A review of what is on in the world of the arts.
Sisters
Everyman Palace, Cork
The confessional structure of Declan Hassett's new play, Sisters, is supported by Stuart Marshall's effectively austere set and the sympathetic lighting design of Michael Scott, who is also the director and composer of the incidental music.
Above all it is animated by Anna Manahan's performance in the dual role of two mis-matched sisters. These lives are explored, rather than explained, in a double characterisation for which any playwright would thank heaven, fasting. Yet the impression remains that this is a one-woman show which would play better, and with more theatrical logic, if it were for two women.
However, Manahan's conviction carries the play, which is based a little doubtfully on the biblical roles of Martha and Mary as represented in a rural Irish family, where one daughter stays resentfully at home and the other, encouraged by a partisan mother, teaches in Dublin.
For domestic Martha, Anna Manahan brings all her skills of timing and innuendo to enliven an otherwise static presentation, and by deepening the text offers a frustrated woman still longing for the golden childhood dominated by a father she idolised. Ostensibly simple (indeed, her unmediated reflections suggest stupidity), she is given ironies and attitudes which indicate some ambivalence in the writing but which Manahan delivers with relish.
Because, like everyone around her, Martha is an unpleasant personality, it might be possible to understand the melodramatic shock which accompanies the portrayal of Mary. She too longs for her father, who ignored her in favour of Martha; this undercurrent of sibling jealousies should have strengthened the play had it been more intensely excavated. Instead the second-act role is weakly drawn, although Manahan's technique and power of atmospheric evocation help her disguise her own insecurity and the mounting inconsistencies (the sisters, for example, are separately raped by the same man) which eventually demand attention.
The chief of these, unfortunately, is the unanswered "why?": persuasive as Manahan, and the whole City Theatre Dublin production may be, there is no dramatic cause or stimulus from which these monologues spring.
Sisters runs in Cork until tomorrow, is at Andrew's Lane, Dublin, February 9th-26th, and then tours
Mary Leland
A Streetcar Named Desire
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
There are times, just minutes into a show, when one has the conviction that it is going to be a good night in the theatre. The set design, opening lines, background music and a sense of the actors coalesce to create a positive ambience. This Tennessee Williams classic, by Serendipity Productions, suborns the critical instinct from the start.
The first impression is reinforced throughout by excellent acting, with a memorable Blanche Du Bois from Fiona Brennan. Her desperate attempts to survive her past ordeals and present crisis draw one into her tortured world. Her humiliation is completed by a rape inflicted on her by Stanley Kowalski. Her mind fails as the destiny she has been fleeing finally overtakes her.
Her performance is brilliantly complemented by that of Caroline Coffey as her sister Stella, adoring wife to the brutal Stanley. If Blanche skidded down the social ladder while maintaining a pathetic pretence, Stella has found her sufficient reality in the basics of marriage and maternity. But they are sisters, and much of the play's most penetrating exchanges are between the two as they try to balance their conflicting views and loyalties.
Alan O'Neil's Stanley is a strong portrayal of a cruel master, ragingly resentful of the intruder he has overheard describing him in contemptuous terms, words that have sealed her fate. Eamon Doyle is Mitch, the quiet man who might have rescued Blanche but for Stanley's intervention. But there are no heroes here.
Alan Kinsella's direction hits the spot, using the set design by Sonia Haccius and atmospheric mood music to good effect. If shades of Brando, Leigh, Malden and Hunter hover in the wings, they emphasise the extent to which their successors here follow effectively in their footsteps. The comparison is not odious: everyone wins.
Runs to February 12th; then Waterford, Feb 24th-26th
Gerry Colgan
The Shadow of the Glen/Tinker's Wedding
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Two marriages - one at an end, the other about to begin; the first dominated by a violent elderly man; the second by a hot-headed tinker girl. In each, the outcome is precipitated by a third party - a stranger seeking shelter from a storm and a porter-sodden mother, intent on hanging onto her son and his earnings.
Big Telly artistic director Zoe Seaton has spotted the links and contrasts between Synge's two short plays, whose subversive content caused merry hell to break out when they first saw the light of day. Both sit comfortably within the atmospheric worlds of Sabine Dargent's simple sets. In The Shadow of the Glen, home and landscape have become one, the interior of Dan Burke's (John Hewitt) isolated cottage invaded by the bleak, windswept Wicklow Hills outside, offering little comfort or diversion to his trapped young wife Nora (Ruth Lehane).
Their loveless marriage of convenience is at breaking point, finally and cruelly fractured when put to the test by an adoring young farmer (John Lovett) and a tramp (Jack Lynch), who dangles in front of Nora the alternative of a physically challenging but spiritually rewarding existence. Modern audiences rejoice at the wisdom of her choice; early 20th-century Irish audiences most certainly did not.
In contrast to the stultifying daily grind of the first play, The Tinker's Wedding captures a community forever on the move. Lehane's wild-haired Sarah Casey, "the beauty of Ballinacree", has a notion to marry fellow tinker Michael Byrne (Lovett). She bribes the priest (Hewitt), charms his mother (Lynch) and almost lures the reluctant groom to the altar. But drink, religion and scheming intervene, at which point the tinkers gather up their belongings and head off down the road.
At this stage, only the softly-spoken Lovett's characters emerge with heart and soul intact. The others, for all Seaton's thoughtful cross-casting, seem too intent on delivering lines and accents to pay full attention to the integrity and humour of Synge's vision.
There are moments when The Tinker's Wedding strays perilously close to the realms of pantomime, diluting the satirical mischief of the original. Topping and tailing the evening is a puppet-narrator, who capers to pop songs, played live on fiddle by Breton musician Nolwenn Guiziou - all to baffling dramatic effect.
At the Lyric until tomorrow, then on tour to Antrim, Derry, Monaghan, Longford, Coleraine and Enniskillen
Jane Coyle
