Reviewed Pumpgirl, Fairytaleheartand O'Connell, RTÉ NSO/ Markson
Pumpgirl
Queen's Drama Theatre, Belfast
After its critical success in Edinburgh, London and New York, Abbie Spallen's Pumpgirlhas come home, roaring in like a stock car at full throttle, sparing no sensibilities in its exposure of a community of wasted lives imploding among the housing estates and back roads of the south Armagh borderlands.
Tomboy Sandra lives for her job at the petrol station, revelling in the raunchy banter she shares with the truckers and traders who call by for a fill, as well as in the insults she reserves for the blonded, fake-tanned women of the local wheelers and dealers. Yet behind the grimy fingernails, the foul mouth and the grease-stained overalls, trembles an innocent young girl, her head filled with a fantasy love affair with middle-aged boy racer Hammy (Stuart Graham), who periodically pounds away at her in his souped-up Toyota, while she eyes the cruddy remnants of crisps and fluff ingrained in the dashboard and back seats.
She is searingly played by Samantha Heaney, whose unadulterated Newry accent is entirely in tune with the rhythms and minutely observed nuances of Spallen's pithy, in-your-face writing. Hammy and his wife, Sinead (Maggie Hayes), complete the sad trio of characters, representing a society where jobs in the chicken hatcheries are as prized as hen's teeth, sex is something you do to pass the time or so as not to be labelled a snob, good books are regarded as the stuff of the seriously weird, and where men are men and women mere receptacles.
It takes Graham and Hayes a little longer to grow into their roles, but when they do the internal combustion between the three is almost unwatchable.
Among the shabby, rusty recesses of Owen MacCarthaigh's set, Andrew Flynn's direction slowly cranks up to create a dark, hypnotic tension from the cleverly constructed interlocking monologues, punctuated by tiny bombshells of truth, unobtrusively dropped into the thought processes like little nuclear explosions. Our hearts go out to Hayes's Sinead, who speaks in carefully rehearsed, routinised sentences until the moment a man quotes a line of poetry to her and her life goes into freefall. But, as with Hammy's fun night out with Sandra and the lads, there is a horrible inevitability about the outcome, leading all of them inexorably down a slippery slope where survival is the least preferable option. This is an important play from a courageous new writer, whose characters and sentiments will translate and resonate the world over.
Runs until Sept 20, then tours to Omagh, Enniskillen, Letterkenny, Sligo, Strabane, Cookstown, Dublin and Armagh- JANE COYLE
Fairytaleheart
Project Cube, Dublin
What room is there for butterflies, starlight and the rolling hills of fantasy amid the concrete and graffiti of a more scuffed reality? Or, as Philip Ridley's play for teenagers asks, how can you retrieve neverland from a wasteland? The answer, to judge by Calypso's handsome, if undemanding, production, is encouraging to a point, offering an empty theatre as a twinkling refuge to two mutually lonesome 15-year-olds from ruptured families.
The potential for escape is mitigated, though, by the play's forlorn understanding that anyone who enters this space, a disused community centre, is already out of step with their DVD-hungry peers.
Nevertheless, Krysia (Joanna Sieracka), who hides her creative soul beneath a prissy exterior and adolescent sarcasm, has abandoned her birthday party for this haven. She finds company in the shape of Gideon (Keith Burke), a tousle-haired romantic moonlighting as an unsolicited set-designer, currently painting his fantasy world into existence. Martin Cahill's set makes this vision as bright and insubstantial as a pop-up book, all mountainous vanishing points and halcyon streams, which the pair gradually illuminate with a constellation of candles. But the darker aspects of fairytales - the Grimm truths - are left under-explored.
Director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh lets the folkloric echoes sound discreetly: Krysia's widower father intends to marry a Wonderbra-assisted seductress whose heart goes "boom-boody-boom" at his touch - a wicked stepmother and a Sofia Loren impersonator to boot. Gideon plays the pauper to Krysia's princess, equal parts hippie and vagabond, whose last dwelling, troll-like, was under a bridge. When it transpires that he too is faced with a disapproving potential stepfather, you don't have to be a card-carrying Freudian to see where their anxieties stem from.
Sieracka and Burke each offer charming performances, while Kevin Smith's lights give their thawing relationship a pleasing glow. The role-play and rambling stories in which they work out their issues resemble drama therapy so closely, though, that it becomes hard to engage a general audience.
An accompanying series of short films, bravely wordless, from multicultural youth group Tower of Babel seems a more genuine expression of teenage fears and fantasies: stalkers, death, alleyways, finding that special someone to cop off with. They may not be polished, but they do offer a glimpse of the psychology underpinning fantasy; in short, the fairytalemind.
Runs until Saturday PETER CRAWLEY
O'Connell, RTÉ NSO/ Markson
NCH, Dublin
The RTÉ Summer Lunchtime concerts are, in general, kept popular by a regular diet of mixed light classics. The penultimate programme of the current series, however, substituted the usual formula with a scrupulous triptych of Mozart's orchestral writing from the summer of 1782.
In this, the first concert of his last season as principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Gerhard Markson's manner with the composer was true to form: disciplined, invulnerable, and admitting a generous supply of string sound.
The Entführung aus dem Serail Overturesubordinated percussive exoticism to refined yet energetic classicism.
Isabelle O'Connell - the Dublin-born pianist who, from her base in New York, is steadily building a reputation for her interpretations of 20th-century and contemporary works - was soloist in the Concerto in A K414. For each movement of this concerto, Mozart supplied two cadenzas. O'Connell opted for the shorter of these in the second and third movements, having played a cadenza of her own in the first movement that included a cheeky quotation from the Marriage of Figaro Overture.
O'Connell is no stranger to standard concertos, with three of Mozart's now in her repertoire. Yet the curious shape and direction of this cadenza might have symptomised a certain dissatisfaction with 18th-century musical decorum.
While the finale contained some harsh passages, there too were her lightest and most shapely phrases. The Symphony No 35 (Haffner) was memorable for lusty outer movements and a particularly graceful Minuet. In the Andante, however, the most pressing concern seemed to be to ensure that this live-broadcast concert would end by 2pm.
Which it did. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
