A selection of reviews by Irish Timeswriters
Forgotten
Helix, Dublin
PETER CRAWLEY
"Now there's a crowd, the Japanese," approves one of Pat Kinevane's four characters during his extraordinary performance piece for Fishamble. "Treat the elderly with the utmost of respect - see it as their duty . . . "
You could say the same about Forgotten, a bold fusion of one-man show and Japanese Kabuki theatre, which affords its four senescent characters an involving, interwoven tale, told with vigorous theatricality and an incisive, often scabrous wit.
That's no easy balance and, having staged this show in a series of hit-and-run short engagements since 2006, Kinevane has refined the performance into a seamless blend of style and substance in which the Japanese aesthetic is more earned than arbitrary. In other stage roles, Kinevane can exert a magnetic focus that often hijacks whatever scene he finds himself in. But under Jim Culleton's direction he puts technique at the service of the play, matching deep, effortlessly convincing characterisations with playful audience interaction, punctuated with stylised gestures that demand the precision of a dancer.
Beginning with Flor, the cantankerous, moithered resident of a retirement home in Limerick, whose dignity is assailed on a daily basis and whose fantasies and delusions supply much of the play's dark vein of comedy, Kinevane moves briskly between figures, mining their past for a shared history. Dora, a well-to-do dowager, resides in an upper-tier retirement home, her mind like a steel trap, aloofly complaining about the service while imparting her fateful romantic history to the audience.
Eucharia, her one-time maid, chats humorously about death and bequeathment - "Trouble with a capital RIP" - rarely straying from the reflection of her vanity mirror while outlining the weekly joys of exploring the Arnotts make-up counters. How she connects with Agustus - a stroke victim, astonishingly realised through mask and puppetry techniques and voiceover dialogue - is one of the play's most moving coups and ties together each relationship within a consummate act of storytelling.
Kinevane has a larger point to make, though, and this he entrusts to Flor. Between hilarious tirades against advertising, nurses and Alzheimer's, Flor makes an entreaty to the Virgin Mary, asking why the universal fondness shown to every human being in infancy should be denied us in our last days. "Come back to me on that one," he concludes without bitterness, and the words reverberate with dreadful abandonment.
Forgotten, however, is shot through with compassion, understanding and a performative adventurousness that goes far beyond duty. It is a striking accomplishment; captivating, moving, and - yes - even unforgettable.
• Next performed in Draíocht, Blanchardstown, on May 2 and 3 and at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, on May 16
NCC/MacKay
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
MICHAEL DUNGAN
Since January of last year, following the dramatic resignation of Celso Antunes, the National Chamber Choir has carried on without the overarching influence of an artistic director and chief conductor. With a successor, Paul Hillier, now due to take over and import a fresh, personal vision as of June 1st, the choir and guest conductor Brian MacKay opted for artistic neutrality with a miscellany-style programme for its national spring tour, which concluded with this concert.
There was a generalised focus on the first half of the 20th century, featuring Kodály, Vaughan Williams, and Villa-Lobos, but the concert opened with tasters from the baroque and romantic repertoire. Here and throughout the concert MacKay relaxed the choir's customary restraint in individual vibrato, resulting in a rich sound that worked best in the quiet, nocturnal intensity of Waldesnacht (Woodland Night) from the Sieben Liederby Brahms.
The liberal use of vibrato made a less positive impact on the motet, Lobet den Herrn, by Bach, and in the wordless, Bach-inspired Bachianas BrasileirasNo 9 by Villa-Lobos, in both cases congesting the contrapuntal interplay of the independent lines and clouding the harmony.
At the heart of the concert MacKay fashioned a slow, powerful evocation of awe and majesty in The Cloud-capp'd Towers,Vaughan Williams's setting of words from Prospero's great speech in The Tempest. There wasn't the same level of atmosphere and imagery in the other two Shakespeare settings that made up the set, this performance neither conjuring the eerie underwater mystery of Full Fathom Fivenor the gossamer scamper of fairies in Over Hill, Over Dale, both from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
An impression of cautious programming was reinforced by the tame nature of pieces included by Irish composers. Both Séamus de Barra's A Chraobh Chromand Gerard Victory's Sliabh Geal gCuaare pleasant, Irish folk-influenced settings from the early 1980s that would be a welcome addition to any choral miscellany like this one. On the other hand, perhaps it's a pity that the National Chamber Choir on a national tour wouldn't showcase some of the rich and forward-looking choral music that Irish composers are producing today.
The concert's highlight was Kodály's Mátrai Képek (Matrai Pictures), in which MacKay handily negotiated the Hungarian's many abrupt changes of speed, dynamics and mood as his singers summoned a warm, earthy picture of rural life.
