Early in Fool For Love, Sam Shepard's intense, unsettling and often absurdly funny play from 1983, a wary May grabs a romantically insistent Eddie and kisses him passionately.
Then, with just as much passion, she knees him hard in the crotch. It's all about love at the Abbey, as the theatre's publicity campaign has it; yet here love is something inescapable, brutal and destructive.
Ambivalently reunited in a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Catherine Walsh's short-order cook May and Don Wycherley's gregarious cowboy Eddie measure their relationship in needy co-dependence and aggressive confrontation. In Annie Ryan's relentless and physically potent production (with vigorous, stylised movement direction from Bryan Burroughs), the pair move around the room like animals in a cage, hugging to the extremities of Paul O'Mahony's claustrophobic set, then meeting each other violently in the centre.
It is both foreboding and unreal: every time a door is slammed, it reverberates with impossible menace, like a clap of thunder or a nail in a coffin. When even the desert wind outside can sound like the howl of the Furies, the lovers are nudged steadily into mythic realms and, watched constantly by the Old Man (John Kavanagh, slumped like a hobo outside the playing space), their story attains both the contours of a dream and the weight of a Greek tragedy.
That this is more family drama than love story is no real surprise, the Old Man turning out to be precisely that - Eddie and May's father - whose bigamous double life has allowed the unwitting coupling of his children and its tortured, unresolved aftermath.
"It was the same love," Kavanagh growls of their different mothers, "it just got split in two."
But, as in Shepard's True West, there are more divisions in the play than that, with no easy negotiation between what is real and imagined and where even May and Eddie could be two sides of one divided self.
If that sounds as though the play is nothing but scuffed symbolism, Ryan roots it to something moving and human. A bow-legged Wycherley, slamming tequila and adeptly lassoing the furniture, is almost a parody of a cocksure cowboy, but the growing mania of his performance makes an arresting spectacle, like Jack Nicholson in spurs. Walsh, in a red dress and cowboy boots, her hair hanging in tired blonde tresses, hits the right note between bruised and imposing. She ultimately takes command of the story, silencing Eddie and her hapless suitor, Martin (an excellent, bewildered Andrew Bennett), and rousing the Old Man into a striking moment of theatrical rupture.
That may be why the strength of her early gesture sums up the production; a dark tale of the wreckage of love, which grips with strange passion and leaves you recoiling from its startling blows. - Peter Crawley
Runs until Mar 15
Dylan Thomas: Return Journey - Everyman Palace, Cork
Although a luminous name is attached to this solo presentation, which carries with it the legend that it has been directed by Sir Anthony Hopkins, Dylan Thomas: Return Journey depends on a single voice, that of Bob Kingdom. Dylan Thomas is there for all of us without Kingdom, whether we want him or not; but this actor, with a voice of melting Welsh honey, makes us want every word.
However coincidental his appearance might be, jowled as it is, curly-headed and tall, with the face - as he says himself - of an excommunicated cherub, his voice brings all the lines alive through The Outing and Fern Hill and perhaps not quite enough of the rest. The delirium of those hallucinatory adjectives and adverbs is compelling, and Kingdom has a decisive grasp of what to stress and where to pause, especially for the subtle comic emphasis which punctuates this feat of memory.
What is missing, though, is that wildly dangerous sense of the poet himself, desiring little other than to die of hospitality (which he did). For here Kingdom grows cautious; this is an evocation of the work rather than the man. Assisted by little more than a too-solid lectern (what could Sir Anthony have been thinking about?) and a trio of obliging lights the piece is a reminder that it is the work which matters. - Mary Leland Runs until Sat
OLCS/Ó Duinn - NCH, Dublin
Dvorák - Stabat Mater.
On one of its comparatively rare outings, Dvorák's 10-movement setting of the crucifixion poem typically clocks up around 85 minutes. But in this performance by Our Lady's Choral Society (OLCS), conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn telescoped the usual timing by a good quarter of an hour.
At under 15 minutes, the first movement actually came much closer to the specified tempo than it often does. Inevitably, however, the haste took its toll on certain finer points - the expressive inflections of the quartet, Qui es homo, for example, and the colourful and surprising modulations of the lilting chorus, Tui nati vulnerati.
This would have been more tolerable had the RTÉ Concert Orchestra been more sensitively balanced to the solo vocalists. But the winds seldom receded below an opaque mezzo forte.
Bass Jeffrey Ledwidge nonetheless tenaciously sustained some protracted lines in Fac ut ardeat cor meum, where his unaccompanied declamations struck a note of imploring intensity. The single purely solo movement, Inflammatus et accensus, fell to a young but commanding Raphaela Mangan, whose rich and even alto voice matched itself to the weighty neo-Handelian music with style and impressive power.
A continuously swelling accompaniment posed no threat to soprano Orla Boylan, although it impelled her to more extreme tonal splendour than is called for by the duet, Fac, ut portem, where the silky tenor of Robin Tritschler was often hard to hear.
But to his solo, Fac me vere tecum flere, Tritschler brought a touching nursery-song simplicity that marked the evening's first really atmospheric moment.
Although the performance left them with little time or space to develop the kind of subdued warmth required by much of this score, the choir was characteristically alert and clear-toned, crowning the exultant finale with a blaze of a cappella glory. - Andrew Johnstone
Ferenc Snétberger Trio - Coach House, Dublin Castle
Having forged a reputation for stitching jazz, classical, flamenco and samba styles into rich tapestries in his playing, Hungarian guitarist Ferenc Snétberger brought his structured, almost architectural music to a packed Coach House where it shimmied and slid, ducked and dived, with feline agility.
This transnational trio, drawn from Hungary, Norway and Italy, betrayed little sign of any communication difficulties as they merged and diverged across a repertoire that was at times as sultry as a humid afternoon on a shaded veranda in Havana, and at others as intensely driven as a mathematician in hot pursuit of an elusive solution to an intractable calculus problem.
Arild Andersen's bass was a miraculous canyon of rich tone and joint-defying rhythms. He's a player who has not so much cut his own teeth as sharpened those of his countless collaborators, including Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and Stan Getz. Shadowboxing and bending notes with amused ease, Andersen traded and shared the spotlight with Snétberger (a dead ringer for Sarkozy, minus the faultless coiffeur) and percussionist Paolo Vinaccia with barely a hint of ego, as they bagged pieces taken from their debut, Nomad, with Waterkiss and Song to the East particular standouts in a spine-tingling programme.
At times it was hard not to envy this trio, privy to an inner language few others can parlay. In between Snétberger's intricate melody lines lurked a distinctly urbanite, almost claustrophobic mood that was dispersed and aerated by Vinaccia's highly personal percussive style. Vinaccia's idiosyncratic appetite for inserting syncopated and fleshy hand-clapping in the midst of his percussive palette struck a wonderful balance between the crucially, messily visceral and the cerebral.
Straying briefly from their own repertoire to tackle Michel Legrand's What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?, the trio transformed an unlikely detour into a wondrously dark and impenetrable undergrowth that gradually revealed itself through Andersen's elegant bass lines.
Less a night of individual set-pieces - despite the technical brilliance of Outhouse and Nomad - and more an evening of sinuous soundscapes, the trio dizzied the audience with music that followed few rules and yet inhabited a structured world all of their own making. A timely reminder that music can indeed reroute our brainwaves in ways we might otherwise never imagine. - Siobhán Long
