Reviewed today, Lay Me Down Softlyat the Peacock Theatre and Peter Planyavsky at St. Patrick's Cathederal
Lay Me Down Softly
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
In the way of most boxing stories, Billy Roche's new play features strutting contenders, washed-up coaches and injured kids with something to prove. Set in the early 1960s, but located less specifically "somewhere in Ireland", it retains Roche's warm, gently forlorn depictions of small-town lovers, dreamers and losers, but loosens his usually rooted sense of place and sets the characters adrift as members of a travelling roadshow.
With the Peacock stage handsomely transformed into a scuffed boxing marquee, set designer Ferdia Murphy and lighting designer Paul Keogan conspire to bathe this world in a sepia glow - a natural tone for director Wilson Milam's nostalgic production. Pitching their tent in any given field, where Barry Ward's young prizefighter, Dean, will take on "all comers", it is a man's world - which means it is endlessly in thrall to women.
Ringmaster Theo (Gary Lydon) may call the shots, but it is his squeeze and co-worker Lily (Aisling O'Sullivan) who is more likely to float and sting. With her milky complexion and peroxide tresses, O'Sullivan matches the look of Marilyn Monroe with the direct manner of a welterweight. And though she happily announces her presence, sniffing the air for "sweat and dust and leather", Ruth Negga makes the greater stir as new arrival Emer. As Theo's long-absent daughter, Negga is beautifully unforced, her girlish inquisitiveness prompting Theo and weary coach Peadar (Lalor Roddy) into bitter-sweet remembrance and soft revelation, while capturing the heart of lame young boxer Junior (Joe Doyle).
That dynamic of sexuality and relationships - which tips into comically violent skirmishes in off-stage incidents - is more conspicuously the engine of the play than any overt plot. Like much of Roche's work, the play's deeper meaning is hinted at in misty allusions among anecdotes. When Theo recalls rescuing Emer's mother from her bull-headed brother, negotiating the maze of her home in the process, it lends this fairground huckster the back-story of a Greek hero, and her later abandonment a tragic inevitability.
Further grace notes may involve injured heels and coming saviours, love triangles and endless journeys, but rather than lean heavily on any archetypes, Roche's references afford a generous humanity to his characters: that every life can have an epic significance.
Though Barry Ward offers us a limber preener in Dean (silhouetted in one lingering moment with the classic allure of Raging Bull), Milam's production is more interested in aftermath than action. That's why we never see a bout, but also why Lalor Roddy's Peadar, who we are asked to accept as a former boxer, more appealingly resembles a former punching bag. Ultimately urging his young charge to escape this lost world of wash-ups and has-beens, he carries the bruised charm of the play, knowing it is better to be a lover than a fighter after a lifetime spent on the ropes.
Until December 13 PETER CRAWLEY
Peter Planyavsky (organ)
St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
This year's biennial George Hewson Memorial Recital marked a long-awaited return to Ireland by Peter Planyavsky, professor of organ and improvisation at Vienna's University for Music and Drama. The Viennese thread running through his programme led to crannies of the repertoire that even the more intrepid of organ aficionados might not previously have explored.
From the late Romantic era, a Fantasy in D flat by Robert Fuchs was ample testimony to Brahms's opinion that "Fuchs is a splendid musician; everything is so fine and so skilful, so charmingly invented".
Fuchs's pupil Franz Schmidt was represented by an imposing set of variations, based on fanfares from his own inauspicious debut opera, Fredigundis. The Brucknerian source material itself held out little promise, but from its foundations arose a sequence of six intriguing character pieces, a short chorale, and a fugue. Along the way, addicts of chromatic harmony, evolving tonality, scholarly counterpoint and abundant virtuosity could all take their fix.
Though Planyavsky might have included a composition or two of his own, he instead improvised on a submitted theme, Veni redemptor. The resulting 13 minutes were among the evening's most vividly varied, and placed their plainchant matter in more seductively modern surroundings than those of Ecce lignum crucis by Planyavsky's teacher Anton Heiller - a stern interweaving of modal melody and rigid atonalism.
There were samples, too, of the less familiar side of two non-Austrian giants. Though Franck's discursive Fantaisie in A was perhaps too strongly coloured by this organ's idiosyncratic tone quality, Mendelssohn's Allegro in D minor struck a fine balance between focus and fluidity.
Planyavsky's delivery was consistently and shrewdly musical, and it made this recital much more than merely entertaining. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
