Peter Crawleyreveiws Everybody Loves Sylvia at the Project, Dublin and Michael Dunganreviews violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis at the National Concert Hall, Dublin
Everybody Loves Sylvia
Project, Dublin
HOW CAN you find a new language of love, when everything has been said countless times before? That's the underlying question beneath the attractively playful surface of Randolf SD's Everybody Loves Sylvia, a show that, for all its arch self-awareness and throwaway wit, dares to supply an answer.
Directing his own adaptation of Pierre de Marivaux's La Double Inconstance, Wayne Jordan has brought an 18th-century comedy of tangled desires and elaborate deceptions into an ironic age, where romance is the engine for a dozen sitcoms or an infinity of pop songs. Marivaux's characters spoke with delicate witty flirtations, so peculiar to the writer they became known as marivaudage. Here they match such eloquence with routine, unembarrassed dips into junk culture - a style that we might call jordanage.
Billed as a "Technicolour adaptation", Everybody Loves Sylvia has the pleasingly saturated hues of an unreal world, deliberately invoking both fairytales and the stage. Its set (also by Jordan) is a maze of cherrywood platforms over a lake of pink balloons, where the synthetic tints of Jessica Hilliard's contemporary costumes increase the contented sense of weightlessness.
Separated from her lover, Harlequin (Allen Leech), at the behest of the Prince (Jose Miguel Jiminez) who seeks to woo her, Aoibheann O'Hara's Sylvia is - in several senses - the subject of an elaborate plot. Karl Quinn, engaging as scheming servant Trivelin, explains the machinations as well as he can, but it's Natalie Radmall-Quirke's Flaminia who functions not only as the play's chief manipulator, but also - and this may be a first - as its on-stage dramaturg.
Passing comment on the plot, the scenes, the roles, even the interval, a parody of primness Radmall-Quirke is disarmingly funny but also revealing.
Courtship, she shows, is like stagecraft; an artful accommodation of fairytale ideals with rigorous plotting. "I shall manipulate their love through a labyrinth of twists and turns," Faminia says of the country couple, gulling them towards new affections, "with Happy Ever After branded on their hearts". A little knowingness goes a long way, and only Leech gets to play naive, his Harlequin a bounding creature of impulsive appetites, where O'Hara's appealing Sylvia makes a swift transformation across class barriers from ingénue to insider.
As partners are exchanged like couples in a baroque dance, the imitation of love becomes the real thing. Yet the pop references in Jordan's dialogue go into overdrive: a jukebox of passionate declaration from Pat Benatar to Will Young. It's funny at first, but Jordan pushes it beyond a joke, and that may be the point of this attractively flippant, breezily smart and engagingly performed production. A cliche can't smother a feeling. It is somehow still possible to have a total eclipse of the heart. Until December 6th
PETER CRAWLEY
Mutter, Orkis
NCH, Dublin
Brahms: The three Violin Sonatas
Previously, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis gave all three of the Brahms violin sonatas at the National Concert Hall in 1997.
Many things were the same this week as they were then. Mutter remains centre-stage, the relationship between violin and piano not really equal (even in sonatas Brahms entitled "For Piano and Violin"). She remains a player of extraordinary refinement. She has been a frontline, classical music celebrity for more than 30 years - since Karajan invited her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic at age 13 - and yet she is actually still a young violinist who has lost nothing and may yet grow further (not technically where she doesn't need to, but perhaps in interpretation).
For she is already an artist who seeks something new when she approaches great works. While this impulse produced mixed results with sonatas by Mozart in 2001 and previously, Brahms seems more accommodating of a spectrum of ideas.
On this occasion her special viewpoint seemed less concerned with travelling new paths within each piece than with the framing of all three sonatas within a single programme. There was a clear and obvious distinction between the two halves of the concert: the first - in which she played the short, sunny Second Sonata and then the first - featured playing that was intensely intimate, upon which we listeners eavesdropped, and where she played almost all with a lowered voice, like a teacher securing attention by speaking softly.
Her expression was sublime, the delivery utterly flawless. Clara Schumann said of the First Sonata, "I was deeply moved by it. I wish that the last movement could accompany me in my journey from here to the next world".
The second half offered the Third Sonata, the most passionate and dramatic of the three. Here at last she loosened the restraints and came out of the drawing-room to play to the gallery. This also allowed greater scope to the fine pianism of Orkis which added increased tension and weightiness to the discussion.
Too much Brahms? No. All three encores were from his Hungarian Dances: flying, helter-skelter gypsy finger-work played with abandon as if to say, "Don't forget I can do that, too."
MICHAEL DUNGAN
