A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics
The MariettasLiberty Hall, Dublin
How’s this for product placement? It is 1969 and while man and mankind celebrate the first moon landing, five young Dublin women decide to name their new showband after a particular brand of biscuit. There is something sweetly pathetic in the gesture – two of the members are employees of the biscuit factory, a place they find as plain, unpromising and joyless as a typical Marietta biscuit, yet even in their more rocketing aspirations they stick to the world they know. They aren’t even canny enough to ask for sponsorship.
That’s not something you could say about Five Lamps Theatre Company, who here tap into the nostalgia market for innocent musical pleasures and humble baked goodness, but whose logo-emblazoned promotional materials suggest something much more savvy.
In every other respect Niamh Gleeson’s new comedy, now on its second run, comes with few frills. There is no set, the lighting is a notch above functional, and most scenographic attention goes into Ann Curry’s fetching sky-blue costumes in Jackie Kennedy cuts. This places all emphasis on performance, where ensemble sketches, miming and multiple role-playing puts us firmly in the John Godber mode of flexible stagecraft and ordinary lives.
Undaunted by early setbacks, biscuit-checker Bernie (Stephanie Behan) decides to set up her own all-female showband, assisted by nice-but-dim co-worker Mary (Emma Reinhardt), schoolteacher Assumpta (Margaret O’Doherty) who matches the voice of a star with the gait of a farmer, beleaguered trainee nurse Rita (Andrea Cleary) and simpering teacher Nuala (Jennifer Meade). In the course of their predictable rise and fall, there is enough good will and light comedy to sustain an undemanding 60 minutes. Sadly the show is about two hours long.
This wouldn’t be such a drag if, as a writer, Gleeson didn’t think in three-minute sketches, or if, as a director, Gleeson didn’t feel the need to separate each one with a blackout and a music cue; a pace-sapping technique that begins to feel like water torture.
Written around the effusive cast, all of them Marino College graduates, the play redresses a theatre culture that has never been generous with roles for young females talent. Conversely, everyone here gets a surfeit of opportunity to exhibit their range. In the absence of a well-regulated plot, however, this multitude of accents and physicalities comes off less like a play than a staged CV. It also reduces the main roles to maddeningly one-note characterisations and tiresome catchphrases that conspire to flip the tragedy of the play into bathos.
Ushering the girls variously into marriage, a nunnery, the grave and – most horrifyingly of all – another showband, the play hardly offers a parable of feminist self-actualisation. Then again, unlike product placement, opportunities for working-class Irish women in the 60s were never plentiful.
"Maybe one day we could be working on the Fig Role line," says Mary, dreamily. Now that takes the biscuit. PETER CRAWLEY
Runs until March 28th
NCC/HillierNational Gallery, Dublin
Mouton – Ave Maria. Ross Edwards – Mountain Chant. Mouton – Nesciens mater. Sermisy – Au joly bois. Gombert – Souffrir me convient. Janequin – Le chant des oiseaux. Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen – Four madrigals from the Natural World.
“Mountains, Birds, Bats and Elephants” was Paul Hillier’s title for his National Chamber Choir concert at the National Gallery on Thursday.
The evening opened with the rich, slowly rolling sonorities of the Ave Mariaand Nesciens Materby Jean Mouton, who at the turn of the 16th century was regarded as someone to be spoken of in the same breath as the great Josquin.
In between, came the strange Mountain Chant(2003) by Australian composer Ross Edwards. This three-movement work frames its Mountain Chantmovement, a buzzing, humming, clapping treatment of tongue-teaser like names, with two Latin motets, set in a harmonically clotted style.
More contrast was provided in Sermisy's Au joly bois, done with solo voices, and Gombert's Souffrir me convient, also performed with reduced voices.
Janequin's Chant des oiseaux, full of amusing imitations (cuckoos, nightingales) provided a link to Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's 2001 Four Madrigals from the Natural World, super-clever settings of four virtuosically turned poems by Australian Les Murray.
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen isn't the slightest bit shy of providing musical stretches to match the verbal ones, with stratospheric sopranos striving implausibly high in Bat's Ultrasound, dallying at too great a length in The Octave of Elephants, but rescuing himself in the later movements, especially the wriggling lines over a drone for "a woman is walking ahead of her hair" in Comete. Hillier and his singers delivered the work with spirit-lifting savoir- faire. MICHAEL DERVAN
