The Irish Timeswriters review the latest happenings in the world of the arts
Sizwe Bansi is Dead Project Cube
THIS EARLY (1972) play by Athol Fugard still stands as a blazing indictment of South African apartheid, happily now defunct. Its endurance owes as much to the explorations of the human spirit embodied in its three characters, not yet crushed by that implacable regime.
The audience is issued with green cards, to be displayed on entering the theatre. They represent the infamous work permits required by black people in order to survive. The raised stage and the theatre are lined with wire meshing, a symbol of all-embracing prison. First to appear is Styles, a young man who has quit the bondage of factory work to start a photography business. His story is very funny - and deadly serious.
One day a customer, Sizwe Bansi, arrives to have a photo taken, to send home to his wife. He is in virtual exile, and lacks a work permit. A friend, Buntu, advises him of the danger of his situation. One night they stumble across a dead man in the street - and a work permit is found on his body. An obvious solution - but not to Sizwe Bansi, who views with horror the abandonment of his family identity. The plot works its way to a tragic but inevitable denouement.
The cast of Yare Jegbefume (Styles), Jomi Ogunyemi (Sizwe Bansi) and Stephen Jones (Buntu), with a backing chorus, are hypnotic. Direction is by Kunie Animashaun.
Runs to Aug 23rd
Gerry Colgan
The End
Parade Tower, Kilkenny
IT IS unusual to begin a performance with a disclaimer. But that seems to be a precondition for Gare St Lazare Players's continuing project to lift the prose of Samuel Beckett's novellas from the page, and breathe fresh life into the curious narrators of his intriguing and scabrously funny fictions.
"The text was written intended to be read," the programme reverently states, but it is something of a feint. Beckett, we know, is more watched than read.
The question is whether a character conceived in prose seems comfortable in the flesh, and though director Judy Hegarty Lovett and performer Conor Lovett are scrupulous with the text and more adventurous than usual with their stagecraft, the nameless narrator of The Endseems more elusive than most.
Discharged from an institution, the speaker reluctantly approaches a city both familiar and alien. Remembered streets have disappeared, others have appeared where he remembers none, while "the river still gave the impression it was flowing in the wrong direction". It's worth remembering that this disoriented story, begun in English but finished in French, has had its own tortuous journey. The city in which the narrator finds (and loses) lodgings and eventually abandons for a filthy, dilapidated cabin in the mountains, could be a blend of two - Dublin and Paris.
That makes Gare St Lazare well-positioned to map the story's curious topography and plumb the wayward psychology of Beckett's wandering voice.
Playing the narrator much as he approached the speaker of First Loverecently - allowing thoughts to etch themselves on his brow, delivering them with believably neurotic hesitations - Lovett makes his character warmer than the text suggests, as he retreats into squalid isolation.
Such humanising is necessary for a story in which it is difficult to discern whether the speaker is alive or dead, and when the narrative doesn't so much develop as disintegrate. Hegary Lovett's staging matches the fraying tale and its loosening certainties with her own moment of startling rupture. Read or recited, the text always strays out of reach, but Gare St Lazare's considered investigation brings it closer within our grasp.
St Patrick's Cathedral Choir/Barley
NCH (Dublin)
Hewson - Te Deum in E.
Byrd - Domine secundum multitudinem. Deficit in dolore. Duruflé -Choral and Variations on Veni Creator. Ubi caritas. Tantum ergo.
Dupré - Versets on Ave Maris Stella. Ment munda letabunda.
Eric Sweeney - Mass of St Patrick.
THIS WAS the first in the National Concert Hall's "ORGANics" series - three concerts of organ and choral music, featuring Dublin-based choirs. The neatly conceived programme opened with the Te Deum in E by the late organist of St Patrick's Cathedral, George Hewson, and ended with the Sanctus and Gloria from Eric Sweeney's Mass of St Patrick.
Those opening and closing works by Irish composers were the only items in which the choral singing has a prominent organ accompaniment. Between them we heard music that has its roots in plainsong and vocal polyphony. One of the two pieces by Byrd was striking, both in quality and strength of performance - Defecit in dolore, a five-part setting for men's voices, of lamenting verses from Psalm 30.
Thereafter we heard French music from 20th-century French organist-composers. This included two of Duruflé's finest motets; and those were adjoined to organ pieces by him and by his older contemporary, Dupré.
Sets of variations on plainsong are usually played as recital pieces. Here, they were interspersed with the texts sung to the original melodies - one verse between each variation. That contextual awareness, and the semi-liturgical atmosphere it generated, gave the organ music an unusually strong sense of purpose.
Throughout this concert, St Patrick's Cathedral Choir and their director, Peter Barley, performed with a thorough musicality that got into the deeper expressive possibilities of several of these pieces. With David Leigh as a faithful partner on the organ, this was an unusually successful essay in transferring music for high liturgies into the secular world of the concert hall.
Peter Crawley
Martin Adams
