Irish Times critics review The Misanthrope at the Gate Theatre, Dublin a performance from the Ulster Orchestra with Takuo Yuasa at the Ulster Hall, Belfast; an exhibition, Bright Colours Only, at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast
The Misanthrope at the Gate Theatre, Dublin
Irish Ferries deciding that it would no longer sail directly from Rosslare to France, and that passengers would have to fly to London and take a boat from Dover. Translated into theatrical terms, this is pretty much what we get in the Gate's production of Molière's great 17th-century comedy The Misanthrope. To get to France, we are rather absurdly routed through London.
One of the big ideas in Irish theatre over the last 20 years is that it does not make sense for our encounters with European classics to be refracted through English sensibilities. Dramatists such as Thomas Kilroy, Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness have created vivid Irish versions of many of the standard plays of the European repertoire that seemed, once and for all, to have freed us from provincialism.
The Gate has been an important part of this process. So has Molière. Derek Mahon's exuberant, glittering and technically accomplished versions of The School for Wives and The School for Husbands are among the crown jewels of the whole movement.
How astounding then to find that, after all of this, Irish actors have to put on fake English accents to perform a French play.
This 1996 version of The Misanthrope by the English playwright Martin Crimp is not, in itself, at all bad. It is deft and fluent and the verse strikes a good compromise between formality and accessibility.
Crimp's decision to shift the action into the media and movie worlds of mid-1990s London does flatten out the plot somewhat. But he carries it through with aplomb.
The protagonist Alceste (Nick Dunning) becomes a relentlessly honest but rather self-regarding dramatist who refuses to play the game of kissing backsides and stabbing backs. Celimene, the bitchy, coquettish young woman who represents everything he despises but who in fact he adores, is transformed into an American movie star, Jennifer (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh). The other characters become an influential critic, a dirt-dishing journalist, a powerful agent and so on.
This is all fine and well - in London in 1996. In Dublin in 2003, however, it gives us neither a genuine encounter with Molière's original play, nor an intimate, immediate satire on our own time and place.
In his own time, Molière was a scandalous writer, who enraged many powerful people and diced with danger. In a milder way, Crimp's version takes a few sharp pokes at what were, seven years ago, contemporary targets.
There is a direct and scathing reference to John Major's Back to Basics campaign. There is a kick at the fashionable darlings of the Saatchi-sponsored Britart establishment. Raspberries are blown, not just at the soft target of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but at cherished playwrights such as Alan Bennett and David Hare.
At the Young Vic in 1996, this probably felt rather daring. At the Gate in 2003, however, it feels terribly smug. Instead of being asked to laugh at the hypocrisy and pretension of our own media darlings, we are simply being asked to laugh at the English, which Irish audiences will happily do all day long.
To take one example, Crimp's ludicrous critic is called Covington, an obvious swipe at Messrs Coveney and Billington, two of the most powerful drama critics in England. A play at the Gate which slagged off a ridiculous Irish critic called, let's say, Fintan O'Kelly, might have a similar cutting-edge. Left as it is, though, the satire is completely toothless.
There is also the added problem that Alan Stanford's cast display varying degrees of comfort with the London setting. Nick Dunning, who is English, obviously has no trouble and gives us a more than credible Alceste. Susan Fitzgerald, who has an English background, is completely assured as a burnt-out theatrical grande dame.
Elsewhere, however, the performances are uneasy. Insincerity is very hard to act on stage, and to play a hypocrite requires a comfort with many layers of a persona. Too often here, the strain of put-on accents and assumed mannerisms results in mere posturing. Elisabeth Dermot Walsh's Jennifer is especially problematic, convincing neither as an American star nor as a 20- year-old ingénue.
The overall feel is inescapably provincial: a London sensation reaching the outlying regions seven years later. Even if this is really the way Irish audiences now see themselves, this Misanthrope is also ineffably self-satisfied. Alceste would see through it like a shot.
Runs for five weeks at Gate Theatre
Fintan O'Toole
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast
They come from far and wide, idealistic volunteer soldiers gathering to fight a war in a foreign land against a largely unknown enemy. Buoyed up by wide-eyed optimism, the adrenalin of conflict and a conviction they are here to continue a battle for freedom which began in their own land, they seem insulated from the dangers and horrors which lie ahead.
It is the bloody summer of 1916 in the flatlands of Flanders. It could just as easily be the year 2003. For all the technological advances and developments in modern warfare, how little the basics have changed. And how chillingly fresh and resonant do the words and sentiments of Frank McGuinness's magnificent play ring out in this moving, timely revival.
Within the framework of Terry Loane's superbly realised mud-toned set, rosily lit by Conleth White, director Michael Duke provides a sensitive response to the nuances and sensitivities of these eight damaged souls, seven of them in search of some kind of personal catharsis and, even, a tilt at heroism. The eighth has a different agenda. Kenneth Pyper, the eldest son of a wealthy Co Armagh family has enlisted purely as a death wish, a decision he is doomed to live with for years to come. His cavalier attitude and sardonic take on life propel his companions into a depth of self-examination they would probably never have contemplated had they stayed put in Derry or Coleraine or Belfast or Enniskillen.
The fine ensemble cast is dominated by Richard Dormer's Pyper, hovering on the edge of hysteria and threatening to take his emotionally precarious companions with him. Mark Mulholland makes an immediate impact in the difficult opening scene, as the elderly Pyper confronts the ghosts of that terrible day and admits the shame of his own motives. The scenes in the muck and gore of the trenches are riveting, pacey and fluent, qualities which flag a little in the famously stylised central episodes, where the men revisit the familiar landmarks and psychological territory of home. This production, echoing with the fervour of the Ulster Volunteers' call to action, seeks out the nooks and crannies of our consciences, reflecting ruefully on the devastating effects of war, no matter on what stage it is played out.
Runs until March 1st.
Jane Coyle
Bright Colours Only at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
We are warmly welcomed at the door and, after an exchange of pleasantries and condolences, we are offered tea, sandwiches, biscuits and a wee dram to ease ourselves into the occasion. The TV murmurs away mindlessly and the chat is of the latest fashions, the variable quality of tinned salmon and, oh yes, affectionate memories of the deceased, lying in the coffin.
Writer-director-performer Pauline Goldsmith resurrects lifelong memories in this, sometimes all-too authentic, recreation of an Irish wake, which was an enormous hit at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival. It is a surreal, interactive experience, in which the audience crowds into the living room set, settles into armchairs and becomes the mourners and pall bearers. Into this unsettling piece of virtual reality is projected a series of cartoony impressions of death and burial from a child's uninhibited perspective.
Not that Belfast-born Goldsmith is in any way inhibited in her own observations, whether she is giving out an unflinchingly graphic description of the embalming process or re-living a range of personal experiences of death itself. Indeed, it is sometimes easy to forget that this is a piece of drama of the most surprising kind.
Not for anyone with a fear or squeamishness about death or dying, the mood varies from black comedy to meticulous first-hand recollection, as the central character recalls the effects on her family of one of the most shocking incidents in Belfast in the early 1980s. But the best is saved for last, as the familiar ritual draws to a close and the audience is invited to take its leave of proceedings in the most bizarre yet logical manner imaginable.
Bright Colours Only is at the Old Museum until Feb 15th.
Jane Coyle
Ulster Orchestra, Takuo Yuasa at the Ulster Hall, Belfast
Holberg Suite - Grieg
Trombone Concertino in E flat Op 4 - Ferdinand David
Cantos de la Mancha - Jan Sandström
Symphony No 1 in E minor - Sibelius
Trombone concertos are rare items, one obvious reason being the shortage of players of the calibre of the Swedish virtuoso Christian Lindberg. The concerto by Ferdinand David, a friend of Mendelssohn, was written for a 19th-century virtuoso, but has languished since, partly because of the scarcity of exponents, and partly because the orchestral parts were lost in Cincinnati in 1923 (Lindberg, a composer himself, has orchestrated the work from a piano reduction).
It's a fun piece which gives the trombone plenty to do - although Lindberg gave it even more to do in a cadenza of almost perverse virtuosity which both challenged and was challenged by the instrument's inherently heavy articulation.
A trombone concerto in all but name, the Sandström work was written for Lindberg to play, or rather, for Lindberg to perform: this Don Quixote-inspired music theatre piece requires the soloist to declaim in various languages, hop about the stage, and perform various other tricks in various stages of undress, while also playing some difficult music. It was all done with great good humour and aplomb, even if the musical content was a bit thin in places. We had an encore in the form of My Funny Valentine.
Elsewhere, Takuo Yuasa and the Ulster Orchestra gave us a fresh, classically restrained Holberg Suite and a Sibelius First Symphony which was both rugged and refined, attentive to balance and the all-important degrees of loudness, and played with plenty of passion; but which somehow never went beneath the surface of the music.
Dermot Gault
