Irish Times critics review Morrisey, Private Lives, Scullion, The Magic Treeand Pipeworks.
Morrissey
Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin
SOMEONE MUST have told the weather that Morrissey was coming to town. After a week of torrential downpours, bar a brief shower to tease us, the rain was suitably distant for Manchester's most famous misanthrope.
With a brief greeting to "Baile Átha Cliath", the dapper 49-year-old and his five-man band burst into Irish Blood, English Heart, the song that pricked the ears of a younger generation who had consigned Moz to the 1980s relics list and reignited his career at a vital time. Morrissey's stock has rarely been higher. With a recent greatest hits on the shelves and a new album due in September, his career is in rude health.
But Moz has always had the luxury of a devoted fanbase who would happily put up with renditions of his songs accompanied by a banjo playing monkey if he so desired.
Ask and First of the Gang to Die, with audience singalongs, followed and the first half of the set smartly matched new Morrissey with classic Smiths. Referring to the venue's proximity to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Morrissey declared "I am modern art" and everyone cheered. Strange then, that the mid-set was such a flat affair. New material, including the impressive Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed, together with a pedestrian cover of The Buzzcocks' You Say You don't Love Me, the rarity Stretch Out and Wait and a dour Life is a Pigsty drew impassive responses. Even Vicar in a Tutu appeared to appeal to a select few. A re-ordered setlist could have made for a show that would have appeased the die-hard fans and the less committed.
It was only the heavenly reverb intro to How soon is Now? that brought the audience back to life. Finishing with The Last of the Famous International Playboys Morrissey could have fooled the fans into thinking the whole set was as strong as this finale. It wasn't. But don't expect Morrissey's disciples to agree. - BRIAN KEANE
Private Lives
Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork
DIRECTOR MARY Curtin is not the first to meddle with Noel Coward's ending for Private Lives, nor will she be the first to realise that she opted for the wrong finale. This presentation otherwise achieves the necessary balance on what is a skating-rink of a play, one that could be horribly dated - especially in terms of what might now be called domestic abuse - but which, in this performance, keeps its original sparkle and wit.
It is a play without a soul, unless one remembers the epigram linking wit with brevity, and Coward was too respectful a writer to overload such a brilliantly flippant work with any message other than that conveyed by its characters. Connecting them, however, is the allure of sex, and in this case the poised, word-perfect and intelligent playing of Ann Dorgan, Joy Buckle, Michael Murphy and Ian McGuirk somehow miss that little fuse of desire and compulsion that makes sense of an otherwise bright but meaningless comedy.
Amanda and her first husband Elyot meet up in one of Coward's more daring coincidences while on honeymoon with their new partners Sybil and Victor. Committed to nothing much more than to smoke, drink cocktails, play at the casino, dance and argue, they are attuned to their times yet they don't work, read or care about anything very obvious.
But they generate, or are supposed to generate, something close to passion, even if it's only a passionate argument. Written in 1930, the play's defining insouciance relies on its structure as much as on its dialogue. It is as neat as a glossy pin and about as sharp, and all leading players, assisted by Rachel O'Connell's maid, are clever enough to measure and point the delightful lines with verve. But the director should have kept to the more subtle and funnier denouement. Perhaps next time, for as this production reminds us, there must always be a next time for Private Lives. - MARY LELAND
Scullion
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork
IT WAS a homecoming of sorts. Even though Philip King might be the only member of Scullion to claim membership of the Independent Republic, last Friday night was a 30th birthday celebration in the company of punters who spoke the same language as the trio who'd come to blow out the candles on the cake.
King was in full Groucho mode for the evening. Sidelong references to Tom and Pascal, boiled sweets and the Capuchin annual were greeted with immediate chuckles of recognition - by the punters - if not by his fellow Scullioners, Sonny Condell and Robbie Overson. Three decades equals a remarkable repertoire in Scullion's world, most of it drawn from the creative genius of Condell, whose subtle lyricism and matchless melody lines bear scant kinship to anyone else on the planet.
From the spasmodic rhythms and schizoid imaginings of The Actor to the wistful musings of Kings and the ultimate urban romance of Down in the City, Condell's canvas is as broad as it is deep, fuelled by the imagination of someone who stands gloriously askew from the world.
Overson lent intricate guitar lines, instinctively knowing how to ebb and flow between Condell and King's jousting. Somehow, special guest Freddie White's cavernous cathedral of a voice was the perfect foil to Condell and King's sibling-like harmonies.
His self-composed The Boy Talks Tough was a standout, all gangly elbows and paternalistic concern about the swamp of teenage angst: a snapshot of life as we know it, but seldom hear it sung with such world weary insight. With Sonny Condell's graphic art providing an eye-popping backdrop to many of the songs, this was a fiery marriage of sound and vision that gave licence to the limitless possibilities that have always lurked beneath his music's surface. In between, there were pristine borrowings from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Lowell George. Most of all, it was a reminder that great music needs no elixir of youth, just an airing in a venue as welcoming as the Triskel. - SIOBHÁN LONG
The Magic Tree
The Granary, Cork
A PLANNED gang-rape goes wrong for good reasons, and then goes wrong again for bad reasons which might turn out to have been good. This confusion of good and bad, of accident and design, is the ground from which Ursula Rani Sarma's new play, The Magic Tree thrusts itself.
It's not particularly solid ground and the playwright relies on the performances of the four players in this 90-minute piece to obscure the occasionally troubling issues of likelihood that puncture the narrative here and there. "Here" is a deserted holiday house somewhere in Ireland in which a well-to-do but runaway girl takes shelter in a storm, followed by a group of feral teenage boys; "there" turns out to be Cambodia, reached without time or travel, restrictions.
Perhaps these prickling little questions should not matter in what is an essay in magic realism, and they are banished, even if only temporarily, by the quality of the playing from Frank Bourke, John Cronin, Laura O'Toole and Ciarán O'Brien.
The questions inherent in the theme are worked out through an investigative dialogue that seeks to examine the relationships between small thoughts and acts of evil and immense policy-driven genocide, barbarous annihilations enshrined in a country's history, totemic as, in this case, a magic tree. As pornography is to rape, so manslaughter is to a holocaust, and Rani Sarma's exploration of complex yet insistent psychological, social and political connections has a validity that this surreal work attempts to convey. - MARY LELAND
Pipeworks
Various venues, Dublin
2008 MARKS the centenary of the birth of one of the key figures in 20th-century music, French composer Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992. Unusually for a composer of his stature, Messiaen was a remarkable organist, not one who travelled the world giving recitals, but who chose to play and improvise at La Trinité in Paris, where he was the parish organist for over 60 years.
His output for the organ is substantial, amounting to over seven hours' worth of music and Mark Duley, the artistic director of the Pipeworks festival, included a complete survey as a strand in this year's programme.
The music of Messiaen is at the heart of the organ repertoire, but in a selective way. The largest cycle of pieces - the Livre du Saint Sacrement of 1984 can run to over two hours - are daunting enough to guarantee that complete performances are a rarity. So the Pipeworks survey gave listeners an unusual opportunity to sample the music in its entirety.
Messiaen's work was influenced by his staunch Catholic faith, his interest in Indian rhythmic practices, a passion for birdsong (which he transcribed for use in his music), an exceptional ear for musical sonority (influenced perhaps by his synaesthesia, which caused him to experience particular chords as colour as well as sound), and a curiosity that kept him at the cutting edge of compositional thought.
His teachers, who included Dukas, Widor and Dupré, were conservative, but some of his pupils, Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis, were as radical as they come, and some of his works from the late 1940s were crucial to the development of serial composition.
In general, it was the sweetened harmonic palette of his early work, and the richly cluttered chordal toccatas that pepper the larger cycles that came off best in the recitals given by Tristan Russcher and David Leigh at the Pro-Cathedral, St Patrick's Cathedral and St Teresa's Church, Clarendon Street.
Russcher, the assistant director of music at Christ Church Cathedral, came across as a diligent but sometimes rather stiff player. The high-contrast style of parts of the Livre d'Orgue, for instance, was flattened by a failure to engage with the music's extremity of gestural effect, its combination of jaggedness and virtuoso swirl. Leigh, assistant organist and director of the Cathedral Girls' Choir at St Patrick's Cathedral, was the more flexible and responsive player of the two, and his late-night handling of the Livre du Saint Sacrement in a darkened St Patrick's Cathedral was the highlight of the series.
The organ version of the early L'Ascension was shared in performance by Russcher and Leigh at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dundalk. The orchestral original was included in a concert by the RTÉ NSO under Jean Thorel, whose account was finely shaped and sculpted.
Messiaen made a big feature of wind instruments, and the evening's organ concerto, by Poulenc, did the opposite, highlighting the organ by placing it against strings and timpani. Thomas Trotter was the sprightly soloist in this delightful work. Messiaen featured in one other programme during the festival, Margareta Hürholz's recital at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire, where her incisive handling of the Offrande et Alléluia which rounds off the Livre du Saint Sacrement had a youngster in front of me beaming and bouncing with glee. - MICHAEL DERVAN
