The latest reviews
The Glass Menagerie - Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick
Tennessee Williams's 1943 masterpiece is a semi-autobiographical memory play about the "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for". Amanda (Geraldine Plunkett) and her children Tom and Laura (Paul Meade and Susie Lamb) have fallen on hard times. Amanda consoles herself by reminiscing about the many "gentlemen callers" she received as a young woman. Laura seeks comfort from her crippling insecurity by playing with her collection of glass animals. Tom, the narrator of the play, fantasises about escape - but finds himself haunted by memory and guilt when he finally leaves.
As the play opens, the family awaits the arrival of Jim, (Liam O'Brien), a "gentleman caller" for Laura. Each of them hopes in different ways that he'll marry her - giving Laura a sense of her own value, rescuing Amanda from financial insecurity, and freeing Tom to lead his own life. Williams's slow, measured shattering of these illusions is devastating.
The Glass Menagerie is fundamentally about the imagination, so directors often present it in a pared-back style - because its emotional impact lies not so much in the performance of the story, as in Tom's attempts to reconstruct events from his memories. This approach is sometimes complemented by expressionistic lighting, which can accentuate Williams's use of glass as an image of fragility and transformation. So this play works most successfully when it seems strange, or even dreamlike.
Island Theatre's production, directed by Terry Devlin, is pared-back, but the action is presented rather too literally. Lighting is merely functional, and music (an integral part of the script) is never fully exploited. When the play begins, we're told by Tom that only one of the characters should be seen as realistic - but this cue isn't taken up. Instead we have four very fine naturalistic performances, which are restrained and carefully modulated: we sympathise with these characters, while never losing sight of their flaws. But that approach places distance between audience and action, inviting us to engage intellectually rather than emotionally with the play. This results in a Glass Menagerie that's certainly effective, but rarely as affecting as it might be. - Patrick Lonergan
Runs until Nov 5 at the Belltable. Touring to Civic Theatre, Tallaght Nov 7-12
Simply Red - The Point, Dublin
Even Lotharios must eventually mature. Mick Hucknall may have had astonishing success through the years with both the soul-consuming masses and innumerable ladies, but as he steps onto the stage of the Point to deliver yet another love song, you're struck by just how appropriate Leon Russell's A Song For You sounds. "I've acted out my life in stages," sings Hucknall forlornly, "with 10,000 people watching." His voice, for years an unctuous croon, a pretender's belt or a Rastafarian pose, now holds a becoming maturity. It's the tone of a professional seducer who'd like to slip into something more comfortable.
This is precisely what Hucknall has done with his back-catalogue, re-recording the hits of a 20-year career in smooth tones of Cuban jazz and easy listening. This does threaten to render his music simply beige, and tonight the audience is hesitant when Hucknall eases into For Your Babies and Your Mirror, unaccustomed to the sparing arrangements of a sedate piano and a shiver of strings.
However, Casanova hasn't donned his slippers quite yet. Where a cover of Bob Dylan's venomous Positively 4th Street suffers by sounding positively polite, It's Only Love is taut and suggestive enough to allow Hucknall a pouncing Elvis impersonation. Even his introduction to Sad Old Red comes with a lascivious little wriggle, yet the itchy, tip-toe jazz treatment accentuates the song's loneliness, making the jowly Hucknall, his dark shirt open to the chest, seem like a cautionary portrait of the eternal playboy.
Where there is something obscenely tasteful about the concert, with its 12-piece orchestra, bunched curtains, Habana backdrops and twinkling lights, Simply Red's new arrangements veer toward the generic: once dismissed as "designer soul", Hucknall's move toward Starbucks jazz hardly counts as progress. What redeems him is that creamy voice, which, on The Right Thing, Fairground and Something Got Me Started has rarely sounded better, the silver-tongued devil.- Peter Crawley
Belfast Philharmonic Choir - Belfast Festival at Clonard Monastery
Hovhaness - A Rose Tree Blossoms. Prayer of St Gregory. Magnificat. Alleluia and Fugue. Symphony No 50 (Mount St Helens).
The American composer Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) was a man who consciously turned away from many of the musical developments of the 20th century.
"I've always believed in melody," he said, "even when it isn't fashionable. I think it fills a need. My purpose is to create music, not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing, to attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound."
Friday's portrait concert by the Ulster Orchestra at Clonard Monastery, with readings from the composer's writings by Andrea Rea, offered a survey of his work - a first in Ireland - which ranged from the Alleluia and Fugue of 1941 (tinged with Vaughan Williams) to the lyrical and explosive Symphony No. 50, Mount St Helens, of 1982.
There's an unusual simplicity about Hovhaness's music. There are stately chordal progressions, which ensure that the feeling of a chorale is rarely that far away. The Prayer of St Gregory (1946), for instance, is a chorale for string orchestra beneath an independent trumpet solo.
Yet there are usually also other elements to tug against the flow, influences from the East (Hovhaness was of Armenian extraction and was greatly taken by non-Western musics), bass lines which burst into almost preposterously busy arabesque, melodic inflections which judiciously contradict expectations of the commonplace.
From a 21st-century perspective, he can also be seen as an important precursor. His music from as early as the 1940s shows him exploiting techniques that would later become the mainstay of minimalism.
Hovhaness was a composer who usually moved at a leisurely pace, often taking rather more time than seems really necessary to make his points.
Formal elegance and compactness do not appear to have figured highly in his reckoning of beauty.
The simplicity of his work can sometimes seem downright naive.
The volcano eruption depicted in his Symphony No. 50 (Mount St Helens), which closed Friday's programme, delivered with fiery impact under Christopher Bell, is the musical equivalent of a luridly-coloured child's picture rather than the sophisticated orchestral pictorialism you'd expect of, say, Strauss or Respighi.
The sole purely choral work A Rose Tree Blossoms, performed by the ever-improving Belfast Philharmonic Choir, had a flavour of John Tavener, although when it was written in 1971 Tavener himself had yet to embrace the particular style with which he is now identified. The major choral/orchestral piece of the evening, the Magnificat of 1958 (with soloists Kathleen Tynan, soprano, Colette McGahon, mezzo soprano, Robin Tritschler, tenor, and Alan Ewing, bass) was the one work that seemed too anodyne for its length, a case of this extraordinary chameleon among composers not managing to hold strongly enough onto his own identity.
It's that identity which makes Hovhaness such a fascinating, protean figure, an independent voice, rooted in the past, embracing foreign cultures, and predicting aspects of the polyglot musical culture of the present. - Michael Dervan
Midnight - The Helix, Dublin
Watershed Productions' energetic and highly imaginative adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson's novel remains true to the original story while elevating it to another level entirely. Whether or not the 9-14-year-old audience members have read the book before they go doesn't matter at all because they will be drawn into the layered plot either way.
Sarah O'Leary sensitively plays the role of Violet, the quiet, bookish teenager who retreats into her imaginative world, filled with model fairies she creates from the characters in the stories of her favourite author, Casper Dream. Violet's brother, Will (James Camilleri) perfectly combines the mix of childishness and teenage disgruntlement with his new-found charm.
Their parents, adeptly played by Lynne Armitage and Joe Cushley, poignantly play out the unresolved tensions in their marriage which were brought to a head by Will's discovery that he was adopted as a baby.
Then, along comes Jasmine (Rebecca Santos), the coquettish new girl who becomes Violet's best friend. This clichéd friendship - shy girl from average home meets stylish but lonely actors' daughter - allows a teenage romance to develop between Will and Jasmine and Violet to have a chance encounter with Casper Dream. The moment of truth arrives when Will realises he is loved and cherished member of his family and Violet discovers her personal creative energy.
Watershed Productions are renowned for their careful attention to detail and this production is no exception. Violet's schoolmates are brilliantly played by actors with puppet bodies hanging from their necks and the presence of fairy puppets throughout the show adds a mystical other-worldly dimension that fitted perfectly. The musical score and atmospheric set are the final touches that made this show one to remember.
A perfect outing for Halloween. - Sylvia Thompson
Midnight continues at the Helix until Sunday.
Crash Ensemble - Sugar Club, Dublin
Alvin Lucier - Music for Snare Drum,
Pure Wave Oscillator, and One or More Reflective Surfaces. Terry Riley - In C. La Monte Young - Composition 1960 #7.
Arnold Dreyblatt - Nodal Excitation. Resonant Relations.
The Crash Ensemble's concert on Thursday, given as part of the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival was as much a sixties happening as a concert of the Crash kind.
Terry Riley's In C (1964) lasted 32 minutes- short by the standards of this prime specimen of controlled indeterminism.
Nevertheless, its unusual quietness and its relaxed interchange between players made it Zen-like.
Alvin Lucier's Music for Snare Drum, Pure Wave Oscillator, and One or More Reflective Surfaces (1990) is concerned mainly with sympathetic resonance. The title says it all.
Minute shifts of sound through revealed overtones and microtonal tuning are some of the preoccupations of Arnold Dreyblatt, a former pupil of Young and Lucier and, at 53, the youngest composer of the concert. He played his Nodal Excitation (1979) for double-bass with special electronic pick-up.
He had also composed Resonant Relations specially for the Crash Ensemble, who gave it and everything else their inimitable all.
An eight-player ensemble creates a web of sounds that make you listen hard. At 35 minutes in this first performance, it feels long for its own material, partly because it is far more sectional than any other work on the programme.
I well remember my first experience of La Monte Young. In an English art college around 1968, X For Henry Flint was played by a very young Brian Eno, surrounded by a fog so thick that you did not need a joint to get high.
It was the sustained perfect fifth of the same composer's Composition 1960 #7 that lingered in the memory after the Crash concert. It is so simple that it does not work - it just is. Like everything else in the concert, it belongs to that smoky 1960s room.
Now where's the pot? - Martin Adams
Skate - Waterfront Hall, Belfast Festival at Queen's
One might be forgiven for expecting that a play based on the true-life story of a group of young skaters, who wage war on the authorities, would be a gritty, edgy, no-holds-barred affair.
Even more so when it is delivered by the Australian Theatre for Young People. But Skate turns out to be a surprisingly polite, low-volume 90 minutes of theatre, whose major selling point is that a miniature skate park is constructed, on which the cast attempt a few scaled down routines.
Now, there are some things you can do on a stage and some you can't. Full blooded skating moves fall into the latter category, but drama definitely ticks the box.
However, the central storyline of a campaign to build a skate park in a small town in the Australian outback is neither sufficiently strong nor given the required dramatic twists and turns to engage and hold the attention.
A number of seriously challenging associated themes - domestic violence, alcoholism, the treatment of the Aborigines, friendship, parent-child relationships - do arise but only briefly offer interesting possibilities.
Artistic director Timothy Jones has assembled a likeable cast to play writer Debra Oswald's motley assortment of friends, who range from pre-teen girls to a petty delinquent trying to stay out of jail. Apart from the odd bit of cursing and a few rude gestures, they are on the whole a fresh-faced, squeaky clean bunch, hardly the social misfits that local councillor and token baddie, Ray Stone, judges them to be.
The truthful performances of Jon Latham as Corey, the Aboriginal boy whom life has dealt a rough hand, and Sam North as his mixed-up buddy Zac, lead us to believe that there are in this company a number of talented young actors, whose names should be noted and monitored for the future. -Jane Coyle
Miss Saigon - Grand Opera House, Belfast
For the first time in many years, the Grand Opera House is not a venue for the 2005 Belfast Festival at Queen's, but there is a truly festive atmosphere inside its ornate Victorian exterior, as one of the most successful stage musicals of our time finally arrives in the city.
Boublil and Schonberg's multi-award winning show opened in London in 1989 and played there and on Broadway for over 10 years.
This magnificent new production by West End guru Cameron Mackintosh makes stunning use of every shred of state-of-the-art technology available to theatre and in performance, design, choregraphy, musical arrangement and special effects add new contemporary relevance to a storyline inspired by the 19th-century tale of Madame Butterfly.
The title says it all. In the innocent, trusting Kim, Ima Castro delivers a poignant portrait of thousands of young women, caught up in the exploitation and madness of America's shambolic war in Vietnam. There is much that hits home for our own times, a ripple of hollow laughter greeting the line by an ex-marine, "I'm an American. How could I fail to do good?" Mitchell Lemsky and Laurence Connor's lavish staging pitches us headlong into the sordid streets and brothels of Saigon in 1975, where the Marines are happy to pay any price for any service from any woman.
Three years later, we are confronted by altogether different horrors at large in renamed Ho Chi Minh City, where the Viet Cong regime provides no refuge for the hoards of mixed-race children, fathered by American soldiers and cruelly labelled "bui doi" - "dust of life".
The chaotic fall of Saigon is recreated with deafening intensity and realism and in the dash to safety, a decent young marine, Chris (Ramin Karimloo), has no choice but to leave his beloved Kim in the teeming crowd of abandoned Vietnamese civilians.
And no less a genius than political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has provided the visuals for the spikily ironic American Dream animation sequence, stylishly presented by the slick, scheming club owner Engineer, whom Jon Jon Briones first played in the original London production.
It is this same fruitless dream which inspires Kim to take the most difficult decision of her life and hand over her most precious possession, in a gut-wrenching end to a seriously excellent evening. - Jane Coyle
At the Grand Opera House until November 26th. Box office: Belfast 90241919.
