Reviews of The Rivalsat the Abbey, Boyle, RTÉ NSO/Houlihanand Stuart O'Sullivan (piano), both at the NCH, Dublin
The Rivals
The Abbey Theatre
The plot of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Georgian comedy of manners is so tangled with crossed purposes, miscommunication, competing affections, invented characters and co-conspirators, that it can be difficult to actually identify the rivals in question. For the sake of simplicity there are only about five – including one alter-ego and one father – jousting for the honour of a prickly demure Lydia Languish (Aoibheann O’Hara). Were that not enough, director Patrick Mason has added a more surprising confrontation: an early stand-off between the play and the audience.
“Another day, another play,” announces Nick Dunning. “But will it speak to a digital age? Can it hold the contemporary stage?” The words are Mason’s, and for all their pleasingly witty verses, they fall somewhere between anxious gag and stern disclaimer: “So let’s resist the temptation to claim some kind of ‘relevance’.”
As a framing device it's an admirable gambit, and it is followed with an arm's-length aesthetic of self-conscious theatricality; Dunning, half in costume and milling around "backstage" with the ensemble, has to switch off his phone to deliver it. Following similar distancing devices with An Ideal Husbandand Three Sisters, such manoeuvres now seem to be the Abbey's default setting for staging classics. This play, already a self-conscious confection of knowing winks and direct addresses, doesn't require much more distance. The consequence is a witty, worried production that often seems as irresolute as its love-addled characters. Rich with sumptuous period costumes, it elects a contemporary thinness for its set (both designed by Joe Vanek). Reliant on scattershot anachronisms – a steam iron, some fugitive bling, a stray boombox – for contemporary chimes, it is still in thrall to the intricate verbal comedy of two centuries ago. The play may end with drawn swords, but the production has the past and the present duelling from the start.
Appropriately, perhaps, Sheridan’s comedy thrives on confrontation, as do his politics. Love is disputed by marriage-market pragmatists and novel-reading sentimentalists, with Dunning’s Sir Anthony Absolute and Marion O’Dwyer’s Mrs Malaprop seeking to sway their charges, Languish and Captain Jack (Rory Nolan). O’Hara recognises that any play offering its performers surnames instead of character notes can be fetchingly served with a cocked eyebrow, but Marty Rea’s tortured swain Faulkland commands more attention through his droll commitment to a character consummately in love with his own misery.
Throughout, in fact, there is a tension on stage between performers who submit to their characters and those who resist them. Dunning offers an excellent blend of irascibility and sneaky pride, Tom Vaughan Lawlor ratchets up the physical comedy of his gormless suitor Acres, and a terrific Emma Colohan as a maid on the make steals any scene left unguarded, but as Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Phelim Drew opts to play a stage Irishman with precious little stage Irishness. When Nolan later impersonates Sir Lucious with a thick brogue that Drew hasn’t affected, it encapsulates the problem. Individually, everyone is commendable; collectively they seem strangely out of sync.
Mrs Malaprop, played gamely by O'Dwyer beneath an enormous fright wig, often uses words that are at odds with her meaning, and this production continues the practice of injecting a gratuitous malapropism into her last, wounded line. Yet both the enjoyment and confusion in this production, with its relevancy hang-ups and bright temporal game play, could stem straight from her mangled words of wisdom: "We will not anticipate the past," says Mrs Malaprop, "our retrospection will now be all to the future." Until Sept 19 PETER CRAWLEY
Boyle, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan
NCH, Dublin
This year’s RTÉ Summer Lunchtime Concert Series might aptly have been subtitled “Soprano-watch”. Eight of the 17 programmes feature a soloist from that category, as opposed to one with mezzo and five with an instrumentalist.
Yet when this creates a platform for the likes of Claudia Boyle, who could possibly object? Boyle (25) comes from an uncommonly musical Dublin family, plays the cello, and has headed up her own rock/country band, Grand Canal.
On top of all that, as one of around 3,000 entrants in Vienna’s 2009 International Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition, she’s just taken a prize in the operetta class (won last year by Ireland’s Naomi O’Connell).
In terms of vibrato, intensity and agility, Boyle’s voice is of the pleasantly satisfying, optimum kind that could easily sustain a whole evening’s listening.
Her broad-ranging selections revealed equal strength in opera buffa (Fiordiligi's aria from Mozart's Così fan tutte) and verismo (the titular heroine's valedictory aria from Catalani's La Wally).
In the realm of bel canto, Elvira's mad scene from Bellini's I puritaniperhaps inevitably placed characterisation second to a brilliant and invulnerable technique. These Italian numbers were models of studious enunciation and compelling adroitness. On switching to German for Lehár's Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß, however, Boyle outdid even herself.
Very good things happen when Robert Houlihan is along to conduct, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra gave Boyle’s items the precisely executed and finely tuned accompaniments they thoroughly deserved.
Risks taken with balance and flexibility in the Lehár, though they led to some minor uncertainties in verse 1, culminated in an enthrallingly supple verse 2.
The Houlihan magic had perhaps been a little slow to work, with Hérold's Zampa Overtureachieving merely textbook excellence.
But when it came to Berlioz's Hungarian March, Gounod's Judex,and four movements from Massenet's Le cid,the playing was at least as superb as any I have heard from this orchestra. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
Stuart O’Sullivan (piano)
NCH John Field Room
Beethoven– Sonata in C sharp minor Op 27 No 2 (Moonlight). Chopin– Barcarolle. Polonaises in A Op 40 No 1 (Military). in A flat Op 53 (Heroic). Rachmaninov– Preludes in A flat Op 23 No 8. in B flat Op 23 No 2. Schumann– Fantasy in C Op 17. Liszt– Hungarian Rhapsody No 2.
The high point of Stuart O’Sullivan’s career came in 1994. He was 24, and, as the highest-placed Irish competitor in the Dublin International Piano Competition (he made it through to the second round) he won the Charles J Brennan, RTÉ and NCH Prizes.
As well as prestige and money, his prizes brought him a solo recital at the NCH John Field Room and a concerto appearance with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. He began to appear in the role of accompanist and chamber musician.
By the time of the 1997 piano competition he was studying under the great Russian pianist Lazar Berman at the Accademia Pianistica Internazionale “Icontri il Maestro” at Imola. But at that year’s competition he failed to make it out of the first round, and he did not continue on the professional performing path which would have established him as a regular presence in the concert scene in Dublin.
This month, however, he’s back with a bang, giving full-length recitals in Limerick and Dublin. At the NCH John Field Room on Tuesday the bang was more sonic than aesthetic. O’Sullivan’s favourite hunting ground has always been the romantic repertoire and the salient characteristic of Tuesday’s performances was the amount of brouhaha he chose to stir up.
He opened with Beethoven's MoonlightSonata, giving a coolly sculpted performance of the slow opening movement, and working his way judiciously through the gentle Allegretto before tackling the agitated finale with an apparently uncontrollable frenzy.
Frenzy and the lack of control were barriers to enjoyment in the rest of the evening. O’Sullivan offered the sort of playing where excitability becomes a substitute for real excitement, where climaxes produce simply too much noise, and where the interpretative gestures of rubato often sound simply arbitrary. And his technique did not stand up well in the delivery of the most demanding passages.
It was like an effect without a cause, a Hollywood blockbuster without connective tissue, explosion after explosion without the binding forces of character or plot. Musically speaking, O'Sullivan is still what he was back in the 1990s, a clear musical talent who has yet to find a viable vehicle for his particularly passionate musical vision. MICHAEL DERVAN
