Irish Times writers review A Brief Taste of Lightning at The Factory in Sligo, Tobar na Scéalta at Siamsa Tíre inTralee, Cross Purposes at the Mermaid Theatre in Bray and Lindberg, RTÉ NSO/Eddins at the NCH, in Dublin.
A Brief Taste of Lightning
The Factory, Sligo
Patrick Lonergan
This mesmerising Blue Raincoat production of a Malcolm Hamilton play begins with a marriage ceremony and several funerals. Gertie (Sandra O'Malley) and Garth (John Carty) have returned from a wedding party; she is sleeping, while he reads the obituaries in the morning newspaper.
We soon realise that Garth's interest in other people's funeral arrangements is a sign of his own fear of mortality. When Gertie wakes, she seems uninterested in her husband's feelings however, but is instead preoccupied with her appearance, and with her competitive relationship with Emily, her sister.
Both characters address each other throughout the play, but moments of genuine connection are rare: we're not watching a conversation here, but a series of occasionally intersecting monologues. Both Garth and Gertie seem exhausted, their lines delivered with bleary-eyed weariness - but the memories they describe present us with extraordinarily vivid images.
There is a hilarious story about arriving late for the funeral of an acquaintance. Garth tells us of how, when he was a baby, his father carried him across Turkey. Gertie describes a gloriously over-the-top spat with Emily. And we also hear of the couple's memories of how they once loved each other.
There is a moving contrast here between the vitality of these memories and the weariness with which they are recounted, which explains the significance of the link made at the beginning of the play between marriage and death. This is a couple whose relationship appears to be in the process of ending.
They are preoccupied with the past only because their present is so unsatisfying - as Garth illustrates in one brilliantly written sequence, in which he talks about how both of them are "dying" from the accumulated clutter of modern life.
We tend to associate Blue Raincoat and its director Niall Henry with an emphasis on the visual. Movement, gesture, lighting and music are all wonderful here, but so too is the script. This is a fascinating meditation on memory, love and modern life. And the acting is achingly good.
Touring to Bray, Letterkenny and Galway during November.
Tobar na Scéalta - The Well of Stories
Siamsa Tíre, Tralee
Patrick Lonergan
Tobar na Scéalta blends traditional and contemporary forms of Irish culture, creating a vigorous musical tribute to The Kerryman newspaper, which celebrates its centenary this year.
The show takes stories from that publication's archives, using song, dance, video, and storytelling to enact them. With ten musicians and a company of more than 30 singers and dancers, this is an ambitious undertaking, particularly given that only one person - Michael Scott - is responsible for script, music and direction.
The show considers the relationship between folk tradition and popular culture, convincingly mixing the two together. Tableaux blend with photo montage, video recordings with naturalistic performances, traditional music with contemporary movement, Gaelic football with traditional dance.
This encounter works most memorably in a lively scene set in the Kerryman printing works: the clatter of typewriter keys becomes the tapping of a traditional dance step, while the bodies of dancers merge with the movements of a printing press.
Less successful however is the show's opener and encore - a performance of Ding Dong Didero played to a techno beat. It's an interesting combination, but the music is a derivative version of a style that was explored by bands like The Prodigy and Orbital more than a decade ago: ironically, the contemporary element of this sequence sounds dated.
The show works best as a celebration of Kerry life during the 20th century. From the pages of the Kerryman, we learn about the arrest of Roger Casement, and the passage of immigrants to and from the county.
We witness many aspects of local life, from dressing for Sunday Mass to GAA finals and the Rose of Tralee festival. And we get an important scene about the Kerry Babies Case, which is handled with unflinching integrity.
Tobar na Scéalta thus presents an exciting example of the ability of the local press to act as a community's "well of stories" - while interestingly expanding the boundaries of folk theatre.
Cross Purposes
Mermaid Theatre, Bray
Michael Seaver
There were no pools of perspiration on stage after the première of Cross Purposes, which explores relentlessness, intention, speed and interruption. That would be too easy and choreographer Liz Roche, never one for visceral rhetoric, wouldn't ask us to applaud just sweat. Instead, she weaves these concepts into her work with the seductiveness and guile of a magic trick that leaves you saying: "Hang on. Do that again."
Roche's movement might be softly spoken, but it's authorita- tive and intensely energised. From the initial solo, outwardly neutral performance energy belies ever-changing internal shifts in weight and flux, and, as more dancers enter the stage, a choreographic babble grows.
By the time small coinciding motifs of the dancers Philip Connaughton, Lisa McLoughlin, Katherine O'Malley and Liz Roche coalesce into a unison quartet, things get edgier and they are drawn towards the ground as if defeated by the task.
The work's trajectory is edited into mini-chapters by Paul O'Neill's changing lights. A restricted palette of warm oranges and cooler blues not only provide thick emotional brushstrokes, but are effectively combined, with the overhead oranges at times enriching the rich-toned costumes as blues catch expressions on faces.
Denis Roche's music, with assertive looping melodic riffs almost drawn asunder by arrhythmic percussion, gradually settles and nudges the impressively articulate dance to the front of stage. But while all of the i's were dotted and the t's crossed, by the end I was left with a nagging feeling that Cross Purposes hadn't said all that it wanted.
Alongside this première, the first in a series of commissions by Mermaid Arts Centre, were two short duets. These Two People Forgot In Silence was premiered with no staging at National Gallery in 2002 and its transfer to the theatre and change of music hasn't diluted its essence. The excerpt from The Salt Cycle, danced by Grant McLay and Katherine O'Malley, in contrast seemed more barbed and unsettling than before.
Lindberg, RTÉ NSO/Eddins
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Eric Sweeney - Granard, a memorial. Michael Haydn - Alto Trombone Concerto. Christian Lindberg - Mandrake in the Corner. Nielsen - Symphony No 5.
Eric Sweeney's new RTÉ commission for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Ann Lovett.
Ann Lovett was the 15-year-old schoolgirl who gave birth outdoors at a grotto in Granard on a wet and wintry day in January 1984. Her baby was already dead when she was discovered by three schoolboys, and Ann Lovett died in Mullingar hospital a few hours later.
Although the tragedy transfixed the nation, and played an important part in prompting a communal soul-searching about the social attitudes which were at play, little detail has ever emerged about the specific background to the two deaths.
Sweeney's minimalist-patterned Granard, a memorial is a gentle piece, an expression of sympathy from one individual to another rather than any kind of grand statement about the issues involved. William Eddins's performance with the NSO on Friday was careful to respect the music's quiet understatement.
The writing of trombone concertos has never won the attention of major composers to the point of creating a repertoire that can win immediate recognition from an audience. But Sweden's Christian Lindberg has been chipping away at the problem, both as performer and composer.
On Friday he played a Concerto for Alto Trombone by Michael Haydn (younger brother Joseph) and a work of his own, Mandrake in the Corner, which he has described "music to a second-rate TV thriller".
Both proved to be effective display pieces for Lindberg's remarkable virtuosity and outgoing spirit. It's hard to imagine a trombonistin this repertoire who would communicate a greater sense of focused energy and musical purpose than this dramatic and colourful Swede.
Eddins led the NSO in stylish partnerships in the two trombone works, and ended the concert with a strong and cogent account of the struggles in Nielsen's Fifth Symphony.
