The Desert of Love: Theatre Space, Dublin. There is no shortage of plays. Most of them are bad, but there are still enough good ones to go around. Even some great plays are very rarely produced. So why bother to adapt novels for the stage?
There are lots of bad answers and only two good ones. The first is to return theatre to its roots in storytelling, as Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy has done. The second is to develop a purified style of performance that uses the novel to interrogate the conventions of theatre.
Sam Young's production of his own adaptation of François Mauriac's 1925 novel The Desert Of Love achieves neither. For all its rather laboured elaboration and occasional flashes of invention, it never tells us why it is being done. Why this novel? Why now? Why here?
There is the rather basic problem that The Desert Of Love is not driven by a compelling narrative. Mauriac's work is all about what does not happen. His focus as a Catholic mystic is on the folly of human desires, the inevitable failure of the search for carnal or romantic fulfilment.
In The Desert Of Love, the plot is minimal. Paul Montegani, a respectable doctor in bourgeois Bordeaux in 1910, and his surly teenage son, Raymond, fall for the same luscious widow, Maria Morland. Neither manages to do much about it. Their desire is the desert of the title: arid, dry, largely featureless.
Mauriac makes up for the paucity of plot with a complex form, switching back and forth between the original events of 1910 and the chance encounter of Paul, Raymond, Maria and her eventual second husband, Victor, in Paris in 1925.
The basic task for any adaptation is to find a theatrical equivalent of Mauriac's style that will similarly compensate for the almost complete absence of narrative or dramatic tension. As we are not being gripped by the story, we need to be enthralled by a powerful, coherent approach to performance. Instead we get a series of rather frantic attempts to keep the story going with one hand and prop up the tottering dramatic structure with the other.
Young starts his adaptation with the 1925 Paris episode, placing an older Raymond, Maria and Victor at opposite ends of a bar in Pigalle. Even while the action continues for the most part in Bordeaux 15 years earlier, he leaves this scenario in place, largely inert. As a result, we often have five playing areas occupied by up to a dozen actors.
This is not the end of the convolutions, however. Young also blasts out styles of performance like a mad officer firing indiscriminately at an anarchic crowd. Naturalistic dialogue, visual stylisation, mime, dance, silhouettes, voice-over, burlesque dream sequences, farce - whatever comes to hand is thrown at us.
Individual sequences work well enough, but on top of all the Byzantine time schemes, the diversity of forms adds to the feeling of 16 characters in search of a purpose. By the time we get a Brechtian visit from the "Director" to fill us in on the plot, the air of panic is unmistakable.
Coping with all of this bewilderment would be very difficult for an experienced cast, and it is to the credit of the largely untried actors who occupy the massed ranks of Young's army of performers that they hold their nerve at all.
It helps that the battle-hardened David Heap and Mal Whyte provide stability as Paul and Victor. Heap is especially good at suggesting the volcanic passions beneath the doctor's sepulchral surface, and he even turns the stilted literary dialogue to effect by making it an expression of the character's aridity. Around him, Una Kavanagh, Duncan Keegan and Carol Brophy suggest the ability to do much more than the restrictions of this tortuous confection allow.
Until March 8th; bookings at 01-8729977
By Fintan O'Toole
Madama Butterfly: NCH, Dublin. This Lyric Opera production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly was considerably more modest in scale than the lavish Rostov one at the Helix three weeks ago. But it was every bit as effective as music theatre. Vivian Coates directed an unfussy and straightforward staging against a background of the NCH's own wood panels. And conductor David Jones provided all the right tensions with his mainly thrusting but never hustling speeds.
In the title role, Fiona O'Neill eschewed any suggestion of the child bride in favour of an aware young geisha who was as forthright in her lovemaking as in her defiance in the face of later adversity. She didn't lack tenderness: the letter-reading scene and her final acceptance of the inevitable were poignantly done. But her strongest assets were her steely high notes and her ability to ride the orchestral climaxes with ease.
Steely high notes were the only things lacking from David Maxwell Anderson's performance. In the tenor role of the obnoxious American sailor Pinkerton, his rich and often quite beautiful middle range almost robbed the character of his anti-hero status.
Riccardo Simonatti was a very young US Consul and his too-modern suit didn't gel with the other more-or-less period costumes. But his vibrant baritone and convincing acting were impressive. Torrance Blaisdell had tremendous vocal and physical presence as the slimy go-between Goro, and Deirdre Cooling- Nolan's Suzuki was suitably self-effacing until it was time to add her considerable contralto to an exuberant flower duet.
Baritone Eugene Armstrong was good in his two roles as Imperial Commissioner and Prince Yamadori.There was a strong contribution from Cathal Garvey's small and disciplined chorus.
By John Allen
