WB Yeats' 1906 play Deirdre was a seminal work for the poet and playwright. Experimenting with the use of a chorus, music, and tragic ritual, Deirdre foreshadowed Yeats's adaptation of the Japanese Noh tradition in Four Plays for Dancers, which would become his signature works for the stage.
Placing Yeats' version of the Irish myth side by side with Ulick O'Connor's 1980 Noh version immediately establishes a dialogue between the two Deirdres, rightly suggesting a lineage of form. However, the reverse order of the programme, performed by Naoise Productions, serves to mystify rather than clarify this connection.
O'Connor's Deirdre is performed first, its condensed and contained dramatic expression of the myth faithful to the ancient Japanese ritual drama. The ensemble provides a unanimous chorus, complete with enquiring scholar and wise old man, who narrate the tragic story of Deirdre of the Sorrows in the continually varied music of O'Connor's carefully crafted incantations.
Meanwhile, a masked Geraldine Plunkett provides a physical link to the story, as Deirdre's ghost who is haunting the countryside. Caroline Fitzgerald's direction is precise, while Diane O'Keefe's choreography and original musical composition are complementarily rhythmic.
It is at the hands of the sculpted beauty of O'Connor's Deirdre, however, that Yeats' play - which takes second billing - suffers. Fitzgerald's vision of the play is so conservatively naturalistic that Yeats's drama seems more like a 1950s kitchen-sink melodrama than the nascent anti-drama that it really is. The symbolic function of the chess board (Yeats' sole defining prop); the foreshadowed tragic inevitability; the use of mythic archetypes; the function of the musicians as chorus: all are given purely realistic expression.
Chisato Yoshimi's green and gold design is most effective in establishing the difference and complementarity in the pieces. She achieves this beautifully through the weight, texture and sheen of fabric, the use of colour, and the repetition of motifs. However, this is the sole interrogative element of the evening, the reverse chronology obscuring the richness of the lineage between O'Connor's Noh play and Yeats' evolving dramatic form. In the end, the two plays seem united by nothing more than their eponymous heroine: the woman who, typical in Irish mythology, is the source of all the world's woe. - Sara Keating
Ends tomorrow
Elizabeth Cooney (violin) - St Ann's Church, Dublin
Bach - Sonata No 3. Partita No 3.
To the six annual concerts in the Orchestra of St Cecilia's cantata series is always added a seventh Bach event, an instrumental recital. This season's guest soloist, Elizabeth Cooney, is a rising star of Irish violinists.
Others had been written before, others since, yet Bach's works for unaccompanied violin remain the first and the last word in the genre. In diverse ways, they require the player to coax two or more simultaneous melodies from an instrument designed to produce but one.
Sometimes, there's too much going on to allow every note to be sustained for its full duration, and the listener is presented with a kind of auditory join-the-dots exercise. But thanks to forthright tempos and an outgoing mood, these performances were connective.
Cooney positively marched through the uncompromising fugue from Sonata No 3, neatly marshalling the persistent stretto entries, and capturing a sense of several-voices-in-one in the passage-work.
The pervasive harmonic element, however, was sometimes clouded by unsettled tuning, and by a tendency to deny the more abstruse chromatic excursions the extra time they need to fully register on the ear.
In the Loure and Menuets of Partita No 3, Cooney avoided the kind of excessive nuancing that can develop into mannerism.
But, despite some squally moments, the most memorable listening came with the concluding allegros of both sonata and partita, and in the partita's opening allegro. (The latter, repeated as a bonus encore at the end of this short programme, looked forward to next Sunday's concert, when it will be heard in its re-worked version as the introductory sinfonia to Cantata No 29.) To these brisk movements, Cooney brought invigorating energy and involving dash. - Andrew Johnstone
