Irish Times writers review Festen at Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Sabine Meyer, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Schiff at the Helix.

Festen

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Helen Meany

"I wonder what's going to happen next?" - the guests at the house party in Festen know they are spectators of a play within a play: with each course of their celebratory dinner comes a revelation of an appalling family secret. And still they observe the formalities, proposing toasts to Helge, the paterfamilias, on his 60th birthday.

This stage version of Thomas Vinterberg's film, by the Polish company

TR Warszawa, emphasises the emptiness of these conventions. Beneath the exaggerated bonhomie of the greetings and reunions we sense something rotten. Seated at two tables far upstage, the diners' faces are unclear: the suggestions of threadbare ritual, of guilt, denial and hypocrisy are universalised.

With the action taking place over one night in a single location, the film's unified form is rooted in the European theatrical tradition. While the play remains faithful to the structure of the film, one of the most impressive from the Danish Dogme 95 school, this production brings a discordant, manically comic energy to the marvellous ensemble scenes, and Helge's eldest son, Christian, assumes an "antic disposition".

The frenzied choreography and heightened gestures become the theatrical analogue of the swirling, jerking movements of the film's hand-held camera work. The silence, when it falls, is all the more powerful, as we listen to Christian's accusation of his father's repeated rape of him and his sister as children. For all the references to Hamlet, the difference here is that Christian stops procrastinating and finds a way to confront his father directly, in language that is plain and truthful.

The director Grzegorz Jarzyna (using the pseudonym H7) commands the stillness that this painful subject requires. The attempt to reproduce scenes faithfully from the film is less successful; it seems a pity not to have exploited the non-naturalistic potential of the piece further. Even though the superb set extends as far as possible in the Abbey, it needs a bigger stage: the scenes in the kitchen and garden are unsatisfactorily cramped and might not be entirely clear to someone who had not seen the film.

But what remains is the light shone on a shameful, ongoing, abuse, which, even for adults, takes enormous courage to expose - in Poland, Denmark or Ireland. Not surprisingly, the illumination is not only metaphorical: Piotr Pawlik's sensitive lighting design was one of the many rich pleasures of this production.

Sabine Meyer, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Schiff

The Helix, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Schreker - Chamber Symphony. Copland - Clarinet Concerto, Symphony No 40

Not much has been heard in Ireland of the music of Franz Schreker (1878-1934), whose success in the opera house and in education peaked in the early Weimar Republic.

His Chamber Symphony for 23 solo instruments, which received a welcome airing from the Deutsche Kammer- philharmonie Bremen on Wednesday, dates from 1916. For the modern listener it's quite an elusive piece. It's written in a style in which harmonic and motivic activity take second place to a fascinating array of instrumental colourings and textures.

Think of it as a journey on which the momentary experience of the upholstery and the quality of the ride matter more than the passing scenery or the eventual destination and you'll have an idea of what's involved. Heinrich Schiff and his players performed it with a persuasive sense of indulgent luxuriance.

At the evening's end conductor and players engaged in one of those stylistic transformations that are such a hallmark of leading orchestras today, by approaching Mozart's great G minor symphony with all the interpretative apparatus of period-performance style, although without the period instruments themselves.

The speeds in the Mozart were brisk, vibrato was minimal, the string tone was lean, the textural finish predicated on high contrast rather than blend and the whole shot through with spotlit calls from the horns, these latter a detail that sounded rather out of scale from where I was sitting.

The Mozart was a bracing experience, as were the outgoing moments in the Clarinet Concerto Aaron Copland wrote for Benny Goodman in 1948. Here the soloist, Sabine Meyer, relished the music's caressing gentleness every bit as much as its high-wire dancing, although she resisted the temptation to play around too much with the parts where Copland flirted with jazz. She managed that unusual feat of being at once cool and passionate, playing with poise but also bringing to the music the excitement of a biting edge.