Reviews of Paula Spencerat the Project and Golden Melodies from Opera and Operettaat the National Concert Hall
Paula Spencer:Project, Dublin
Peter Crawley
Chances are that you know Paula Spencer from somewhere. The battered wife, alcoholic and mother of four has already been the subject of a TV series, two novels, a play and an opera. Few characters in fiction have seemed at once so painfully trapped by abuse and addiction, yet so well travelled.
Now one of Roddy Doyle's most resonant characters returns to us in Paula Spencer, la femme qui se cognait dans les portes, via Théâtre de l'Eveil, in director Michel Abécassis's adaptation of both novels, The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, performed in French with English surtitles.
To begin with, Olwen Fouéré's Paula is barely recognisable, an unseen presence on the dark expanse of the stage. Her early words - "He killed parts of me. He killed most of me. He killed all of me" - hit you not with the unflinching brutality of Doyle's book, but rather with a languorous tristesse underscored by the sighing jazz of Miles Davis. If the tone seems wrong, the image is an even sharper disjunction. Here is Paula Spencer with cascading white hair flowing over a lavish fur coat, her eyes sometimes shielded by enormous rock-star sunglasses, less impoverished Dublin cleaning woman than Russian gangster.
Abécassis's sparing production, with a design so minimal from Jean-Guy Lecat that sometimes all we see is the ember of Paula's cigarette, is allied with a startling performance from Fouéré. Together they take on the literature without asking to be taken literally. Fouéré's Paula not only refuses to act the victim, but physically and vocally she is an aggressor. She recalls her worst bouts of alcoholism with giddy self-loathing, shouting "I adore my kids" at the audience, as though to silence any objections.
Indeed, Fouéré is so fierce it's hard to imagine her cowed by anyone, much less living vicariously through her adulterous sister. Uprooted and unreal, the idea may be to make her an everywoman, but she comes off as a nowhere woman - you lose Doyle's rooted sense of Dublin and the keen national narrative of the second novel, but, uninterested in social realism, the production doesn't transplant Paula to the banlieues either. Somehow, though, this displaced Paula is amazingly compelling.
Like the onstage microphone, an otherwise howling cliche of experimental theatre, the effect is to use the stage as a platform for the words. One heart-wrenching scene takes place entirely in the mind, when Paula describes meeting her estranged son, John Paul, a recovering heroin addict, in a cafe.
Bitter and ashamed, neither can express love for the other: "I just hang there." Such exquisite pain loses nothing in translation, and Fouéré is never anything less than magnetic. That this otherworldly figure seems the teller of the story, rather than its owner, makes it tempting to repatriate Paula Spencer, but her story of abuse, damage, survival and recovery needs no passport. Finally turning her microphone towards the audience, Fouéré brings it all back home.
Until Jan 10
Golden Melodies from Opera and Operetta:NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
It is just two years since David Brophy was appointed principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. This programme of Golden Melodies from Opera and Operetta suggests that, during his time with the orchestra, he's become a musician who is much happier in his skin. His conducting has become freer and more pliable, while the playing at the National Concert Hall also showed an orchestra that's managed to tighten its discipline and tidy up its musical responses.
The evening, however, was the opposite of uptight. It was a relaxed occasion, of the kind where cosiness and informality are key.
Singalongs were encouraged in numbers by Jerome Kern (Ol' Man River), Gilbert and Sullivan (The Policeman's Song) and Lehár (Vilja), and the invitation was taken up with quiet warmth.
Brophy's musical approach is more sensible than stylish. That's not to say that he eschews razzmatazz or that his music-making errs on the side of dullness. He can certainly zip and zing when he wants to. But he doesn't give the impression that precision of musical flavour is a high priority. He's like a chef who produces dishes from a range of cuisines in a way that tends to diminish rather than highlight the distinctions between them.
In fairness, of course, it probably wasn't the orchestra that the audience came to hear, but the singers. Soprano Celine Byrne may not yet have quite the lightness of touch that's called for in the Jewel Song from Gounod's Faust (she glowed rather than sparkled), but she found her form in Catalani's most famous aria, the highly charged Ebben? . . . ne andrò lontana (the one popularised in the film Diva) and in the Song to the Moon from Dvorak's Rusalka.
Byrne is one of those performers who makes the act of singing seem easy and natural. The voice is true and even, and she can swing and sway as persuasively through Gershwin's Summertime as she can open out at the top of her range or spin out the magic of a long, fading high note.
Her partner for this concert, bass baritone John Molloy, is another singer who gives the agreeable impression of taking a very immediate pleasure from standing in front of an audience. He can't quite rival Byrne in vocal finesse, and in musical terms his general approach seems a lot more studied than hers. But the two singers played off each other nicely in duets by Mozart, Gershwin and Lehár. I suspect the audience would have liked a lot more of the same - encores were offered and enthusiastically received at the evening's end.
