Irish Timeswriters review Lang Langat the NCH, Dublin; The Importance of Being Earnestat the Mill Theatre, Dundrum; The Good Sistersat the Half Moon Theatre, Cork; and Peter Grimes at the Grand Opera House, Belfast.
Lang Lang
NCH, Dublin
Mozart- Sonata in B flat, K333. Schumann- Fantasy in C, Op 17; Six Traditional Chinese works.
Granados- Los Requiebros. Wagner/Liszt- Isoldens Liebestod. Liszt- Hungarian Rhapsody No 6.
This was Chinese celebrity pianist Lang Lang's second appearance in Dublin since his debut here in 2005. The big question in the run-up to the recital was how the balances would go this time between surface and depth, show and art.
As in 2005, he opened with Mozart, the Sonata in B flat, K333, and revealed an approach that was a clear development on what was summarised in these pages on that occasion as "prettiness". Mozart completed it in 1784, and the work's maturity - for example, the harmonic adventures which disturb the tranquil waters of the slow movement - found Lang Lang engaged and thoughtful, with showmanship on hold. Even the virtuosity of the final Rondo was dispatched with an effortless lack of fuss.
But if his plan was to be serious in the first half and showboat in the second, then the rest of the first half was disappointing. His account of Schumann's large-scale three-movement Fantasy in C, Op 17, featured a curious relationship with the interior voices that are so characteristic of Schumann's music. Sometimes an inner line - or even a single note - received weird, emphatic prominence, while other melodic material on the inside was almost neglected. Even bass lines that needed to emerge from the overall texture were left in the shadows. This meant that while every single note was probably in precisely the right place at the right time, the piece was incomplete and the narrative subtext (Schumann lamenting his enforced separation from his love, Clara Wieck) was undermined.
In the second half, Lang Lang offered a product that did exactly what it said on the tin. In a spectacular deployment of his extraordinary technical ability, he drew out the thrill factor in a diverse selection of works, ranging from Chinese traditional melodies dressed up in classical garbs, to the Spanish colours and dancing of the first of Granados's Goyescas, and to music from the ultimate pianist-showman, Franz Liszt.
The climax was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 6, where, in the final, mad pages, Lang Lang played like a man possessed and brought the house down. - Michael Dungan
The Importance of Being Earnest
Mill Theatre, Dundrum
"What's in a name?" Everything, darling. Especially if that name is Earnest. For Wilde's most popular comedy comes with such a history of reinventions, with so many anecdotal reductions, so much biographical baggage, that it struggles under the weight of its own archetypal Wilde-ness. A man cannot simply say "The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain", without anticipating an audience's familiarity with the lines. Modern directors thus search outside of the classic play for ways to make The Importance of Being Earnestnew - as with City Theatre Dublin's latest production. Michael McCaffrey's meta-theatrical design makes a stage of the stage-world: a smear of flock-tiled paint marks out the arena in which the comedy will be played, while a flimsy late-Victorian edifice provides a time-specific backdrop. As director, however, McCaffrey's vision remains purely aesthetic, and the wavering tone of the scenes and the idiosyncratic performance styles of the ensemble cast make for a largely uneven production.
Jim Roche plays to the audience as the mischievous Algernon, while Shawn Sturnick's far more serious Jack is stuck in a naturalistic melodrama. Meanwhile, Sinead Murphy's hard-edged Gwendolen and Maureen O'Connell's simpering Cecily are caricatures of soullessness and innocence so crude that they become almost vaudevillian.
Dillie Keane as Lady Bracknell and Pierce Kavanagh as servants Lane and Merriman are the strongest links in the cast, playing Wilde's double-edged lines with just enough knowingness to highlight the superficiality that Wilde so carefully satirises, while remaining utterly (and aptly) earnest.
However, it is the cartoon quality of the production that prevails, and it ultimately fails to penetrate the surface of this complex, if crowd-pleasing, play. The Importance of Being Earnestanatomises the shallowness of a particular class and a particular culture, and City Theatre's production does not interrogate, but mimics, this frivolity. - Sara Keating
• Ends tomorrow, then tours to Castlebar, Mullingar, Ratoath, Tallaght, Cork and Thurles.
The Good Sisters
Half Moon Theatre, Cork
All the women, even the wheelchair-bound, portrayed in The Good Sistersscream their way through life at a searing pace. Adapted from Les Belles-Soeursby Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay, this co-production from Cork Opera House and Stage Centre sets his group of working-class harridans in a 1960s Cork besotted by Green Shield stamps and bingo.
A houseful of stamps brings family, neighbours and friends together and, through this device (the construction creaks like the jerry-built houses themselves), what is supposed to be a version of female solidarity emerges.
Trapped at times in a danse macabre which always ends - tellingly - around the picture of the Sacred Heart, these women are seething with rapacious animosities. Behind the unmanageable hysteria of the dialogue, the shoving and cursing with which they attack one another (as if rage were a communicable disease) suggest a community fully committed to civil warfare. Perhaps this was intended. Certainly director Marion Wyatt has collected some good actresses, not least Ann Dorgan, who, although no height is left unscaled in the dementia of her delivery, is convincing in her quieter moments.
The subtle and measured work of Martina Carroll would always be notable, but here, set against the cataracts of shattering decibels unleashed all around her, her performance is true to her role but also true to her craft.
Subtle and measured, however, are not terms which apply to anything else in this uneasy mixture of comedy and sadness, which finally collapses into broad and nonsensical farce, the whole presentation thoroughly enjoyed by an audience delighting in a riot and well ahead of the plot. - Mary Leland
• Runs until Feb 29.
Peter Grimes
Grand Opera House, Belfast
Opera North's season at the Grand Opera House in Belfast has brought Ireland what is, remarkably, only its second production of the most successful English-language opera of the 20th century. Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, now more than 60 years old, was last presented by Opera Ireland back in 1990, when Elaine Padmore was the company's artistic director.
Leeds-based Opera North's current Grimes is directed by Phyllida Lloyd and emphasises the claustrophobic nature of a small community where nothing can really be private. Everything is observed, mulled over and commented on.
The fishing village of this Grimesis an extremely watchful society, highlighting the issues of personal privacy and public good which are such hot topics when it comes to possible or likely child abusers, as Peter Grimes is suspected of being. The pitch-forking and dismembering of an effigy of Grimes in this production spells out as much as anyone needs.
Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts's Grimes is both tender and violent. With his almost out-of-place lyricism, he is a lost and tortured soul, a hulk of a man who is perplexed and confused, unable to anchor himself either through love or work. His long Act I kiss, full of longing, with the always patient, always compassionate Ellen Orford (as played by Giselle Allen) doesn't actually have the potency to bring him the balance he needs.
The secondary roles are so evenly cast, finely drawn in both nuance and voice, and the chorus so subtle and varied a presence, that the community becomes a character in itself, against the force of which an individual like Grimes stands no chance.
Anthony Ward's set is spare, his mostly muted costumes designed to suggest a generalised late 20th-century feel. Paule Constable's lighting is oppressively claustrophobic. The conducting of Richard Farnes is patient, presenting the music in a way that's unsweetened in its inexorable playing out of the inevitable.
There are many memorable moments and images in the production, not least the closing tableau, with the villagers swaying as they repair a net, the noise of their movement evoking the lapping of the water that has just taken Grimes's life. - Michael Dervan
