Irish Timeswriters review Blackbirdat the Project in Dublin, Heroes with their Hands in the Airat Liberty Hall, Dublin, O Lionaird, Crash Ensemble/Piersonat the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, Roysevenat McHugh's, Drogheda, Concorde/O'Leary at the Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin and Lyric Opera'sproduction of Bizet's Carmenat the National Concert Hall
Blackbird at the Project, Dublin
"This feels like a wound," says 55-year-old Ray, holding up a damp and sullied shirt tail, having rolled over uneaten junk food strewn on the filthy floor of his dispiriting office kitchen, as his raging tussle with Una, the 27-year-old woman who has appeared in his workplace like a malevolent ghost, slackens to an impotent peace.
David Harrower's incendiary and compassionate play, Blackbird, from the superb Landmark Productions, topples the ragged nest of sexual abuse out of the sturdy familiar tree of victim and abuser, of blame and retribution, and examines the awful and ongoing psychological consequences on two people, both now adult, whose pain and longing are embedded in a confusion of need and revulsion. In this instance, an intelligent and imaginative 12-year-old girl's pre-pubescent "crush" on a dull and lonely 40-year-old neighbour (whose photo she kisses) is eventually eviscerated on a cold, wintry bed in a seaside boarding house when he rapes her.
"What could I have given you other than my 12-year-old body?" she asks him in one of the play's many shattering conversations. "There was nothing else." "There was," he replies. "For me, there was." Harrower's play is carefully and quite beautifully borne by the two lead actors. Stephen Brennan is the bleakly unreconstructed Ray, whose attempts at forging a new identity (new name, new partner, new job) after a six-year prison sentence are as flimsy and insubstantial as his barely glimpsed remorse, while Catherine Walker's terrible fragility and anger leave an indelible and haunting impression. They are aided by Joe Vanek's dispiriting grey urban interior, which perfectly captures the chilling, discomfiting emotional landscape.
This is not an easy play. There are times when Harrower's insistence that he should not stand as moral adjudicator over his characters' actions is difficult to take, but the play is no manifesto for paedophilia and is richer for his insistence that we confront the ambiguity of abuse, desire and self-sacrifice without a road-map.
Riveting, compulsive theatre.
Runs until Mar 3 Hilary Fannin
Heroes with Their Hands in the Air at Liberty Hall, Dublin
Heroes with Their Hands in the Air, adapted and directed by Fintan Brady, is like a first reading of the script for what could become a brilliant and powerful play. It is crying out to be dramatised, because the stories it tells are important and moving.
As it stands, it isn't really a play. Seven actors, some of them very good, some not, stand on stage and speak the words of relatives of those murdered by the British army on Bloody Sunday in 1972, and those of survivors, lawyers and soldiers at the Saville Inquiry. Each actor takes several parts.
The backdrop is a map of Derry. The set is a couple of chairs. There is hardly any movement. There is a little music at the start, and at the end. There is minimal use of lighting, and even that was botched on the opening night, when the lights went out in the middle of the poignant closing speech.
The piece is adapted from Eamonn McCann's fine collection of interviews with relatives and survivors. They describe the long, difficult years of the campaign, sitting around a gas heater in a tiny office, the splits and quarrels and then, at last the new inquiry, which lasted six years. They meditate on the nature of justice.
Some of the characters emerge more effectively than others, but even when you lose track of who is who, there are moments when the voices work strikingly well as an ensemble. These are brave people whose lives have been taken up with struggle. Some are strong, some vulnerable, many exhausted.
There is sorrow in the stories - a woman bringing a blanket to the graveyard in winter for her dead son. There is rage - a man listening as the soldier who killed his brother lies and lies and lies again. There's good humour - during the months the inquiry sat in London, one woman saw the sights and went for lunch one day to Calais. With radical, imaginative work this could become great theatre.
Until tonight.
Susan McKay
Ó Lionáird, Crash Ensemble/Pierson at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
Franghiz Ali-Zadeh - Music for Piano. Osvaldo Golijov - The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Evan Ziporyn - Kebyar Maya. Donnacha Dennehy - Grá agus Bás.
Composers of the 20th and 21st centuries have been every bit as fascinated by folk and traditional musics as the composers of earlier times, and the Crash programme, entitled Strange Folk!,focused on four approaches from the last 20 years, culminating in a new work for sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird and amplified ensemble commissioned by TCD from the group's artistic director, Donnacha Dennehy.
Grá agus Bás (Love and Death)focuses on some dark lines from Aisling Gheal, and presents the sean-nós world of Ó Lionáird's voice in a nightmarishly oppressive soundscape of grinding minimalist obsessiveness. At over 25 minutes, the piece makes its points at great length, and the winding up of volume, not to mention the punctuation by electronic percussive explosions, has the aura of 19th-century over-reliance on diminshed seventh chords about it.
Over-generosity of scale was a feature of all of the evening's works, in spite of an otherwise quite extraordinary diversity of approach; Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Music for Piano, played by Márta Erdei, effectively transforms the world of the piano (through a glass-beaded necklace rattling on the strings) into a world evocative of the music of Azerbaijan. Evan Ziporyn's Kebyar Maya, played by Kate Ellis, recreates flavours of Indonesian gamelan for live and multi-layered pre-recorded cello.
The evening's most rewardingly resourceful work was Osvaldo Golijov's The Dreams and Players of Isaac the Blind, an elaborate deconstruction of klezmer music for clarinet (Deirdre O'Leary) and string quartet.
I know that the Samuel Beckett Theatre is an acoustically challenging space, but the pieces by Ali-Zadeh and Golijov were not helped by the timbral denaturing of the amplification that Crash's sound engineer Jimmy Eadie used on this occasion. Michael Dervan
Royseven at McHugh's, Drogheda
Coming up on the outside, just behind Director, the Blizzards and the Immediate, Royseven - winners of the Meteor Hope for 2007 Award - bear the underdog burden relatively well. Yet, for all the perception of them as underachievers, Royseven could well overtake at least one of their contemporaries in the race for crossover success.
For a start they, have some fine songs, taken from their 2006 debut album, The Art of Insincerity, and they work as fully formed items in the live setting - concise, likeable and often very impressive.
The music seems tailor-made for venues far bigger than this one. There are lots of anthemic-type choruses, big, bold, but without the blather and bluster that one usually associates with such species and with neat, interesting little touches that reach out into nooks and crannies.
Then there's singer Paul Walsh, a whippet-like frontman who treads a thin line between forced chumminess and natural charisma.
We've seen too many lead singers over the years to be swayed by the notion that sitting down on stage and talking to the audience for minutes at a time is a good idea, yet Walsh had the crowd on his side if not in the palm of his hand.
Royseven need to iron out the creases in their presentation; yes, the stage is small, but they need to look more thrilled than bored if the music is to reach its prospective audience. Tony Clayton-Lea
• On tour until Sat
Concorde/O'Leary at the Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin
Director-pianist Jane O'Leary and her much-travelled ensemble are in their 30th season and devoted this concert to revisiting works they introduced to Irish audiences between 1995 and 2005. The mini-retrospective began with Joan Tower's beguiling Amazon(1977). The intermingling ideas and textures form a constant flow that's satisfyingly programmatic, yet there's also a deeper sense of sustained and shapely musical argument.
Items by Howard Skempton and James Wilson revealed both the wide vocal range of soprano Tine Verbeke and the two composers' contrasting approaches to setting unrhymed and much-enjambed poetry. Skempton's setting of Kamala Das's Hot Noon in Malabargets straight into the action, then out of it, its sultry formulas perhaps over-emphasising the unframed, segment-like quality of the words. Two downbeat songs from Wilson's Wildwoodwork pensively through the vibrant syllables of texts by Kevin Nicholls, teasing them out with the composer's characteristically fitful rhythms. Flautist Madelaine Staunton took the delicate solo part in Ton Bruynel's Serene, which backs circumspect instrumental arabesques with a dreamy prerecorded mix of real owl hoots and artificial cicadas.
Things reached a rousing and energetic end with Stephen Gardner's three-movement You Never Know What's Round the Corner. The postmodern title is at once accurate and misleading, for this finely wrought and invigorating music is anything but postmodern. Rather, it's a welcome rekindling of the visceral cosmopolitanism of the 1940s and 1950s. Andrew Johnstone
Lyric Opera/Brophy
NCH, Dublin
Bizet - Carmen
Casting is the key to Lyric Opera's new production of Bizet's torrid and tuneful masterpiece, and it admirably warrants this company's policy of favouring Irish artists.
As a lithe and petulant incarnation of the eponymous anti-heroine, Fiona Murphy is dramatically deft and vocally splendid. The easy grace of her wrist-spiralling, skirt-hitching seductions, and the luxurious tones of her sung and spoken French, bode well for further successes in this and other roles.
Ryan McPherson combines leanness and ardour as Don José, Carmen's mixed-up lover and eventual murderer, and wrings out his every big moment with much éclat. As his rival, the popular toreador Escamillo, Paul Carey Jones is competitive but could verge on his not-quite best.
Carmen gets excellent vocal and theatrical support from Frasquita and Mercédès (Mary Flaherty and Claudia Boyle), who make up some adroit ensembles with the two smugglers (Brendan Collins and Eugene O'Hagan). As Captain Zuniga, John Molloy wields his military authority with grim determination.
Vivian Coates's design and direction almost but not entirely overcame the restricted stage potential of the NCH's main auditorium. The set is minimal and sensibly places much of the action on a central dais.
There were bright contributions from the children's chorus, while the tone quality of the adult chorus steadily improved after a shaky start. Under the taut control of David Brophy, the orchestral playing was of a consistently high quality. Andrew Johnstone
