Described as "a play in cabaret clothing", Johnny Hanrahan's new work for his Meridian Theatre Company is certainly very well-dressed.
Enacted along three sides of the narrow auditorium at the Triskel Arts Centre, The White Lady offers an exploration of city life, with iconic buildings emerging from the walls like a stigmata of local geography. This examination is not new territory for Hanrahan, whose journey in this case has a preconceived destination, always a relief in a dramatic construction where multi-media diversions can distort any final conclusions. That's not to say that this piece has finality; the story ends, but at a place from which it could take off again. Kieran Ahern is stalwart and humorous as the voice of one kind of existence, Ciaran Ruby, laden with aggressive rings, both vulnerable and dangerous as another.
Working on two levels as if trapped in parallel lives running like faults through a fractured city, these characters evoke the urban experience as if it were a classic of mythology. Here urban means a city that is changing at a pace which defies the poet Cavafy's quoted warning that the citizen will find no new lands or other seas. As a theme this is a little bit larger than the play can accommodate, but the references - the need to see scaffolding as art, for example - are incisive as scalpels cutting through to a hinterland of dreams, memories and domestic ornament. Hanrahan's narrative balances allusion with illusion; his skill at weaving these references into a script both subtle and seductive is matched here with an assembly of supporting talents, not least those of the chorus, the acrobatic choreography designed by Nick Bryson for Valdone Talutyte's container-load immigrant, the band led by sound designer Cormac O'Connor and the lighting by Tom Creed. Too much is attempted, it is true. Instead of knitting together, the action falls away into something close to pretentiousness, always a risk with a big idea.
But there is no faulting the idea, thrilling and decisive in itself. Although the seamless garment is replaced by a coat of many colours, the coat, or cabaret clothing, designed by Lisa Zagone, resounds with excitement, imagery and something close to an imagined but no less debatable truth. Debatable, above all, by urban planning executives. - Mary Leland
Runs until April 1st
The Hollow in the Sand - Black Box Theatre, Galway
In the programme note for this play, Blue Raincoat co-founders Malcolm Hamilton and Niall Henry argue that theatrical productions can mature over time, if given the chance. This principle of theatrical evolution is strongly evident in their presentation of Brendan Ellis's The Hollow in the Sand.
First, the show builds on much of the company's recent work. A Brief Taste of Lightning and Donald Crowhurst considered interpersonal relationships; here they're presenting a history of humanity. Whereas a Bald Soprano celebrated the absurd, this play is grounded in the rational.
The Hollow in the Sand was first staged by Blue Raincoat in 2002, but has been since radically redeveloped.
The play is also about the evolution of ideas. It dramatises a lecture on the history of mathematics, which takes us from the Big Bang to ancient Babylon, on to the Renaissance and right up to the present. This "lecture" reveals how the acceptance and rejection of scientific ideas has always been determined by culture - by such variables as social division, warfare, and religion. The play's dramatic tension therefore arises from the clash between knowledge and belief.
These themes are explored through the interlinking of this "lecture" with an account of the brief life of French mathematician Evariste Galois, who was killed in a duel the day after making a major algebraic discovery. The almost mathematical quality of his story (flawed genius + rejection by authorities = tragic early death/posthumous recognition) helps to make the play's ideas accessible: although we're being treated to a History of Everything Since the Dawn of Time in less than 60 minutes, the action is presented with clarity, humour, and warmth.
The Hollow in the Sand makes an aesthetic virtue of mathematical symmetry: music, movement, dance, set design, props, voice, visual projections and blocking are all beautifully and precisely harmonised here. The production also emphasises the value of experimentation. - Patrick Lonergan
RTÉ/Wayne Marshall - NCH, Dublin
The Great American Dream I - The Music of George Gershwin
Well, now we know. If you were prepared to make your calculations with only a small number of events in your sample, you could conclude that Steve Reich is currently a more popular composer in Dublin than George Gershwin. The evidence would be the full houses for Reich during last month's RTÉ Living Music Festival and an altogether less full hall for this week's all-Gershwin programme from the RTÉCO.
The last all-Gershwin programme I heard, from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under William Eddins, was an occasion of altogether greater musical composure than Thursday's under Wayne Marshall.
Both men chose to sit at the piano to direct Rhapsody in Blue, the "jazz concerto" written for Paul Whiteman's concert extravaganza, An Experiment in Modern Music, in 1924. Marshall set speeds that suggested some kind of race against the clock, and managed to rattle most of it off with an energy that remained unflinching.
It was edge-of-the-seat stuff, poles apart from the composer's own approach in his recordings.
The orchestra engaged in an orgy of note-bending which tended to undermine both the clarity of the pulse and the sheer tunefulness which is the composer's greatest hallmark.
The faster sections of An American in Paris were also taken at quite a lick, frenetic enough to dispel the touristic elation the title suggests. The bluesy homesickness was captured with altogether greater fidelity, and the exotic percussion of the Cuban Overture was also heard to good effect.
Gershwin's orchestral output is small enough that programmers often draw in works by other hands to fill out all-Gershwin evenings. On Thursday the orchestra trotted out Robert Russell Bennett's not terribly successful orchestral medley of Gershwin songs from films. The first half of the programme being rather short, Marshall offered the audience some solo improvisations at the piano. These he carried off with a suavity and aplomb which, in their match of musical material and style of delivery, left everything else in the evening in the shade. - Michael Dervan
