Irish Times writers give their verdicts.
Mud
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
By Fintan O'Toole
The New York theatre is remarkable for operating not just with artistic distinctions, but also with geographical separations. Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway are both places and states of mind. The Cuban-American playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes is the presiding spirit of the outer circle, at the greatest remove from the money, the glamour and the mass appeal of the Great White Way. In New York terms her work, like the 1983 play Mud, which is given a welcome Irish première by the Corn Exchange company, is self-consciously avant-garde.
Yet in an Irish context, it seems much less far-out. One of the fascinations of Annie Ryan's fine production is how well the play sits here. The Irish inflections and attitudes of Simone Kirby, David Pearse and Liam Carney seem completely at home. Although Mud is set nowhere in particular, and Kris Stone's accomplished design suggests a universal landscape, Ryan and her cast have no great trouble giving it a local habitation.
The reason is simple enough. The form of the play - a mixture of fable, folk-tale and absurdist allegory - is strange in the American theatre but relatively familiar here. The best way to describe Mud is as a John B. Keane play written by Samuel Beckett. It is a big folk melodrama pared down to a short, stark and elliptical parable. If you took a wild dramatic epic like Keane's Sharon's Grave and boiled it until there was nothing left but the bones you would have something like Mud.
Fornes gives us the kind of situation from which Keane, or Synge and Lorca before him, would have made a spectacular drama. In a world of harsh poverty, Mae lives with the dirty and diseased Lloyd, brought into her household as a child and grown to be an uncomfortable mix of brother and lover. Mae, who supports them by taking in ironing, wants to better herself by acquiring literacy and numeracy and takes the older, better-educated Henry into her bed. Yet instead of the escape she dreamed of, she finds herself trapped even more firmly between two dependent men.
Instead of the three-hour epic her predecessors might have created, though, Fornes strips this story down to a third of that length. There is no luxury of language, no convolution of plot, no dramatic detail. And although these losses are never quite made up, the piece has a fierce integrity of purpose. It is what it is. And Ryan and her cast are smart enough not to try to make it anything else. They neither apologise nor explain.
Ryan directs with great clarity and assurance, showing an instinctive feel for the rhythm of Fornes's succession of short, snapshot scenes and eking out the wry humour of the piece without detracting from its essential bleakness. Ironically, if there is a problem in her production it is a product of splendour. For while both Kirby's Mae and Carney's Henry are quiet, precise and calmly understated performances, Pearse's Lloyd is utterly mesmerising in its combination of childish innocence and demonic energy. Like a Puck with no Prospero to control him, Pearse operates on the dangerous borderline between touching humanity and raw bestiality. The only problem is that the power and presence of this exceptional actor threatens to overwhelm the rest and to take the focus off Mae, whose story this must be.
This is a good complaint, however, and Mud remains, if not quite glorious, then certainly worth the wallow.
- Runs until September 20th
Glengarry Glen Ross
Draíocht Studio, Blanchardstown
By Gerry Colgan
David Mamet's famous and probably best play is one that rewards the efforts of talented and committed actors, and cruelly exposes the limitations of those not up to its high-voltage dialogue and exchanges. In this production, directed by Donal Cantwell, the cast have a royal evening out on stage, and the audience are amply rewarded for their attendance.
Given that the author is renowned for the authenticity and ping-pong pace of his dialogue, what social group could serve him better than hard-nosed American salesmen, glib and ruthless, under pressure in the equivalent of a bonus-based sweatshop? And here they are, led by the charismatic Richard Roma, fighting for leads - the all-important details of likely targets for real estate scams. Without good leads, only miserable pickings are left.
Shelly Levene is an old-timer down on his luck, talking fast to change it to a winning streak. His desperation is to lead him into a treacherous quagmire. John Williamson, office administrator, is without pity; only results count. An overnight robbery throws the office into chaos, and brings tragedy with it.
Simon Delaney's Roma has presence and force, bending his hapless victim - a pitiful creation by Paul Laycock - to his will. The pathetic Levene is nicely portrayed by Sean Colgan, and Gary Finegan's office boss has the requisite cynicism and sharpness. Others to hit the mark are Jim Tighe, Paul Congdon and Paul Fay. The American accents are not perfect, but it really doesn't matter here. There is a punchy musicality in the delivery of dialogue that carries the day, and the play. A good one.
- Runs until September 6th
David Adams (organ)
St Michael's Dún Laoghaire
By Michael Dervan
The last 250 years have produced only two works for organ and orchestra that are heard with any regularity. They are both French - the Concerto by Poulenc and the Organ Symphony by Saint-Saëns.
John Buckley's Organ Concerto was commissioned to mark the arrival of the new Kenneth Jones organ at the National Concert Hall, and premièred on it in 1992. The piece made it onto CD in 1999, but, given the track record of organ concertos, the composer's reworking of his material from a 28-minute concerto into a 12-minute solo is likely to gain wider currency for the music.
Carillon, premièred here by David Adams, retains the general shape of the concerto. The composer had volcanic explosions in mind when he conceived the stabbing toccata writing of the outer sections. These have been transformed with great success, so much so, in fact, that the long, slow, central section, now shorn of its orchestral slides, sounds a little empty by comparison.
Adams pumped out the violent writing with a controlled virtuosity which tempted one to imagine that such mechanically consistent delivery could only be achieved by means of some mysteriously hidden pneumatic support.
The programme as a whole centred on three chorale preludes - two small settings of Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr by Reger framing an expansive one by Bach (BWV663).
Adams included isolated fugues by Bach (in C minor BWV575) and Mendelssohn (in E minor), and coupled them with pieces by later composers, a Prelude by Josef Rheinberger and a Toccata by the little-known German, Heinrich Reimann. In both cases, the effect of the couplings was to draw the music out of its own time and closer to our own.
The evening opened with three contrasted selections from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, given performances as clear and stimulating in thought and execution as everything else in this rewarding and sometimes provocative programme.
