Reviewed: Candide, Through a Film Darkly, Sonnerieand RTÉ NSO/Markson
Candide
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
Political satire during the Age of Enlightenment was a very different creature from that to which 21st century readers and viewers are accustomed.
The genre tends not to age well, so the very fact that Voltaire's magnum opus still regularly appears on the academic curriculum and has resurfaced here in a new stage version suggests that it contains sufficient creativity, wit and irreverence to survive the passage of over 250 years. Voltaire holds up to ridicule one of the most commonly held, delusionally optimistic notions of the time - that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It is the unenviable lot of the wide-eyed innocent Candide to put to the test this patently ridiculous theory, peddled by his tutor Dr Pangloss, as he travels far and wide in search of his lost love, Lady Cunegonde. He encounters wars, poverty, religious conflict, cruelty, genocide, natural catastrophes and a host of grotesque characters, who are out to get him in an unchanging, universal world. But our ingenuous hero is less interested in discovering the cause of evil than in identifying his individual response to it.
Patrick J O'Reilly's lively adaptation for Bruiser Theatre Company cleverly sends up the metaphysico-theologico-cosmoligico gobbledygook of the day. The focus is on testing the theory that the real value of life is in the living, no matter how miserable and depressing external conditions may be. For all its longevity and absurdity, Voltaire's original remains something of an acquired taste, a piece for study and debate rather than entertainment.
Lisa May's production, brings together a tight ensemble cast: Pádraig Wallace as the eternally optimistic Candide, Tommy Wallace as the scheming Cunegonde, Paddy Jenkins as both Pangloss and a one-buttocked hag, and O'Reilly as practically everyone else. But in spite of all the intellectual, comic and dramatic skullduggery and the hard-working efforts of the cast, it is a struggle to become fully engaged with either the cause or effect of the storyline. Bruiser's carefully crafted trademark has become a little too reliant on intense physicality, resulting in a tendency to sacrifice substance for style. The performances, particularly those of the two Wallace boys, hold our attention pretty well up to the interval, but the second act rather loses point and purpose as it romps its way towards its philosophical conclusion.
• Runs until tonight, then tours to Omagh, Armagh, Manorhamilton, Strabane, Coleraine, Antrim, Lisburn, Downpatrick, Castlebar, Monaghan, Thurles, Wexford, Drogheda, Letterkenny, Derry, Enniskillen and Belfast's Waterfront Hall - JANE COYLE
Through a Film Darkly
Project Cube, Dublin
Written almost 40 years ago to address the clash of cultures in post-independence Africa and the spectre of racism among educated Ghanaians, and now staged by Arambe during the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, Joe Coleman de Graft's play stridently argues that we should never be quick to leap to lazy assumptions and hateful judgments about people - unless those people happen to be theatre critics.
A play that establishes its Pirandellian affinities early, when the impish Fenyinka (an energetically engaging Yare Jegbefume) slips out from behind the set to apologise for a blurted false start, and later suggests that if the critics don't like it, someone ought to puncture their "bloated balloon of pseudo-intellectualism", Through a Film Darkly has a tendency to dictate its interpretation, merrily breaking the frame of its own drama in doing so.
Today that seems like a rather quaint device, a playful vestige of the counter-culture, and though director Bisi Adigun updates such rupture, interrupting proceedings again with a brief, disorienting documentary about the production we are watching - making this the first show to incorporate its own publicity department - the play's form rather than its theme make it difficult to deliver from its time.
Fenyinka may claim to be a trespasser in the play, a character the author was not in search of, yet it is he who takes centre stage rather than the explosive, misogynist John Owusu (Yomi Ogunyemi). John's racist outburst against Fenyinka's white wife Janet (Bernie O'Reilly), together with the evidence of an inconvenient visitor from his past (Elizabeth Shuh), exposes the roots of his racial hatred - in which the victim of discrimination abroad becomes its perpetrator at home.
There are clear parallels with Ireland's burgeoning interculturalism that Arambe wish to draw and important questions to ask about the pathology of racism, but whatever about De Graft's distrust of theatre critics, he seems as cagey about his audience, fretful they will miss the message if they become lost in his drama.
• Until April 19th - PETER CRAWLEY
Sonnerie
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Mozart Quintet in C Op 515; Quintet in G minor Op 516
Mozart composed both of these quintets (for string quartet with extra viola) in 1787, a terrible year for him, dominated by ill-health and - despite the popular success of The Marriage of Figaro - debt.
It was also the year that saw the death of his beloved father in April, and the two quintets were written within just a few weeks of each other on either side of that sad event. Much is made of the parallels between this pair of quintets and, from the following year, his two final and probably best-known symphonies (Nos 40 and 41, Jupiter): the intense, rapid composition within a short time-frame; the pairing of C major and G minor; the polar contrast of moods.
Indeed, the C major Jupiter and the C major Quintet Op 515 - a huge masterpiece longer than any other work Mozart wrote in four movements - share a bright, positive spirit, while both symphony and quintet (Op 516) in G minor have a sorrowful, sometimes despairing character.
That said, in April 1787 Mozart's purpose in composing the C major Quintet was not to present a public profile of his emotional state, but to make money. To this end, he tailored an attractive and prominent cello line in the hopes of prompting the patronage of the cello-playing King of Prussia.
At Sunday's concert, this line was beautifully articulated yet without overstatement by Joseph Crouch, cellist with the London-based period-instrument ensemble Sonnerie.
The group's approach to historical style found them flexible in relation to tempo, for example in the shaping of phrases and punctuating of larger sections in the final Allegro.
It was in the Allegro also that founding leader Monica Huggett (and leader of the Irish Baroque Orchestra) opted for a cheeky glissando each time the theme returned. This added to the high spirits already generated by the nimble energy of Sonnerie's period strings and fleet bowing. - MICHAEL DUNGAN
RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
John Kinsella Cúchulainn and Ferdia - Duel at the Ford
Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4
Strauss Dance of the Seven Veils & Final Scene from Salome
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra gave a special gala concert at the National Concert Hall on Friday. John Kinsella, a former head of music at RTÉ, was commissioned to write a new work and sought out a dramatic subject from the Táin for inspiration.
His Cúchulainn and Ferdia - Duel at the Ford is an atmospheric creation, drawing on well-established techniques (augmented arpeggios and chords on the harp, rapid turns on high violins, raspy spits on low brass) in a way that makes it sound like a descendant of Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain.
Antti Siirala's approach to Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto was more than a shade too cool in emotion, as if he were more concerned with the consistent perfection of his pianism than adapting to the actual moods of the music.
Gerhard Markson brought a persuasive bite to the Kinsella, and compensated for some of the remoteness of the soloist in the Beethoven. But neither had quite the expressive focus that he brought to the close of Richard Strauss's setting of Oscar Wilde's Salome. - MICHAEL DERVAN
