Our writers sample the delights of the Galway Arts Festival while veteran rapper Ice T and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra cater for opposite ends of the musical spectrum.
Orange Flower Water
Town Hall Theatre
Towards the end of Craig Wright's new work for Steppenwolf Theatre Company a character tells his lover that they have "ruined the world" for the chance to have sex with each other.
It is a key moment in this play about the impact of the couple's affair on their families. After 90 minutes of crackling action the lives of everyone onstage have indeed been ruined, but the couple still try to convince themselves that their infidelity was justified, feebly suggesting that "love keeps happening", despite the pain they've caused. Yet although we've seen an intense treatment of many of the emotions associated with romantic relationships - sexual attraction, jealousy, the pain of abandonment - love certainly doesn't feature here.
Orange Flower Water is full of empty declarations, starting with a love letter that's actually an extended exercise in sarcasm and concluding with a piercingly ironic monologue. Wright suggests that honesty is too painful for his characters, who reveal themselves fully only after the infidelity is discovered. Beth tells her husband, Brad, that she's leaving because every time he touches her she feels as if she's been raped. And Cathy's reaction to David's infidelity is to insist that he have sex with her before leaving. The contrast between these two scenes is terribly sad, suggesting that the marriages are based more on coercion than on contract.
Wright avoids detailed characterisation here, concentrating instead on moments of crisis. This narrow perspective might have been alienating, but director Rick Snyder has his actors engage fully with the audience: we're constantly being reminded that this play is at least potentially about us. This immediacy can be unsettling, but the strong acting from the four leads is often irresistible.
Wright avoids giving us clear-cut answers to the questions his play considers: like a bad relationship, Orange Flower Water is ethically messy, frustrating and confusing. And that is its strength: it sent the audience away deep in conversation. It's also a fine example of Steppenwolf's strengths: its willingness to produce new work with conviction and its excellent acting.
Runs until Sunday
Patrick Lonergan
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Flesh Wound
Town Hall Theatre
London's Royal Court Theatre has been one of the leading producers of Irish drama since the mid-1990s, premièring work by Conor McPherson, Sebastian Barry and other important writers. Irish audiences have had few opportunities to encounter the exciting British dramatists who have emerged at the theatre during the same period. By bringing Ché Walker's play to Galway it gives us a welcome introduction to a lively new English voice and deepens our understanding of the many Irish plays recently produced by the theatre.
Joseph (Michael Atwell) has come to a high-rise Camden council flat to search for his estranged son, Vincent (Andrew Tiernan). The Calderazzos, a local gangster family, believe Vincent has raped their daughter and want revenge.
Joseph believes he can protect his son, but Vincent is sceptical, perhaps justifiably, about his father's motives. Entangled in the uneasy relationship between the pair is Vincent's sister Deirdra, played with show-stealing robustness by Jo McInnes.
Walker is exploring different ideals of family, moving us from warm paternalism to the brutality of Mafioso retribution before concluding with a bizarre and hilarious nativity scene. Using violence to suggest that blood is thicker than water, Flesh Wound also makes room for moments of surprising tenderness. This action is driven by rich dialogue, a poeticised version of London speech that's full of literary allusions. Walker might remind his audiences more of EastEnders than Oedipus, but it's impressive that comparison to both is possible.
Director Wilson Milam fully exploits the tensions in Walker's script, getting plenty of mileage out of the old theatrical adage that if a gun appears in a play's first act it must go off before the curtain falls. This keeps the action moving at a vigorous pace right to the play's final, satisfying twist.
Admirers of the Irish writers associated with the Royal Court will find much that's familiar here, but Flesh Wound is in its own right an impressive production: an exciting, in-your-face thriller that's also rewarding on closer inspection.
Runs until Sunday
Patrick Lonergan
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Ice T
Crawdaddy, Dublin
The last time Tracy Marrow was in town he was wearing his Bodycount cap and a "public enemy number one" target around his neck. The Ice T who prowls the tiny stage in Crawdaddy is still hollering about hustling, pimping and the hassle he receives from police, but the 12 years since the Cop Killer furore has seen seismic changes, both for Ice T and hip hop. Put it like this: the gardaí across the road in Harcourt Street had little to worry about tonight.
Rap's template may still largely concern bragging about guns, money and other gangsta matters, but the players have changed. Ice is now better known as an actor and television talking head than as a streetwise, mouthy blade, and hip hop is ruled by Eminem and 50 Cent, who were probably playing with toy guns when Ice was in his prime.
If Ice T, the original gangsta after all, feels a little bitter about being sidelined, he doesn't let it show. As he tells it at one stage, the 1990s are over but he's still here and the bookings are still coming in.
With an old-skool swagger and some firing one-liners, Ice has improbably turned into hip hop's Jackie Mason. While Evil E, his long-time DJ, plies sturdy, sleazy funky beats from the turntables, and sidekicks Seanie Sean and Marc Giveand largely confine themselves to dousing the crowd with beer, it's Ice who runs the show.
What he does is just stand and deliver the hits. They may all come from the 1980s and early 1990s, but there are few complaints when The Tower, Pusherman, Six In The Mornin' and Original Gangsta boom out as fresh as a daisy.
Between songs comes constant banter. He asks how to pronounce "gardaí", for his anti-police shtick, organises a stage competition for would-be rhymers (which throws up a fairly accomplished female MC, to Ice's surprise) and tells us over and over why he's still number one. There's no show like an Ice show.
Jim Carroll
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RTÉ NSO/Bropy
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Sibelius - Finlandia. Grieg - Peer Gynt Suites I and II (exc). Sibelius - Valse Triste, Karelia Suite
Music such as Grieg's Peer Gynt and Sibelius's Karelia Suite is often considered to be of the lighter kind. It was not considered to be such when new, however.
Look at British and French concert programmes from the 1920s and earlier to see just how much music of this "lighter kind" appeared in the most prestigious venues. And, in almost all countries, late-19th-century composers who excelled in the symphony also took seriously the composition of occasional and other kinds of music we might now regard as light. Sibelius and Grieg were experts; so were Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Elgar - almost every important figure except, significantly, most of the Austro-German symphonists.
This concert's conductor, David Brophy, understood that while this music might not have the profundity of a Sibelius symphony it deserves to be taken just as seriously. Perhaps that is self-evident with Finlandia. Yet Grieg's less weighty contribution was designed for Ibsen's epic drama Peer Gynt, Sibelius's Karelia Suite for a nationalistic pageant and his Valse Triste as a melancholy evocation of mortality.
With the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in responsive form, a good balance between seriousness and ready communication was achieved by letting the music speak for itself. Brophy resisted the many opportunities to milk it for expression. Familiar music did not mean playing in the old familiar way. Attention to phrasing and a generally good (though not impeccable) orchestral balance captured the music's picturesque purposes.
In planning and in performance, this concert was a model of how to create a programme that is thematic yetvaried, popular yet high quality.
Martin Adams
