A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics.
Michael Collins: A Musical Drama
Cork Opera House
MARY LELAND
The generosity with which writer and director Bryan Flynn approached this story means Michael Collins: A Musical Drama is a production rich in achievements. Although there is no credit for choreography in the programme, the large cast provides a lesson in ensemble movement. Apart from a 'Scenic Artist' nod to Davy Dummigan, no credit is given for the set design, yet somebody must have fused the static staging levels with the mobile steel scaffolding which enhance the heroic scale of Flynn's theatrical vision. The setting also manages to accommodate what might have been an awkward technical problem (and is definitely a clumsy device in the narrative) by draping an internal theatrical context - scenes from the 1916 Abbey Theatre production of Yeats's Cathleen ní Houlihan - with scarlet curtaining. This splash of gore both relieves and enriches the costume design by Blanaid McCann which hints at a Whistler composition in black and white (with shades of grey). To these successes must be added Richard O'Neill's lighting, his searchlights arrowing through the blizzards of dry ice as if trying to discover life in a galaxy far far away.
Possibly because Flynn believes his story happened in a very distant galaxy indeed, he offers a lot of instruction and at times the script sounds like the New Testament being justified by the prophesies of the Old. With no faith at all in the suggestion that less is more, he also manages to create a needless confusion from which Freedom, Ireland, Flag, Homeland, Liberty and War emerge as the much-repeated catch-words. Shouted and sung by Collins - a man who spent his boyhood reading The Mill on the Floss but is now apparently prey to paranoid blood-lust - these phrases act like a stimulant to the birth-pangs of the drama. The leading quartet (Killian Donnelly as an appropriately heroic Collins, and Derek Collins, Michael Grennell and Robert Vickers as Boland, De Valera and Emmet) delivers with admirable vocal finesse and commitment. But what happens to Trevor Knight's orchestration of the music and lyrics by Bryan Flynn is a total mystery.
Sonorous and repetitive, with occasional hints of melodic structure, the collaboration extracts some engaging choral harmonies from the score, but with the singers miked at each ear like pirates, and the overwhelming soundtrack coming from another galaxy (this time all too close), the distortion was punitive. The critics were invited for the final night of the run when the tired sopranos achieved their top notes with difficulty or not at all.
Problem Child
Stix, Limerick
PATRICK LONERGAN
George F Walker's Problem Child is the first in a cycle of six short plays, all set in the same seedy motel room in an unidentified US city. Each play focuses on marginalised people who find themselves in desperate situations: here, we're presented with a recovering drug addict and her ex-con partner, whose child has been taken into care by an unhinged social worker.
Their situation is sketched with a darkly humorous blend of sensationalism, strong plotting, and pop-culture references - a style of writing that was common in the late 1990s when this play first appeared. It's therefore unsurprising that Walker sometimes seems like a Canadian Martin McDonagh, whose Leenane Trilogy premiered at the same time as Problem Child: both seem like attempts to import the transgressive style of Quentin Tarantino into the theatre. And that's one of the problems here: although the play has never been produced in Ireland before, it still feels a little too familiar to be fully effective.
This Impact Theatre production, in Limerick's Unfringed festival, does much to overcome that difficulty. The action takes place in the upstairs room of a Limerick amusement arcade: the audience is led up a darkened staircase to a candlelit performance space, and the sounds of videogames and shouts from the street below set the scene brilliantly. Jeff Culbert builds on that atmosphere well, directing in a style of cinematic realism that keeps the action zipping along nicely. The pace only stalls in the final minutes, when Walker unwisely has his heroine deliver a monologue direct to the audience. Aiming to give his play closure, he instead only emphasises the superficiality of everything that has come before.
As the couple at the centre of the play, Norma Lowney and Myles Breen give good performances, but all four actors seem uncomfortable with the script's inherent absurdity. The only way to present this kind of comedy convincingly is for the cast to believe absolutely in every line that they deliver. Too often here, however, they seem to invite us to laugh with them instead of at them.
Return Journey
Project Cube, Dublin
MICHAEL SEAVER
In the movies, departures by rail are always the most dramatic, agonisingly stretched by a lover running down the platform following the head poking from the train's window. This is the metaphoric territory of Return Journey, an installation and performance in Project's Cube. James Kelly's three films are set in an Irish train station, devoid of commuters and silent. It is the non-mainland geography of the Ballybrophy line or the Rosslare to Limerick Junction line, sparse journeys to stations where nobody boards or alights.
But the trains still run, just as the dancers orbit the Cube's space from noon to 8pm every day, whether anybody is watching or not. Mary Wycherly and Immaculada M Pavon join choreographer Mary Nunan (although there are only ever two performing) in walking around the square walls. As they move, they take their black and white houndstooth overcoats off with slow toreador swishes and put them back on by sliding the sleeves along rigid arms that soften and embrace.
Although always at the farthest point away from each other around the square, their concurrent movement gives a sense of empathy and intimacy. It is an unfulfilled journey, both a departure and return. The overall sense is close to the expression "coming and going at the same time", that state of uncertainty and restlessness that is magnified by Michael McLoughlin's soundscape that includes the indistinct reverberations of public announcements, unanswered phones and distant bells.
On the three screens, a child's shoe, Schindler's List-red against the monochrome backdrop, is clutched between gripping hands, turned inside out and lovingly clasped and unclasped, later furtively stuffed into a coat pocket.
Elsewhere, cupped hands crack open, spilling a yolk of blood-red petals that slowly float down to rooted feet, or a warm hand presses against the station's cold floor, a houndstooth sleeve harmonising with those square black and white flecked tiles that are disappearing from updated stations. Although the images balm the viewer with a sense of nostalgia, particularly when low winter sun adds wet sepia to the screens, it is Return Journey's aesthetic conversation around space, perspective and presence that most beguiles and is rewarded by repeat visits. Runs until Sat
RTÉ NSO/Rophé
NCH, Dublin
MICHAEL DUNGAN
Although Ravel's Shéhérazade sets lines not from the legendary Arabian storyteller but by the composer's Parisian contemporary Tristan Klingsor, the sensual, aromatic atmosphere he creates belongs to the 1,001 Nights and to the opera inspired by them that he never finished. Conductor Pascal Rophé and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra captured this atmosphere, making good account of the languid exoticism conjured by Ravel, master of orchestration.
Irish soprano Ailish Tynan subtly inhabited the persona of a young girl whose hunger for life and longing for love are encompassed in Klingsor's three poems. Above all, Tynan - who is young - sounded young, something not every young soprano can do when required. Her French was natural and understated, and with her warm, nicely measured voice, she matched the poems for their quiet intimacy.
In this, she was not always complemented by Rophé, who sometimes allowed Ravel's sweeping orchestral ardour to mask the solo voice. Something similar occasionally marred Alborado del Gracioso, whose jolly character and dancing, Spanish colours sometimes saw the first violins rendered all but inaudible by the exuberance of the percussion and brass who were all in very fine fettle.
Even in the massive work that occupied the concert's second half - Messiaen's extraordinary Turangalîla-Symphonie - the eerie contributions from Valérie Hartmann- Clavérie on the electronic ondes Martenot were often lost in the overall texture.
That aside, Rophé ignited a rambunctious tour-de-force from his players, supported by a virtuosic performance from piano soloist Roger Muraro. The 10-movement, 70-minute outburst - described by Messiaen as a "hymn to joy . . . superhuman, overflowing, blinding, unlimited" - was encapsulated in the two sharply contrasting movements at the work's centre: the mad careering of The Joy of the Blood of the Stars followed at once by the drowsy air and twittering birdsong from Muraro in The Garden of Love's Sleep.
Editors
Olympia, Dublin
LAURENCE MACKIN
Editors write music as sombre and dark as a long tea-time of the soul, and their lyrics brood more heavily than poets in winter. But live, the band are a tumult of crackling energy. The sparse stage and black outfits, right down to their uniformly black guitars, set the weighty tone that the band created on their first two albums. But this is not joyless music that gets lost in its own introspection. It is a loud, mammoth of a beast. Frontman Tom Smith's rolling baritone intones the lyrics, rather than sings them; Chris Urbanowicz's squalling, fitful guitar whips up a storm as bassist Russell Leetch and drummer Ed Lay pound the front rows of the enthralled crowd, with seething waves of rampant rhythm.
This sound is as big as a cathedral, and it's all baroque mood and blood-red presence, particularly on tracks such as Escape the Nest and Munich and, when Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors is let loose, the quality become apparent. This music sounds as if it's been written with bigger venues in mind.
Halfway through the gig, Smith's on-stage posturings (fans may note he has toned down his Ian Curtis approach) lead him to straddle the piano and mangle the mic stand. If his lyrics suggest he has the soul of a poet, his on-stage antics hint he's got the heart of Bono.
Editors might be just two albums into their career, but this gig feels almost like they are working with the songs and the set-up, tinkering and testing them for much bigger things to come - they might just have the stones, hooks and on-stage swagger to push the air around arena-sized venues.
