Irish Timeswriters take in Savedat Peacock, Dublin, and Concorde Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin
Saved at Peacock, Dublin
If Edward Bond's feverish polemic of 1965 is known here at all, it is because of one infamous scene, so grisly in concept, so notorious in performance, so historically indelible that it has become almost legendary: the stoning to death of a baby in a pram. This, the reason for its original ban from the London stage, often functions as a plot synopsis for many who have never seen or read the play. Saved: that play about stoning babies.
Given a rare opportunity to see the scene in context, such as Jimmy Fay's stark new staging at the Peacock, Bond's drama appears no less horrifying, but his message has inevitably lost its power. An almost apocalyptically bleak view of a culturally and socially impoverished working-class Britain, blown up and over amplified, it aims to shake us to the core.
That Bond, with his second play, needed to shout so loud suggests he thought his audience was especially hard of hearing. For all the slow torture of its most controversial scene, the play's more disturbing moment comes earlier, when a young mother turns up the volume of a television set to drown out her baby's cries.
Bond's sympathies certainly lie with the downtrodden - capitalist society is to blame for such moral disintegration, goes the clarion cry of Saved - but this grotesque imagining of the desensitised masses could have sprung from the same elitist well of doom as the deadened crowds of TS Eliot's The Wasteland. A poor response to Bond's threatening vision of working-class degradation is to reject it. A far worse one is to accept it.
Jimmy Fay has treated Saved with utmost fidelity, however, his excellent cast negotiating the play's unflinching tone, its queasy comedy and the staccato rhythm of a once-naturalistic South London argot that may now read like parody: "Yer d'narf fidget." "I'm 'andy with me 'ands." "What a carry on!" Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as the conflicted, slight-framed Len is the character allowed to come closest to decency (which is not particularly close), standing by the irredeemable young mother Pam (Eileen Walsh, very good in a troublingly unconvincing part), while Rory Keenan appropriately underplays his clench-jawed, charismatically louche Fred. Eleanor Methven and Paul Moriarty offer strong support as Pam's stalemated parents, the claustrophobia of their lives dictating the unreal angles of Paul O'Mahony's set.
However committed the production, it can't make the play feel any more politically potent. Bond doesn't allow us the catharsis of tragedy, aiming instead for the spurring effect of agit-prop. With the left-wing hopes of the 1960s now all but expired, we are left instead with an unanswerable violence that leaves you sickened, cowed and powerless; its images stirring up memories of a toddler slain by two school children or the incomprehensible death of a young family. After all these years, Saved is still with us, but salvation seems far away. Runs until May 26 Peter Crawley
Concorde Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin
Elaine Agnew- Calligraphy. Si-Hyun Yi- An Island Baby. Zhou Long- Secluded Orchid. Nicola LeFanu- Sextet
The four works in this concert were all composed within the past 10 years, all by women, all featuring textures as a primary concern.
Elaine Agnew's 2002 Calligraphy, for example, opens with a variety of languid, ear-balming textures: a lonely solo for alto flute, blends of clarinet and flute with strings, then with vibraphone. The whole was an evocative response to the shifting colours of prairie grass rippling in the wind.
There is a similar instrumental line-up, with piano and no vibraphone, in An Island Baby, receiving its first performance in the presence of the composer Si-Hyun Yi, who flew in specially from her native Korea. She describes it as "a lullaby composed of four songs".
Here, a warm, delicate texture was established in quite a long introduction by the players before soprano Tine Verbeke made her subtle entry, sounding almost like another instrument. The four pieces conjure up images of mother and baby on a beach, of an infant's chatter, of softness and sweetness.
There was a more forthright evocation of Asia in the pentatonic flavours of Secluded Orchid, a 1999 piano trio by Beijing-born Zhou Long. Inspired by music alleged by legend to come from Confucius, its sampling of emotions from anger through melancholy to exhilaration was brought to life by violinist Elaine Clark's lyrical playing, and the echoes and pedals and interplay with cellist David James and pianist Jane O'Leary.
Nicola LeFanu's 1997 Sextet for flutes, clarinets, percussion, violin, cello and piano presented a series of episodes linked to the flora and fauna of the west of Ireland. Not as programmatically structured as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, it nonetheless drew on and reflected the composer's experiences of walks in Galway and Clare.
A pleasing element of this concert was the brief but informative notes provided in the printed programme. But what made it one of the most enjoyable Concorde concerts of recent times was the assured control of phrasing, balances and ensemble by conductor Dermot Dunne. Michael Dungan
