PETER CRAWLEYreviews Marble at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and MICHAEL DERVANreviews David McNulty at the National Concert Hall, Dublin.
Marble
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
PETER CRAWLEY
It doesn’t require a dream therapist to unravel the riddles of the unconscious mind in Marina Carr’s new play. When Art, a bullish businessman played by Stuart McQuarrie, announces he has dreamt about sleeping with his best friend’s wife in a marble room, the mechanisms of desire and jealousy are neatly set in motion. But when Peter Hanly’s perturbed Ben finds that his wife has shared the same dream, things become complicated – so begins an affair that, for the moment, is all in the mind.
To the Freudian or the poet, each unconscious ramble is pregnant with symbols and covert desires. To those who see dreams (particularly those of others) as the eccentric window dressing of a much more mundane process – “the mind’s economy wash cycle” as one of several programme notes sardonically puts it – Carr’s dream play will seem just as banal; less a map of the imaginative space, than a decorous display of a dull mid-life fantasy.
“The life not lived is what kills,” says Aisling O’Sullivan’s Catherine, and even if the production were not keen to stress the image of female melancholy and entrapment, from its Giorgio de Chirico poster image to a bar jokingly named after the painter, there is a leaden emphasis on the dream’s refuge of passion from a barren, suffocating reality.
Sadly, though, everything seems inert. Leaving behind her mythic and scabrous view of rural Ireland, Carr finds little beyond the steel and concrete of the nameless city these equally placeless characters inhabit. In Jeremy Herrin’s staging, their dreams offer no more liberation: Robert Innes Hopkins’s set may have a rear wall like an Escher print and a sofa that moves magically between scenes, but a stubborn marble monolith dwarfs the stage, shooing away more adventurous staging possibilities. When McQuarrie and O’Sullivan finally meet, for instance, we should wonder if it’s another imagined tryst, but such ambiguity is quickly snuffed out.
Instead we get familiar gender confrontations, which seem either overblown or stiltedly portentous. “Women aren’t allowed to get old,” Ben tells Catherine. Old women look happy, she counters, “because they’ve buried their men”. Despite such rough repartee the characters are deliberately bloodless, symbolic to the point of lifelessness. Derbhle Crotty works hard to find something human in Anne, a loveless spouse and borderline souse, as does McQuarrie. But for all their revealing dreams, it’s hard to believe in these dreamers.A strident underpinning of Greek tragedy has lent the selfish, destructive actions of Carr’s previous characters some emotional heft and inevitability.
The grace notes here of Arthur Schnitzler's jealous fantasies in Traumnovelleor the melancholy dream world of de Chirico don't do the same. When a bored man or woman abandons their children without hesitation to live out their dreams, all we see are depthless phantasms. If there are more convincing figures in this Marble, they have not been set free.
Until March 17
David McNulty (piano)
NCH John Field Room, Dublin
MICHAEL DERVAN
Haydn– Sonata in D Hob XVI: 37.
Chopin– Ballade No 1; Tarantelle.
Schumann– Davidsbündlertänze
Monday’s NCH John Field Room recital by David McNulty was an unusual affair. The pianist didn’t perform the programme that was originally advertised. Anyone arriving in expectation of Beethoven’s brief Sonata in F sharp, Op 78, or Prokofiev’s epic, war-time Eighth Sonata, will have had cause to feel seriously short-changed, as the substitution of Chopin’s First Ballade and Tarantelle left the evening with just around an hour’s worth of music.
That hour fell into two distinct halves. McNulty attacked the opening movement of Haydn’s Sonata in D with a dangerously brittle energy that was disagreeable in tone and accentuation. He pushed and pulled in unproductive ways at the marvellously deep Largo, and seemed altogether too disengaged in the finale.
Here, as in the other works of the first half, he played with too many angles and too few curves. Both the First Ballade and Tarantelle of Chopin were treated like a kind of obstacle course. The performances seemed to be more concerned with tricky challenges to be tamed by the fingers than issues of musical shape or overall expressive coherence.
Happily, the playing improved after the interval, with McNulty showing a surer grasp of the fluctuating moods of Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. The change in response was entirely apt, as Schumann's brotherhood of David (the Davidsbundof the title) was intended to counter what he saw as the prevailing philistinism of the 1830s.
Schumann would probably have clucked at those passages in McNulty’s reading where the raw mechanical dexterity the composer so disapproved of was given too much head.
But when the need for showmanship subsided and McNulty relaxed, the playing showed signs of an easy and rewarding musical command.
