For the performer, bringing a text to the stage always involves an element of compromise; yielding to the words of another, shaping to another's vision, creating their world.
40,000 Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts
Space Upstairs, Dublin
Performers in this country - where theatre remains largely text-based, allowing scant space for the development of improvisational or actor-led work - understand this compromise more keenly than most.
Pan Pan has done well, then, in bringing Dood Paard, the Dutch performance company which shuns directors, to create nightly fusions of the arranged and the improvised, to this year's Theatre Symposium. For Irish actors - and more so, perhaps, for Irish audiences - there should be much to learn.
But teaching and telling are not part of the Dood Paard deal. The Project crew may dim the house lights in an attempt to instruct the chattering audience that 40,000 Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts has begun, but, huddled behind a video screen onto which they're projecting images from current magazines, headlines and cover shots, arguing quietly about the lyrics to Jenny from the Block, the performers don't seem bothered.
For a time, they are content to disappear into the darkness, leaving the stage to the screen and the DJ who is part of their ensemble. Abandoned by the actors, but knowing they are near, the audience is immediately forced to confront its role, to consider the fact of its being in a theatre, to realise its complicity in the realisation of the work; structure, with all its comforts, seems a world away.
It's something of a surprise, then, to find that when the performers do come forward they are offering a text-based work, quoting large chunks of a script. The 1967 play Self-Accusation, by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, consists entirely of statements in the first person, an intricate phenomenology, a dissection of human existence. Shot through, however, with onstage conversations and random observations on the affairs of the day, the sanctity of the text is never assured. With the performers visibly baulking at elements of Handke's play, at moral positions with which they seem unable to align themselves, the audience (which is, by turns called upon to help with pronunciation, deafened by the DJ's mix, pushed to the edge of boredom by the actors' small talk, amused by their onstage arguments, and bemused by their attempts, with talk of leprechauns and the oppressing English, to connect) is not permitted the luxury of deciding what this work means, or to whom it belongs. This play's success is in keeping the audience too occupied with its involvement in the theatrical event to ponder such limited questions. - Belinda McKeon
John Bunch
Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin
Pianist John Bunch is a distinguished member of an endangered species - the guild of veteran craftsmen whose natural home is mainstream jazz and the Great American Song Book. And on Wednesday, in the Dublin Jazz Society's first concert this year, he gave a laid-back exhibition of such consummate skill and laid-back charm that he had the audience in the palm of his hand long before the concert ended.
Now in his early 80s, he doesn't have the force he once commanded, but he has an exquisite touch, considerable harmonic and melodic resource, a well-honed sense of how to shape the performance of each piece while respecting its character, innately sensitive control of nuance and dynamics, and seemingly effortless swing. And while he will never start a palace revolution, either above or below stairs, it's good to be reminded of the virtues of this particular lineage of jazz piano while acknowledging that it's a style now frozen in time.
He was capably backed by bassist Dave Fleming and drummer John Wadham, although glitches in the trio's performance showed it had not had the benefit of rehearsal. Uptempo pieces such as Au Privave were particularly untidy, one or two bass solos went off the rails and there were occasional harmonic and rhythmic misunderstandings - a missed cue on the end of One Note Samba was wittily underlined by a "good evening, friends" quote on the piano, for example.
Though Bunch was never tempted to dig deep - individual solos seldom exceeded one or two choruses and often just artfully paraphrased the basic material, as on the graceful ballad, My One And Only Love - he did produce some notably beautiful moments. Chief among these were Emily, a waltz graced with a gorgeously diaphanous coda, a solo interpretation of Dave Brubeck's The Duke, and a medium-slow I Can't Get Started which had some of the best piano work of the night. Overall, it was an evening where finely crafted nostalgia ruled. OK? - Ray Comiskey
