Annie Wobbler, Andrews Lane Studio: It is a pity that the now 72-year-old Arnold Wesker's plays are not seen more frequently here. Annie Wobbler, written more than 20 years ago, is probably one of his lesser works, but it is still full of interest and dramatic skills.
Constructed for just one actress (Alex Cusack), it offers three playlets, each with a single character holding the stage.
First we meet the eponymous Annie, a 60-year-old cleaning woman in London's East End. For a few pence, she does others' work, content in her servitude and believing that she is of no importance whatever. Her creator should, she is convinced, just rub her out and start again. That is really all; a snapshot of a passive victim of society.
Next is Anna, a recently graduated student already deep into misanthropy and anti-male feminism. She is preparing for a date, making up her face while railing against the convention that requires her to accommodate male demand. But she is determined to lacerate the ego of her man for the night, a study in female chauvinism.
These two segments are skilled and observant portraits, if somewhat on the slight side. They have, however, prepared us for the third, a gripping portrayal of a 40-ish writer, Annabelle, whose fourth book has been commercially successful. She is rehearsing for upcoming interviews, with the aid of a few stiff whiskeys, and offers contrasting images of herself.
She begins in a self-deprecating vein, quite jolly and not taking herself too seriously. As the cycle of interviews proceeds, she becomes arrogant and cynical, professing an interest in power and money as her driving forces.
But finally she abandons her pretences, and is revealed as a desperately insecure person who believes she is a mediocre writer and a failure.
The final play vindicates the author and the actress, here directed by Peter Reid, who also designed the effective set. A nice one.
Ends Feb 29; then tours
- Gerry Colgan
McHale, Camerata Ireland/Douglas, NCH, Dublin:
Mozart - Adagio and Fugue in C minor. Concerto for two pianos
Mendelssohn - Symphony No 4 (Italian)
Thursday's National Concert Hall appearance by Camerata Ireland, the orchestra created by Barry Douglas, Hugh Carslaw and Malcolm Neale in 1999, was a celebration on a number of levels.
It brought to the NCH an orchestra of Irish musicians which is all too rarely heard in Ireland - although it draws into its ranks a range of Irish players living abroad as well as at home, Camerata Ireland has been more active on foreign soil than in Ireland. It presented two works by Mozart on the composer's birthday. And it brought an early NCH concerto début for the young Belfast pianist, Michael McHale, Camerata Ireland/Accenture Young Musician of 2004.
Orchestra and conductor showed early on in Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C minor that a full command of string sonority and colour is an important quality in Camerata Ireland's style. There was light and shade in the playing, and urgency and delicacy, too. But the performance didn't quite add up to the sum of its parts, and the effects of the moment, which included some especially impressive control of soft playing, didn't create the necessary trajectory in this often darkly chromatic work.
With Douglas directing from the keyboard, the two soloists in Mozart's Concerto in E flat for two pianos were interestingly distinctive in stylistic approach. McHale was the brighter, the more dance-like, the more conventionally Mozartean, Douglas the more earnest, the more romantically probing. The duo played with their backs to the audience, the instruments turned in slightly to retain visual contact, and the coordination between them was admirably tight.
There was no shortage of brio in the closing performance of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. But the internal balance issues created by the small size of the string section of just over 20 players were not resolved with any real sense of musical consistency. The louder the playing was, the more opaque the textures became. The vivacity that was being sought never really yielded a consistent or sufficiently strong sense of direction. The best moments in the performance were all in the quieter passages, where a gracious lucidity often prevailed.
- Michael Dervan
