Irish Times writers review a selection of events.
Savoy, Peacock Theatre
Eugene O'Brien's new play returns to his home town of Edenderry, there to strip three men down to their psychological bones. They are Andy, manager of the eponymous cinema, about to close after its final showing; David; a young local man who has made it big in Dublin in a TV soap; and Pax, the projectionist.
David has brought some whiskey to mark the occasion. As they drink, it emerges that he has a kind of father-son relationship with Andy, woven into the many films they shared over the years. Some of their drink-induced horseplay is very funny; more of it is gauche as the age-disparity kicks in.
There is a hostility between Andy and Pax waiting to be explained.
Set in the empty foyer of the cinema, the first act is largely exposition.
In the second, the explanations tumble out non-stop. Andy hates Pax because he wanted the girl Pax married. He never really liked women, and has brought his own wife to a near-catatonic state by mental cruelty. When he tries to humiliate Pax, the latter retaliates with vicious home truths.
David has been having his own troubles, and may have lost his job and his girlfriend through drink and unreliability. It brings him to a new edge to find that his old friend Andy has feet of clay.
Viewed separately, which of course they are not, each of the three main characters has some credibility and depth. When they interact, their relationships veer between bathos and melodrama.
It is excessive that each should have such personal problems in the same fictional narrative; aggregated, the whole forfeits credibility, and ends in an anti-climactic dying fall.
The actors are individually excellent, with Eamon Morrissey (Andy), Fergal McElherron (David) and John Olohan (Pax) giving intense portrayals. Two small roles taken by Steve Blount and Karen Scully fit neatly into the action.
Director Conall Morrison, with a good set by Blaithin Sheerin, directs with a confident touch.
But the whole dominates the parts, and is too heavy a burden for them. - Gerry Colgan
Dowdall, Feeley, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
David Fennessy - continuity error; Ciarán Farrell - Around and About; Raymond Deane - Epilogue; Frank Corcoran - Quasi un Amore; Jerome de Bromhead - Vespertine; John Buckley - In Winter Light.
The oldest piece in Sunday's concert of contemporary Irish music for flute and guitar was Raymond Deane's Epilogue, originally composed for flute and piano in 1973.
It was also the most moving, engaging the players - flautist William Dowdall and guitarist John Feeley - in a wordless conversation from which meaning was faintly discerned as though with the intellectual equivalent of peripheral vision. Deane manipulates his mysterious motivic material, derived from names, into music which puts a premium on beauty of sound. He links this piece to others which share "a general sense of historical epilogue", and it was perhaps this - a yielding but unsentimental impression of finality - which turned seven minutes into something searching and memorable.
The concert opened with David Fennessy's short continuity error, driven by a fluid guitar ostinato beneath a hovering flute commentary. "Flicking between images," says the composer, "you begin to notice that something's not right - little inconsistencies, things out of sync . . ." Around and About is Ciarán Farrell's three-movement, jazz-influenced evocation of the Tyrone Guthrie house at Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan. Dowdall sustained a clear melodic line through the first movement's increasing complexity, while the two players switched handily between unison and imitation passages in the lively finale.
The newest pieces were world premières by John Buckley and Frank Corcoran. The second movement of Buckley's In Winter Light is a hectic perpetuum mobile which reflects Buckley's observation that the brilliant light of winter is sometimes harsh. Dowdall and Feeley nimbly scaled the rapid passage work, the fastest and flightiest in the programme and a striking contrast with the more ruminative first movement.
Frank Corcoran's Quasi un Amore is a five-minute sister-piece to the orchestral works which form part of his new "Quasi" cycle. It is rather opaque music, with the flute's disjointed interjections assailing the guitar's more approachable voice. The row ends, however, in tranquillity.
Tranquillity also begins and ends Jerome de Bromhead's 1981 Vespertine. A central wake-up call features snapping staccato on the guitar and angry flutter-tonguing on the flute before the opening nocturnal ambience is restored. - Michael Dungan
RTÉCH/Wagner, NCH, Dublin
Boydell - Meditation and Fugue; Earl of Mornington - Caractacus; Duke of Bedford's March. Boyce: Solomon (exc); John Kinsella - Sinfonietta.
Monday's early evening programme from the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at the National Concert Hall was a free Lyric FM presentation, given as part of a European Broadcasting Union Euroradio Discoveries Season. Two Irish works from the 20th century framed two pieces with Dublin associations from the 18th.
Garret Wesley (1735-81), the first Earl of Mornington, father of the Duke of Wellington, and professor of music at Trinity College Dublin, is credited on a manuscript in the library of TCD as the composer of incidental music for William Mason's Caractacus. The music, dated 1764, was revived in a period-instruments' performance for the college's quatercentenary celebrations in 1992, and heard again on Monday, once more in tandem with short march written for the installation of the Duke of Bedford as chancellor of the university in 1768.
In the RTÉCO's programme, it has to be said, the music rather paled in terms of clarity of gesture and thrust by comparison with excerpts from the serenata Solomon by William Boyce (1711-1779), a piece of altogether more persuasive Handelian fibre which was written for Mercer's Hospital in Dublin in 1742.
Laurent Wagner conducted both pieces with sensitive vigour. Tenor Robin Tritschler sang his solos with attractive tone and intelligent musicianship, although he didn't clear all the technical hurdles quite cleanly enough. He was partnered effectively by bass Jeffrey Ledwidge for the one duet, and the members of the National Chamber Choir were their reliable selves in the Mornington.
Aside from Handel's Messiah we hear very little in concert these days from the Ireland of the 18th century, and also very little from the Ireland of the altogether more recent past, making the inclusion of the 1956 Meditation and Fugue by Brian Boydell (1917-2000) all the more welcome.
The sombre mood of the Meditation is set by keening lines on the oboe, and the fugue, which opens quietly on low strings (shades of Bartók's Music for strings, percussion and celesta), builds up to some angry climaxes. The orchestration is probably one of the barriers to this work's greater success. Its effect is rather like that of rough brush strokes in a painting which are crude enough to impair the image but not crude enough to be a feature as such.
There's a certain rough-hewn quality, too, in John Kinsella's Sinfonietta of 1983. Kinsella, who's now 72, made a brave transition over two decades ago, when he abandoned any truck with the avant-garde in favour of a re-engagement with tonal processes and materials.
The Sinfonietta, subtitled Pictures from the Odyssey, lacks the confidence and trajectory that Kinsella would later find in his new style. And on this occasion Laurent Wagner didn't find the variety of characterisation needed to bring this piece more fully to life. - Michael Dervan
INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL IRELAND
Le Temps Du Repli, Project, Dublin
You never know quite know what is going to happen next in Josef Nadj's Le Temps Du Repli, and the more the piece go on the less you trust that the performers do either. Existing from moment to moment, the two characters (played by Nadj and Cécile Thiéblemont) have a sense of desperation as they negotiate the small world they've constructed around themselves.
Much of Nadj's work is unclassifiable (a few years ago he changed the name of his group from Josef Nadj Dance Company to the less specific Compagnie Josef Nadj), and, although he has appeared in dance, mime and performance-art festivals, the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd is what abounds in his work.
For this pair life is absurd and unpredictable but still self-determining in spite of whatever happens.
Dressed in long coats and hats, they endure fate under a fragile bundle of sticks that hangs precariously over the table and chairs that are home. Here they are most comfortable, whether sliding objects to each other with the thoughtful consideration of chess masters or simply touching body parts, finger to finger or elbow to elbow. In these moments companionship shines out, and when they rise and move together their sense of togetherness suggests the decorum and respect of court dancers, even if their movements are completely unco-ordinated and uncontrollable.
Composer Vladimir Tarasov chases these movements with his twitchy percussion, which explodes in to looping riffs as movement and drama become stressed and pressured. Within the sensual poverty they grasp at anything to enrich and enliven their lives. A long stick becomes coveted by both and, like a simple version of the magic rod from the Nibelunglied saga, seems to empower the beholder.
Disaster strikes when a suspended vase is shattered, revealing a dead bird, and from then on the futility is magnified until the end, when miniature souls in the form of dolls leave and stand over the prostrate bodies. - Michael Seaver
