallel motion.
The selection they presented on this occasion, while coming close to overdoing the fauxbourdon, was leavened with a few songs in which Dineen accompanied on the piano or harp.
Their lone foray in to music with independent, imitative lines, Va-t-en Regret by the 15th-century French composer Loyset Compère, not only revealed another facet of this exceptional ensemble but also provided some welcome contrast.
Michael Dungan
