Life and art are not always separate realms. This is seldom more obvious than in this production of Tony Kavanagh's play. Neither the play nor the production can be treated as a purely aesthetic experience, for in neither case is the drama confined to the theatre. What is moving and powerful about the event is inextricable from the immediate personal and social context in which it is happening.
Down The Flats The Crypt, Dublin Castle
When Down The Flats was first produced, in New York in 1992, it seemed to be part of a heroic story: Tony Kavanagh's triumph over the troubles of his early life. It re-emerges now, however, as part of a different story: Tony Kavanagh's slide back into trouble, resulting in his imprisonment in Mountjoy last year. The context for this production is quite explicitly the much bigger drama of imprisonment, escape, reform and return.
The question the play itself asks - is it possible to break way from encircling circumstances? - is asked much more dramatically by the author's own dilemma. If the central character, Fran, a small-time thief trying to break way from despair, poverty and the claustrophobia of a life that offers few real choices, is something of a self-portrait, the thin ray of hope at the end of the play seems even dimmer in retrospect.
Running in parallel with the author's story is the more optimistic story of the production. It is presented jointly by Mountjoy Prison Drama and the Pathways Project for former prisoners, a superb scheme run by the City of Dublin VEC. It opened - though that is hardly the appropriate word - in Mountjoy Prison before transferring to the Crypt.
The sets were built by inmates. Some of the cast have come to the theatre through the Pathways Project. The co-directors, Michael Roddy and Frank Allen, teach in the prison and with Pathways.
The drama of the event thus lies not so much in what is happening on stage as in the tension between the hopeful nature of the project and the sobering reality of Tony Kavanagh's own story. If this overshadows the text, it undoubtedly gives the play a special edge.
Down The Flats is compared in the programme to the work of Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan, but it probably owes much more to playwrights such as Heno Magee and Lee Dunne. Though without the controlled explosiveness of Magee's Hatchet or the shambolic exuberance of Dunne's Goodbye To The Hill, it stakes out very similar territory: the frustrated, alcoholic father, the brave but beaten-down mother, the daughter following her mother's doomed path into early pregnancy and entrapment, the wild son kicking against the pricks.
What makes it a powerful work, in the context, is that the struggle enacted in the play is a battle to become articulate. Though the play has the marks of a writer grasping for a form in which to articulate what he has to say, he manages to represent that hard labour within the dialogue itself.
These are people desperately trying to find a voice, and - again in the context - the relative inexperience of the actors creates its own kind of eloquence.
Their discipline, their passion and their fierce engagement with the story are more important than concerns about technique and professionalism.
What they've created is not a slice of life but a part of life itself, the hard journey from shame and ostracism to the self-respect that comes from the act we take for granted in the theatre - the act of becoming someone else. - Fintan O'Toole
Runs until March 2nd; bookings at 01-6713387
Gina McGuinness (violin), Deborah Kelleher (piano) Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin Sonata In A Op 12 No 2Beethoven ZigeunerweisenSarasate
Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen was the most technically demanding piece on Gina McGuinness's programme last Wednesday lunchtime. While it was impressive to see a 14-year-old violinist so in command of a virtuoso showpiece, her handling of a Beethoven sonata was more revealing.
In the Zigeunerweisen, of 1878, and the celebrated Carmen Fantasy, Sarasate's feeling for proportion is complemented by an ability to control the gestures of display. For the performer, that definition of gesture is at least as difficult to convey as the technical difficulties are to overcome.
McGuinness shows every sign of understanding this knotty challenge, and that is ultimately more impressive than her technical accomplishments. As she plays she bobs and weaves and opens and closes her eyes, all in an undemonstrative, unforced way that comes from feeling the tension and meaning of the music as it passes.
In Beethoven's Sonata In A, Op 12 No 2, which opened the concert, her strong tone, command of light and shade and ability to drive rhythm, even in accompanimental repeated notes, made for a thoroughly enjoyable account of a joyous piece. In her pianist, Deborah Kelleher, she had a strong and responsive partner. The most impressive aspect of this concert was McGuinness's awareness of discourse with the piano, her understanding that the sonata is a duet in which she sometimes takes the lesser role, and her ability to capture the character of each movement. - Martin Adams
