Irish Timeswriters review Dublin Carolat the Civic Theatre and the latest in RTÉ NSO's Horizonsseries at the NCH.
Dublin Carol, Civic Theatre, Dublin
Set in a funeral home on Christmas Eve, Dublin Carol is less about seasonal goodwill than January hangovers. As John, the protagonist of Conor McPherson's drink-soaked play philosophises, "There is nothing worse than decorations after Christmas." John is an undertaker by chance and an alcoholic by nature, a man marked by an innate inability to do anything good. He has been broken by a childhood of loneliness, guilt and boredom. He has broken the lives of those around him by his resolute self-denial and indulgent self-pity. Confronted with the news of his wife's imminent death by his long-estranged daughter, Mary, John is forced to confront the sins of his past. Yet Dublin Carol is no rite of passage; it is a ritual preparation for John's own death.
Liam Carney's John is a sparingly simple and unreachably complex man; a man who can admit that he's to blame, but cannot say that he is sorry. Carney's performance is edgy and physical and deeply empathetic, a performance that manages to beg for forgiveness without actually asking for it. Vanessa Keogh's Mary and Stephen Kelly's Mark, the facilitators of John's catharsis, are more than just good listeners. They are full-bodied characters rather than ciphers; characters with their own catalogue of culpability, their own doubts and disappointments.
Director Patrick Talbot plays Dublin Carol for its best bits: its raw, mordant humour and its searing pathos. Against the clarity of Talbot's vision of the play, Sabine Dargent's set seems slightly uneven, the huge abstract canvas on the back wall hanging awkwardly among the tatty dated furnishings of the rest of the office area. However, in a shared stroke of design and directorial genius, the canvas doubles as a limbo space between the play's three scenes, framing the transition between the life, death and redemption of a tragically flawed man.
The shrouded corpse that the transparent canvas first reveals is coffined in the second movement between the scenes, and in the final sequence the gauze reveals that the coffin has been interred. John's last drink on Christmas Eve, then, seems less a drink of absolution, than the first toast at his wake. He may not have found forgiveness for himself, but, finally, we hope, he has buried his demons. - Sara Keating
• Until Feb 3 at Civic Theatre, Tallaght. Then: Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, Feb 5-10; Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, Feb 12-17; Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Feb 19-21; Glór, Ennis Feb 22-24; Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, Feb 26-Mar 3; Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, Mar 21-24
RTÉ NSO/Houlihan, NCH, Dublin
Gráinne Mulvey - Fanfare. Akanos.
Krzysztof Penderecki - Polymorphia.
Gráinne Mulvey - Scorched Earth.
In the 1960s, Krzysztof Penderecki, working in Poland, which led the Soviet-dominated world in terms of artistic freedom, was a key member of the international musical avant-garde.
The adventurous sonic excursions of that avant-garde in the post-war years still carry a strong charge for the Irish composer Gráinne Mulvey (born 1966), and she chose Penderecki's Polymorphia (1961) to sit with three works of her own in Tuesday's concert in the RTÉ NSO's Horizons series.
The programme opened with a new Fanfare, which Mulvey wrote specially for the occasion and which she dedicated "to RTÉ and RTÉ lyric fm, in gratitude for their continued encouragement and support".
The Fanfare, scored for brass, double basses and percussion, opens with growling, rumbling effects which gradually loosen out to embrace some more typically fanfarish gestures, which Mulvey underscored with a babble of pizzicato double basses.
In a pre-concert talk Mulvey spoke of her work mostly in terms of special effects and advanced instrumental techniques - think of melody and rhythm as aspects of gesture to be considered along with colour, register, articulation, density and texture. She's interested in polarities between smooth and rough, high and low, agitation and calm, dissonance and consonance, though consonance is a relative concept. Slow and fast hardly come into the reckoning, as no matter how agitated things become, she still seems to be manipulating her gestures within a kind of dominating stasis.
Akanos (2005), the title being the Greek word for barb (as in cactus), explores, in the composer's words, "contrasts between steady organic growth and 'spiky,' jagged interjections". Scorched Earth (2004) takes its polarities from bush fires, and the rebirth and rejuvenation which follow.
Both works pile on their effects with generous abandon, rather in the manner of a film designer laying on the style icons to create a kind of hyper-reality so that no one can be in any doubt as to the period that's intended. Scorched Earth made the stronger impression, not least because it's often more lightly layered, and allows more space for the special effects to make their effect.
Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, shows even more restraint, and also a greater grasp of the kind of theatre that can make this style of effects-driven music work. However, the abrupt and surprising pseudo-tonal resolution of the final chord, which may have been daring and sounded exciting back in the early 1960s, now sounds merely corny.
Robert Houlihan and the members of the RTÉ NSO offered performances that lacked nothing in gutsiness. Their task can't have been made any easier by the fact that NCH staff allowed a very young child to cause so much vocal disruption during the performances. -Michael Dervan
