An Irish Times review of the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Dublin Fringe Festival and whats going on in the world of the arts.
Portia Coughlan
Peacock Theatre
It is Portia Coughlan's 30th birthday, and she is a mother, guiltily conscious of the three young sons she cannot bring herself to love. But in too many ways she is stuck herself in childhood, in the time when her lost twin brother still lived; and, as Portia in this rendering of Marina Carr's 1996 play, Eileen Walsh captures skilfully this sense of frightened, stunted becoming.
Her Portia is a mere girl, bruised and abandoned, and her whole body bears her torment by the ghost-song of her brother. Walsh is surrounded by actors with an equally instinctive feel for Carr's characters; Frank Laverty pale and strained as Portia's helpless husband, Gerard McSorley and Maria McDermottroe as her haunted, ruined parents, Stella McCusker as the grandmother with bitterness twisting her heart.
And, as the godmother who loves Portia but is powerless to heal her, Brid Ni Neachtain is moving and funny, all hard edges and soft heart, calling up what constitutes, in Carr's worldview, the best that humanity can be.
Because that worldview is a strange one, at times horrifyingly strange; its language, though lyrical, is starkly difficult to handle. And, scattered around an awkward set that seems to shrink their capacity for expression, Brian Brady's cast are stranded in this world, stranded from the audience and from one another.
Throughout, Brady's direction bears the mark of something that seemed so promising in the rehearsal room but died onstage; the flame that should be at the heart of this production merely flickers for a while, and peters out completely in the second act.
By then, the cast are mystifyingly directed to turn their backs on the audience for long periods, even to remain silent at one point while a John McCormack record runs its course. This introduces a disconcerting alienation which drags all credibility from Carr's already uncommon language; words intended to have mythical resonances become jarring, at times vaguely embarrassing to hear.
Both technically and narratively, the timing seems off; the space between stage entrances and exits lack grace and seem, sometimes, delayed, while the extraordinary unfolding of Portia's true story, and that of her family, seems to come all in a rush in the last quarter of the production.
And while the final song of Portia's dead brother - a taped chorister, utterly beautiful but overused at points - is truly chilling, the video projection of a young boy which dances, at intervals, on the back wall is an indulgence without purpose, betraying a halting, fatal nervousness with Carr's remarkable vision which even this talented cast can do nothing to resolve.
Belinda McKeown
DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL
Noonday Demons
The New Theatre
The late Peter Barnes's Noonday Demons, in which two hermits, both seeking canonisation through self-denial, squabble insanely over the right to occupy the same cave, is really little more than an extended sketch.
But it is so robustly acted, imaginatively directed and subtly lit in this production by the Welsh company Bald
and Bold (the cast is both those things) that the piece almost takes on the quality of high art.
There is an elegant contrast between the two performances: David Glaysher is bulky and overpowering, like Karloff's Frankenstein monster in a hurry; Ronan Byrne is reedier,
craftier and somewhat primmer in his religiosity. Barnes's point - expressed through consistently good jokes - appears to be that such acts of mortification are, despite the characters' devotional language, inherently solipsistic and self-regarding. There is just about enough meat in that notion to sustain an audience's attention for 50 minutes.
Which, happily, is more or less how long Richard Hull's feisty production lasts.
Runs until October 3rd.
Donald Clarke
OTHER REVIEWS
Muraro, RTÉ CO/Wagner
Mahony Hall,
The Helix, Dublin
Henri Dutilleux - Le loup. Grieg - Piano Concerto. Beethoven - Symphony No 2
The 88-year-old French composer Henri Dutilleux destroyed most of his music from before 1945, leaving many questions about his early style.
There may be clues in his 1953 music for the ballet Le loup (The Wolf), with which his compatriot the conductor Laurent Wagner opened Saturday night's concert with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
With its rich orchestration echoing the sound-worlds of Debussy and Ravel, and with suggestions of widely divergent influences such as Kodály and even Broadway, Le loup is certainly a long way removed from the serene nocturnal mysteries of the 1976 string quartet Ainsi la nuit, one of Dutilleux's best-known works. Saturday's three extracts from the ballet - about a girl who is tricked into marrying a wolf with whom she is ultimately hunted to death - sounded broad and cinematic under Wagner's meticulous direction.
The first movement cadenza in Grieg's evergreen Piano Concerto presents a delightful visual puzzle: how can three things be happening at once when the pianist has only two hands? Soloist Roger Muraro effected the illusion with exciting, athletic virtuosity.
A Messiaen specialist and winner of the 1986 Tchaikovsky Competition, Muraro kept Wagner and the orchestra on their toes with changes of pace that demanded the kind of attentiveness you need to follow speakers who drop their voices at unexpected moments. His very slow but persuasive account of the wistful Adagio was enhanced by David Carmody's brief but important horn solos, pure of sound and discreetly expressive.
The second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No 2 is a brief, idyllic pause for breath in what is otherwise a work of boundless and escalating playfulness. Wagner unleashed the scurrying figure that knits together the first movement at a thrilling high speed. Here, and in the third and fourth movements, the players responded with energetic precision and a bright, joyous spirit.
Michael Dungan
Parry, RTÉ NSO/Atzmon
NCH, Dublin
Brahms - Haydn Variations. Mahler - Kindertotenlieder. Strauss - Serenade Op 7. Tod und Verklärung.
Friday's subscription concert by the RTÉ NSO suffered an unusual double misfortune, with both the original conductor, Georg Fritzsch, and soloist, mezzo soprano, Diana Montague, having to be replaced.
The programme was an unusual one. Richard Strauss's early tone poem, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) is a work usually kept away from the closing spot it occupied on Friday.
In truth, it's really too short to constitute an entire second half on its own, so, to make up for this fact, the Serenade for wind instruments the precocious Strauss wrote at the age of 16 was placed before it.
It is entirely to the credit of the stand-in conductor, Moshe Atzmon, that he took on the programme without changes, though if any special revelations from the evening's unusual shape had been in the mind of Georg Fritzsch and the NSO management when they planned it, none were apparent on Friday.
The music-making was solid rather than spectacular. Both Brahms's Haydn Variations, and Tod und Verklärung are pieces which respond well to the type of unfussy interpretative approach Atzmon offered.
He created the greater expressive heat in the Strauss, where the composer attempted to depict in music "the last hours of a man of a man who had striven for the highest ideals," and who, in the composer's vision, only finds their realisation after the release of death.
The 10-minute Serenade is not just full of promise, but a real achievement in its own right for a composer so young.
Yet its main interest remains in what it prefigures in orchestral skill and melodic predilection of the music that was to come. It's function on Friday was as a filler, and that's how it sounded.
Susan Parry was the mostly firm-voiced soloist in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, a song-cycle which probes the world of loss created by the death of children.
The singing sounded at its most natural and persuasive in the lower register and at lower volume.
Higher excursions tended to provoke a hardening of tone and a less than comfortably controlled widening of vibrato.
The result was that the expressive burden of the music was borne more successfully in the orchestra than through the vocal line.
Michael Dervan
