Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events
Guests of the Nation, Everyman Palace, Cork
Simplicity and sincerity are the touchstones of Denis Conway's rendering of Guests of the Nation, the first theatrical offering of this year's Cork Midsummer Festival. The text is as austere as any of Frank O'Connor's stories, and Conway's performance is equally spare and equally elegiac. If there are faults to be found in the production, it is almost as if the actor and writer together are above all that, at some remove from the troublesome demands of staging. Of course, those very demands are what make a play - or at least what make a play effective. Neither Conway nor director Pat Talbot, and least of all O'Connor himself, has produced a play in this work.
What is offered instead is a 45-minute memorised reading, word-perfect and convincing. Convincing, that is, in the telling of the tale. One cannot keep managing verbal connections such as "said", and "replied", and "asked" otherwise than in a clear narrative flow, and this Conway provides efficiently. He invests his character Napoleon with an enhanced ordinariness which must have been O'Connor's intention; this fidelity makes the piece resonant, but it also exposes the theatrical problems. If the setting, designed within a deep square box by Cliff Dolliver, is given as the early 1940s, some introductory context seems to be required even if only to suggest an atmosphere of recall. We need to be told why we're here, especially as "here" is a large-windowed house although the text indicates a cottage.
Of course the story could be recalled anywhere, in any setting, and the seeming contradiction may be justified by the use of the window-shutters for dramatic point and possibly as metaphors contrasting light and dark, the interior world of the spirit and the exterior world of war. But if this is something to think about, the approach of a convoy of steamrollers which eventually declares itself as sound-effects and which culminates in a soundscape roughly appropriate to Cape Canaveral is utterly distracting.
Menacing but external, the sound, with its final windy forlorn flourish over the grave, is meant to warn of coming events and then to mark their arrival, but that warning must come first of all in the performance. It emanates from the uneasiness of Napoleon, unable to come to terms with what he has witnessed and what he has done to two men who thought he was their friend. There is more than one moral dilemma in Guests of the Nation, or if there is only one it is a dilemma with layers of doubt and uncertainty. That sense of the tragedy of events has to be built from the inside out, unassisted by roadworks. Mary Leland
Until June 23
Rhythm and Beats and Audience (1) Waltzers, Éigse Carlow Arts Festival
Hoofers are competitive. Tap dancers have honed individual talent to gain superiority over rivals and in these globalised times the challenges are now between national styles so Irish dancers "trade taps" with American tap dancers in shows such as Riverdance. Pitting percussive dance styles together always carries danger, but the presentations of kathak and sean nós between Sonia Sabri and Seosamh Ó Neachtain in Rhythm and Beats was based on mutual respect rather than arch rivalry. Both dancers, along with their musicians, spent a week together developing material that was performed as the show's finale.
But percussive dance is more than the percussion, it's about dance, and although the two dancers are fellow journey-people with their rhythmic steps, their dances are poles apart. It might be a facile quibble, but the fact that Sabri's performance was projected (reflecting kathak's storytelling tradition) and Ó Neachtain's a more private dialogue with the music, created an imbalance that was never realigned throughout the evening: Sabri reached out to the audience, whereas Ó Neachtain's gait and inward focus allowed us to reach out to him.
This is the nature of their individual disciplines and each dancer is supreme in their field, as demonstrated in the solo dances. The hard consonances of Ó Neachtain's shoes contrasted with Sabri's bare and flat-footed stamps, softer in attack with the lingering resonance of ankle-strapped bells. Musicians Jimmy Higgins (bodhrán), Jessie Smith (fiddle), Sarvar Sabri (tabla), Carl Pebardy (sitar) and Satnam Galsian (harmonium and vocals), provided a rhythmic bedrock and soaring melodies that were tossed around freely when all the performers took to the stage for the finale. Here, Sabri's changing directions gave quirky punctuation to a reel, and Ó Neachtain's fluttering feet matched the multi-timbral tabla, but a week seemed too short to allow either form to influence the other.
In an altogether different collaboration, choreographer Mary Nunan and sound artist Michael McLoughlin created a sure-footed installation dance in the Presentation Convent. In Audience (1) Waltzers an audience of eight sit in chairs facing different directions in the centre of an open-sided white cube. Nunan walks around the three sides, a trailing hand stroking the wall, and the spectators, turning heads and craning necks, follow her slow passage.
It feels like a preparation for the main course but, as she constantly turns back on herself, it becomes clear this is the body of the work. This play on perspective and challenge to assumptions is repeated in different layers in a deceptively simple, eloquent work. Along with Irish Modern Dance Theatre's Rhythmic Space, it is evidence that Éigse's new dance offerings are chosen with similar intellectual rigour to its long-standing visual arts programme. Michael Seaver
Audience (1) Waltzers is at The LAB, Foley Street, Dublin 1 from June 22 to 25
