What is happening in the world of the arts? Here we find out.
Dublin By Lamplight,
Project, Dublin
It is just a slight exaggeration to say that 1904 is to Ireland's literary culture what 1916 is to its political narrative, a kind of Year Zero in which everything can be imagined as beginning again. Both of the main streams of 20th-century writing can build their foundation myths on that year's events. For devotees of a national literature it is the year in which the Abbey opened its doors. For internationalists it is the year in which James Joyce met Nora Barnacle and in which he set Ulysses.
This centenary year has of course been crowded with commemorations and celebrations. Corn Exchange's remarkable new show, Dublin By Lamplight, joins in with an angular and alluring remix of the myths of 1904.
Written by Michael West in collaboration with the company, it has the fecundity of devised work at its best and only a few of the problems that tend to accompany this kind of collaborative process. There is a clarity of purpose in the production that bears the marks of a genuine engagement by the actors, the director Annie Ryan and the composer Conor Linehan in the creation of the piece.
There is also a fusion of discipline and fluidity that suggests a hard-won balance between brainstorming improvisation on the one hand and a ruthless shaping imagination on the other. If, in the second half, there is some loss of focus, it seems a price worth paying for such an accomplished, witty and provocative piece of theatre.
Dublin By Lamplight is set not so much in the historical 1904 as in a kind of parallel universe where the various literary 1904s meet and mate. West imagines an Abbey that didn't happen, the "Irish National Theatre of Ireland", appearing for one disastrous night only with its heroic mythological drama, The Wooing Of Emer (or, as it appears in the newspaper ad inserted by the author's drunken brother, The Wowing Of Emer).
The playwright is a kind of failed Yeats. His putative star actress and benefactress is a cod Maud Gonne. But, as we discover in the second half, the real Abbey is still the city morgue.
Bits of what really happened are embedded in a purely imaginary structure. Real events and movements - Gonne's Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), her and Yeats's protests against the visit of King Edward VII - are thrown into a pastiche of Wilde, Joyce, O'Casey and O'Flaherty. There is a running gag from The Ballad Of Reading Gaol. The working-class girl who looks after the costumes and wants to be a star has elements of both Barnacle and Mary Boyle, from Juno And The Paycock. The playwright's brother, who is set to play Cuchulain in The Wooing Of Emer, is also plotting to assassinate the king, and elements of his story are straight out of The Informer.
Ryan's trademark commedia dell'arte style is perfect for this interplay of the real and the unreal. Commedia dell'arte deals in traditional archetypes, and so does the play. The confidence and precision of the direction allow what might have been a clash of discordant modes to work harmoniously. Ryan uses direct narrative, dialogue and a play within a play but welds them into a terrifically coherent approach.
In the first half, which is played essentially as farce, there is an awesome perfection to the production that creates a resounding hilarity. Most companies would have been satisfied with that. The problems in the second half are of the best kind, created as they are by Corn Exchange's larger ambitions. By reversing Marx, and playing the first half as farce and the second as tragedy, West seeks a deeper reflection on the relationship between reality and fantasy in Irish history.
The shifts in tone are inevitably uneasy. At times the play remains mordantly funny, as when Mark O'Halloran's brilliantly realised would-be Wildean actor replies to the question of whether he has ever been in the Irish Republican Brotherhood: "No, but I've been in the Corsican Brothers." At others it asks us to confront issues of pain, death and betrayal in a way that puts a weight on the commedia style that it was not built to bear.
Even the second half, though, is never less than absorbing. The superbly gifted cast - also featuring Mike Carbery, Karen Egan, Fergal McElherron, Louis Lovett and Janet Moran - sustains a magical combination of manic energy and rigorous control.
Funny, clever, strange and thoughtful, Dublin By Lamplight may send up the spirit of 1904, but it also shows that, in the theatre at least, it started something good. - Fintan O'Toole
Joss Stone
Olympia, Dublin
She hits the stage barefoot and strutting, as though she has been doing this all her life. Joss Stone may not have the biggest wardrobe budget in music history, but she knows what matters: that voice, her passport to the universe, has taken her far, and she's hardly going to stop now.
Her début album, The Soul Sessions, was every debutante's dream: universally lauded, platinum-selling, colour-supplement-hogging overkill that had Stone's name on everyone's lips before you could whisper "Aretha".
Stone's voice is a raw, unfiltered wonder that seeps from her pores and whispers of a chequered history that simply hasn't come to pass. This is a singer whose talent spotters' instincts were right on the money. She seeks out soul like a heat-seeking missile, pausing just long enough to sample The White Stripes' Fell In Love With A Boy and the reggae Less Is More.
The audience is mainly female, the venue full of women who have been craving her down-home sassiness as a welcome alternative to MTV pap. Despite recurring (but fleeting) sound glitches, she hurtles through her small but perfectly formed set (from start to encore takes no more than 70 minutes).
Her opening choice of Super Duper Love is inspired: within minutes she has the audience singing along as she careers across the stage, singing of a gamut of emotions that are hardly the stock in trade of most 17-year-olds these days.
Her mic scarf pays subtle tribute to Janis Joplin; her band relive the Miami soul sound, lead and bass guitar driving, banks of keyboards punctuating her every languid phrase. But Stone has taken the best of this music and made it all her own.
New songs, including Right To Be Wrong and You Had Me, point to an emerging talent as a songwriter, while her decision to pay tribute to Franklin and Lauryn Hill (on the divinely inspired That Thing) whispers of an artist whose career decisions are all her own. - Siobhán Long
Coole Lady
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
Sam McCready wrote and directs, and his wife Joan McCready plays, this 75-minute monologue about Lady Augusta Gregory, of Abbey Theatre fame. An old woman in black hobbles onto the stage using a walking stick, then begins her life's story, from girlhood to imminent death.
The opening chapters do not endear us to the character on stage. Her youth in a grand Galway house was apparently that of the cushioned aristocrat, surrounded by servants and luxuries. When her father died her half-brother inherited the estate, which he wanted for his own use.
But the neighbouring Sir William Gregory, some 40 years Augusta's senior, fancied her, and she married him, although for his Coole estate rather than out of impractical affection.
They lived mostly in London, where she had an illicit affair with an English poet that lasted a year. To mark its ending she wrote him a number of sonnets, which he published as his own, having titivated them a bit. The years rolled on back at Coole, and in her 44th year W. B. Yeats came for a visit, extended for 20 summers. It was a new beginning for her, and she threw herself into the creation of his national theatre.
They were hectic times, during which she was involved with the great writers of the day, most of whom came to Coole to pay homage. Famous names are dropped in profusion, like leaves falling from her famous trees. But Yeats remained her friend to the end, and her dedication to
his work and theatre was constant. Eventually, she lost the estate, but she retained the houseas a rent-paying tenant; a fall indeed.
The writing is lucid throughout, and if the character portrayed so sensitively here seems warmer and more likeable than the lady she describes, that is a tribute one should not lightly dismiss. Different times, different standards - and her love of writing and theatre clearly ran deep to both their benefit. - Gerry Colgan
