The Revenant at the Druid Theatre, Galway is reviewed by Peter Crawleywhile Wheat, Crawdaddy, Dublin is reviewed by Laurence Mackinand Private Lives at the Gate Theatre is reviewed by Gerry Colgan.
The Revenant Druid Theatre, Galway
Whatever happened to Francie Brady? That question seems to be the impetus for Pat McCabe's new play, the centrepiece of this year's Galway Arts Festival performance programme, which finds the once cheerfully deranged star of page, stage and screen now trawling the purgatorial back alleys, a sorrowful, isolated and haunted figure.
The need to revisit Francie Brady - or Frank Brady, or Piglet as we variously know him - is not immediately obvious. Those who followed his grimly funny fate in McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy, his play Frank Pig Says Hello or Neil Jordan's film could anticipate Brady after the asylum: a grown man, still suspended in childhood, with a surfeit of past and an absence of future. What more is there to say? To judge from Joe O'Byrne's production for the festival, the answer is surprisingly little. Performed by a commanding Peter Trant, whose expressive face can communicate a wicked glee, but who McCabe and O'Byrne largely confine to a pathetic and mercilessly punished figure, Frank begins by asking "Is there to be no comfort for my sore heart?" Playing hopscotch, chalking his footsteps on the ground, and singing golden oldies to recall the years long past, Frank is to find no comforts in childish play. A jingle of memories assails him at random, like a malevolent jukebox.
There is a mordant strand of dark humour to begin with in Frank's grim nostalgia. The "spontaneous combustion" of the poorly embalmed body of Pope Pius XII is marked with the macabre salute "may he rest in pieces". As the clerical sex-scandals of our country's inglorious history are noted, he complains that the only thing on television, "is priests - and priests that we know". If Frank is somehow emblematic of a changing Ireland, watching the dark pastoralism of his childhood succumb to a more threatening and empty urban sprawl, an agony seeps into the play as McCabe moves towards a total annihilation of his character: "Why is there so much evil in the world?" wonders Frank. "I don't want to add to it." The play, then, seems like a guilty subtraction.
That may be why Frank is here so abandoned, not only by The Butcher Boy's cast of characters who have each deserted him but also by the narrators of that story's adaptations. When his monologue hits a mercilessly reiterative and sickening association with the Moors murderer Ian Brady, it seems designed to shatter the dark fiction which once allowed us some empathy with Francie, leaving us now with the cold hard slap of reality.
Unfortunately, that odd tone means that other elements, such as Gavin Friday's infrequent score and the awkward appearance of Frank's other demon - his father - never find any purchase. The revenant returns, but so little of him remains.
Runs until July 26.
Wheat, Crawdaddy, Dublin
Laurence Mackin
Art rock band Wheat have been flirting with success for years without ever quite breaking into the mainstream, unlike many of their contemporaries. Their debut album may not grace many record collections, but their second album, Hope and Adams (1999), was an absolute gem of authentic guitar pop.
Producer Dave Fridmann brought his influence to bear on a record that bore all the hallmarks of his other work at the time (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse, to name a few) but retained a charm utterly Wheat's own.
Unfortunately, things went slightly awry for the band after that, and their third album became the victim of their then record company's demise and subsequent legal wrangling.
Their new album, Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One-Inch Square, sees the band attempting to retain the inventive and off-kilter feel of Hope and Adams, but within a more crafted songwriting structure.
The band take to the stage with plenty of enthusiasm and charm, launching into the opening track of the new album, Closeness. The playing is far from perfect (but the band admit themselves that even on record they try to keep the feel and emotion of the track, at the expense of pristine production), but there's enough goodwill to keep things chugging along nicely - most of the crowd have waited a long time for this gig.
Songs build and layer, but they often don't quite deliver on their promise. When the band do eventually go all out, the results are delightful. Scott Levesque flits between the organ and his guitar, but it is only when the keyboard is left playing on a loop that the live sound gets a complete, satisfying sound and Don't I Hold You has the crowd beaming. The band's predilection for singing ensemble is hit or miss, but on an encore of Who's the One, a good old-fashioned wig-out makes it the night's stand-out track.
Private Lives, Gate Theatre
Gerry Colgan
Noel Coward belonged to a generation of English playwrights whose work is not frequently performed now. Their dramas were less than weighty, and the comedy has paled in comparison with today's uncensored assaults on the funny bone. But he was the best of them, with a huge output, and Private Lives has survived to testify to the wit and ingenuity which earned him the title of "the master" throughout a long career.
What Coward fashioned here remains a fast-paced comedy of frivolous, upper-class people whom one can laugh at, as well as with. Amanda and Elyot have been married and divorced, but are still fatally attracted to each other. When they meet again on a honeymoon cruise, the fact that they have both remarried (to Victor and Sibyl) does not deter them from fanning the old flame. Their revived relationship is, if anything, stormier than the old.
Since the characters seem incapable of taking anything seriously, the audience may emulate them and revel in their mannered follies. They are representative of a class that is, or was, self-absorbed to the point of absurdity, a privileged assembly of shallow minds.
The author constructed a neat blueprint that has the quartet breaking up, reforming and dividing again, and finally sees them, like the predators they are, exchanging their spots. It's all rollicking good fun.
In this polished production, directed with nous by Alan Stanford, the production values are impressively upmarket.
Eileen Diss's set is elegant, just the kind of surroundings for the posh people beautifully costumed by Peter O'Brien.
Songs by Cole Porter and Coward himself, in old instrumental recordings and vocals by the lead duo, generate the famous line "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is" - the more so since the same songs remain popular today. But that's just Elyot being a smart-ass, all part of the fun. Stephen Brennan is in form as Elyot, a shade flouncy perhaps, but brimming with style and confidence. Paris Jefferson is Amanda, Simon O'Gorman plays Victor, Katie Kirby is Sybil and Sonya Kelly a comic maid. This one is for laughs, and they're here aplenty.
Runs until August 25th
Erraught, RTÉ NSO/Eddins NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Donizetti- Don Pasquale Overture. Mascagni- Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana. Rossini- Una voce poco fa. Puccini - Edgar Prelude. Rossini - Non più mesta. Ponchielli- Dance of the Hours. Verdi- Nabucco Overture
Summer clothes on stage and a light musical touch in the right places did much to focus the audience at this RTÉ NSO lunchtime concert away from the grey, wet weather outside.
Departing principal guest conductor William Eddins is a man who has often shown the knack of making the orchestra sound a notch or two above its normal performance level. In this all-Italian programme of operatic fare, he did that best in the delightful shimmering and airy orchestration of the Dance of the Hours from Ponchielli's La Gioconda. His handling of the prelude to Puccini's early Edgar was full, lush and incisive.
The concert had taken a little time to warm up, with loose ensemble in Donizetti's Don Pasquale Overture, and a kind of generalised big-heartedness in the Intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.
The arrival onstage of mezzo soprano Tara Erraught seemed to galvanize Eddins into a more tightly focused manner. She sang two Rossini arias, Una voce poco fa from The Barber of Seville and Non più mesta from La Cenerentola, with good spirit.
