Irish Times writes review Dancing at Lughnasa at the Gate and the National Chamber Choir at the Fingal Arts Centre.

Dancing at Lughnasa

Gate Theatre

Helen Meany

Since the five Mundy sisters leapt to their feet in the first production of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990, there has been an outbreak of dancing on the Irish stage. As the play travelled from Dublin to London to New York and beyond, that scene became iconic; it was a different way of remembering the recent rural past, and one that suited a contemporary desire to find sources of celebration and pride.

A revisit to it aptly illustrates Friel's awareness of the unreliability of memory: in retrospect, that dance scene had overshadowed the play's profound sadness.

Sidestepping the possibility of kitsch, Joe Dowling's new production effectively avoids presenting a gleeful bacchanalia - or intimations of Riverdance. Here the sisters' movements to the radio music are full of frustration and their roars have an angry, painful tone. When they stop and catch their breath, there is a heavy awkwardness in the air, a guilty awareness of transgression, even of shame.

The sisters also seem more isolated, in the way they dance and in their interaction throughout.

This is partly due to the slow pace, which creates a sense of flatness, echoed by the heaviness of Robert Jones's cluttered set, but there is also a lack of ease in the performances.

Of the five: Kate (Andrea Irvine), Agnes (Catherine Walsh), Maggie (Derbhle Crotty), Chris (Aisling O'Neill) and Rose (Dawn Bradfield), only Maggie and Agnes appear to be comfortable with the ensemble.

Their brother, Father Jack, recently returned from Africa, is also out on a limb. This is an undeniably difficult role: remaining outside the dramatic circle of the sisters, Jack also has to carry many of the thematic burdens of the play, but John Kavanagh's studied performance is not convincing.

Although muted by the production, lyricism resides in the script.

As Michael (Peter Gowen) looks back on the summer of 1936 before the family broke up forever, his narration exemplifies Friel's easy movement between past and present, as well as his constant reworking of themes that reappear and thicken: the unreliability and deceptions of memory, and the convergence of the figure of the artist, the shaman and the priest resurface from Faith Healer.

The theme of the untrustworthy, inadequate nature of language from Translations and Communication Cord is taken a step further here as Michael recalls his childhood in a series of pictures that supplant words: of his dancing aunts and of his father waltzing his mother down the path.

Even a lacklustre production can't dispel the potency of such images.

NCC/Duley

Fingal Arts Centre, Rush

Michael Dungan

The most famous piece programmed for the National Chamber Choir's spring tour, which opened at the Fingal Arts Centre in north Co Dublin on Tuesday night, is György Ligeti's Lux aeterna. It's not performed often here but has reached a wide audience ever since featuring in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was a good match: Ligeti's long held notes and icy dissonances create an impression of time suspended, readily conjuring up visions of the eternal void.

It was difficult for the NCC to recreate these sensations in the rather dry acoustic of the Fingal Arts Centre, this despite the remarkably steady intonation and blending which conductor Mark Duley drew from his 17 singers in a piece scored for 16 parts. The building is a converted church. Sound-absorbing materials, carpet tiles and curtains cordoning off the resonating chambers of the sanctuary and both transepts make it a venue less than ideal for choral music. This is especially so - ironically - in church music in the polyphonic Renaissance style, of which the NCC presented lesser-known examples by Robert Parsons, Richard Dering and Jakob Handl.

Rather more successful were the comparatively homophonic textures of Tenebrae 1 by Irish composer Michael McGlynn, here writing to good effect in an untypically deeper, chillier style. The plainsong-based harmonic richness of Ildebrando Pizzetti's 1922 Messa di requiem also came across well. What worked best was the more direct utterance of the Cherubic Hymn from Tchaikovsky's Liturgy of St John of Chrysostom, a nicely judged stylistic contrast in a strong, full-bodied performance.

The NCC tour continues until March 6th. Contact 01-7005665).