A selection of reviews by Irish Times writers.
Boston Marriage, Project Space Upstairs, Dublin,
By Belinda McKeown
Every aspect of b*spoke's production of David Mamet's 1999 play Boston Marriage bears a sense of striking incongruity. There's the jarring visage of flowered chintz wallpaper lining the minimalist mouth of the Project's Space Upstairs.
There's the realisation that Mamet, master dramatist of a 20th-century American psyche, but very much a male psyche, has written about women, and women of an era - 1880s Boston - which seems distant from the abrasive idiom, the slang and the slurs, of a typical Mamet character.
And there's the shock of hearing that purported distance dissolve in a vicious volley of outbursts and insults between the three delicious characters of this feisty comedy-without-manners, the tale of one day in the lives of two middle-aged companions and their maid.
Then there are the light jazz numbers which accompany all of this, an incongruity too far - but the only one.
In her first production in Ireland, English director Loveday Ingram has drawn moments of admirable depth and emotion from a script which promises laughs at a rate of knots but potentially yields little else. Hilarity was always going to be assured from a Boston marriage - the genteel euphemism of the time connotes the domestic partnership of two educated single women, in this case lovers - between two women as arch and foul-mouthed as Mamet's Anna and Claire, especially when the jealousy sparked by separate extra-marital affairs, and a young maid who gives as good as she gets, are added to the mix.
Ingrid Craigie (Anna) and Jane Brennan (Claire) fulfil this remit with gusto and, as their increasingly spiky young help, Laura Donnelly is a revelation, breathing wonderful fire into a role which, in Mamet's script, merely kindles.
And you'll laugh. This is the sort of production to which the term "a delight" becomes quickly attached and from which catty one-liners are retained and quoted with glee.
But in all of this, there are human relationships, with their vulnerability, with the shadow of loneliness.
Ingram and her cast see this, and so, touching tenderness emerges between the barbs for Anna and Claire, and genuine respect surfaces for the determined maid.
The real bravery, however, is in allowing Mamet's searing language to have its day. There are points where an obscenity goes so far as to stun the audience into silence rather than to provoke laughter.
If this seems a misjudgment on the part of the actors, of Ingram, even of Mamet, then tough; this play may seem a confection, but comes with a bitter core.
D'Arcy, Drury Byrne, Tinney, NCH John Field Room, Dublin.
By Michael Dervan
Haydn - Gipsy Rondo Trio. Dvorák - Dumky Trio
It would be hard to think of two more sheerly delightful piano trios than those selected for Thursday's lunchtime recital at the NCH John Field Room.
Haydn's Gipsy Rondo Trio was one of the great chamber music successes on disc in the early days of electrical recording. The finale from which it takes its nickname is probably still the best-known movement ever written for piano trio. Dvorák's Dumky Trio, ruminative and melancholy with outbursts of animation, is tuneful enough to have provided a less critical composer with material for at least a handful of works.
Thursday's players - Michael d'Arcy (violin), Aisling Drury Byrne (cello) and Hugh Tinney (piano) - are colleagues on the teaching staff of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and their approach to both pieces was generally plain-spoken.
There was little of the exaggerated push-hard, pull-hard style of rubato that some players like to bring to Haydn's gipsy writing, and the Dvorák was also generally allowed to speak for itself. Some differences of character were obvious between the three instrumentalists. Michael d'Arcy was more likely than the others to project his line with force, sometimes coarsening his tone and causing his intonation to stray in the process. Aisling Drury Byrne showed herself the most concerned with matters of expressive richness. And Hugh Tinney, playing with rounded tone, struck a pose of almost aristocratic reserve.
There may have been little sense of the detailed give and take or finely-gauged timbral balances you would expect from a long-established performing group. But these two particular trios have a lot to offer without high-level subtleties in performance. And the generally neutral balance of the playing style could have left no one in any doubt about the unusually high pleasure quotient achieved by Haydn and Dvorák.
