Irish Times writers review a production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, a recital by Ireland's most renowned classical pianist, John O'Connor, and a concert by Blues legend Bo Diddley.
Under Milk Wood
Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
Llareggub, the Welsh fishing village in which Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood unfolds, spells "bugger all" backwards. It is the kind of schoolboy joke - vaguely daring when the play was originally broadcast in January 1954, two months after the author's death, but now painfully gauche - that makes it obviously a period piece. But it is also a touch of honesty. Beneath its frantic verbosity, the obscure truth of Under Milk Wood is that there's bugger-all going on.
I have to declare an interest here. I have never liked Under Milk Wood. And after seeing Terry Devlin's passionately committed, energetic and sometimes wonderfully skilful staging for Island Theatre Company, I now realise that I never will. If a production as loving and as whole-hearted as this leaves me cold, I'm never going to be seduced by its dubious charms. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. But I'm resigned to the recognition that I'm never going to be one of them.
What's not to like? Well, for a start, there's the fact that people insist on staging what Thomas himself called "a play for voices". Under Milk Wood is not a theatre text. It is a poet's idea of a radio play, using the minimalism of the medium to bombard the audience with a cast-list of more than 50 characters, among them, in the original broadcast, one of the great voices of the 20th century, that of Richard Burton.
Whatever virtues it has - and they include some moments of beautifully evocative writing - have to do with the incantatory power of voices in the dark, working on the listener's imagination. To put it on stage is almost immediately to break that spell. Unlike some poems, Under Milk Wood doesn't provide a good springboard for a piece of theatre. It has too weak a narrative drive for storytelling theatre, but is too verbally busy and insistent for an image-based performance.
There is, too, more than an element of kitsch in Thomas's version of Wales. Translate the names - No Good Boyo, Lily Smalls, Polly Garter, Organ Morgan, Captain Cat - into an Irish equivalent and you end up with leprechauns, colleens and an image of society that makes The Quiet Man look like dirty realism. Under Milk Wood, in other words, is pure Taffywhackery. Stripped of history, politics and context, Thomas's vision of his village is utterly patronising. His characters are a collector's colourful specimens displayed in the gaudy museum of his relentlessly luxuriant verse. If, like me, you are immune to their charms, tedium sets in very fast.
Terry Devlin and his two-man cast of Jon Kenny and Myles Breen obviously think otherwise, for they sacrifice everything on Thomas's altar. The ideas of reducing the 50-odd voices to just two has serious disadvantages, which are exacerbated by the odd decision that both voices should be male. Having the female characters - who occupy, surely, more than half of Thomas's air space - played by men merely adds another layer of caricatured gestures to what is already a collection of exaggerated, sometimes downright misogynistic, stereotypes.
This substantial objection aside, it is hard to imagine Under Milk Wood staged more imaginatively or more vigorously. There are some moments of simple but artful brilliance, all beautifully lit by Gerard Meagher: Kenny's Mr Edwards hovering over Breen's Myfanwy Price in her dreams; the sounds by which the blind Captain Cat identifies passing children evoked by the rolling of marbles.
Kenny's, indeed, is a performance of deep fluidity, reminding us that before D'Unbelievables, he worked with the dance and mime company Theatre Omnibus. He handles the language with impressive suppleness, opting not for an ersatz Welsh accent but for a soft Munster inflection that captures its cadences in his own voice. And he has lost none of his dancer's grace, moving through the roles with a calm elegance that belies the hectic pace of the transitions from one to another. If only the text had a trace of his innate theatricality, all this skill would not seem so futile.
Until Saturday , then touring countrywide
Fintan O'Toole
__________________________________________________________
John O'Conor (piano)
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Beethoven - Sonata in E minor, Op 90. Sonata in A, Op 101. Sonata in B flat, Op 106 (Hammerklavier)
John O'Conor's choice of a chronological sequence for his Beethoven piano sonata cycle at the NCH makes for some very rich programmes at the end of the series. Monday's penultimate instalment brought the sonata nicknamed the Hammerklavier, a work that is a veritable Everest of the piano literature in terms of technical and intellectual demands.
O'Conor's approach to its epic scale was one of maintaining momentum at all costs, on the basis, one suspects, of trying to ensure that, whatever about the trees, the broad expanses of the wood should be kept in perspective.
The speeds were not just fast, they were hasty. They gave the performer some trouble (in spite of his playing the whole recital from the music). They presented challenges that his pedalling could not resolve with clarity. And both the passing insecurities of alignment and the momentary losses of the thread of continuity were pronounced enough to tease the tolerance of his listeners' ears.
Yet in tandem with the not-quite- controlled, helter-skelter aspects of this Hammerklavier, there were also some compensations. If O'Conor did not at all times persuade one this was how the work ought to sound, he did convey the urgency with which it can be felt with consistent drama. This effect was more musically successful in the outer movements than in the Scherzo, which rather threatened to trip itself up, or the great slow movement, which simply didn't sound like an Adagio, let alone the Adagio sostenuto that Beethoven asked for.
In the first half of the evening, O'Conor went for extremes in the Sonata in E minor, Op 90. This sonata, a pygmy by comparison with the Hammerklavier, was handled with unusual aggression in the opening movement, which highlighted the contrast with the easy lyricism which follows it. The most natural flow, and the easiest integration of contrasts was achieved in the Sonata in A, Op 101, where lyricism, drama, and contrapuntal argument were held in better balance.
Michael Dervan
__________________________________________________________
Bo Diddley
Vicar Street, Dublin
It has taken Bo Diddley quite a few years to make it to Ireland, and now that he has, it's hard to resist harking back to the good ol' days when Bo rocked like nobody else. These days, Bo is partial to deliciously tall tales and snatches of his greatest hits. Backed by a band who looked and sounded like they'd been plucked from Wal-Mart's bargain bins, he sweet-talked his way into an ever-appreciative audience's affections but delivered little more than a tincture of that old magic.
Diddley's voice, still possessed of its gravel-rich tones, ably navigated its way through a handful of old favourites, from Road Runner to Crackin' Up, but somehow each one seemed truncated, relieved of its primal forces.
He didn't seem to mind the muddiness of his back-up band, a quartet mired in workmanlike arrangements. At times he struggled to recreate that distinctive backbeat he's patented, concentrating his attentions on engaging in some playful verbal jousting with his audience. Sometimes that worked, particularly in the spirited Who Do You Love?, but mostly it dampened the fire that used to be in the belly of his once-superb I'm A Man.
He may lay claim to having invented rock'n'roll; he may even bemoan the gap that he insists now separates his song-stories from rap, but Bo Diddley's short live show revealed nothing more than a man whose speedometer is on cruise control. Still, he's earned an audience who applauded his dry, wry stories, and relished a pedestrian trawl through a back-catalogue. All that seemed to matter was that the man had graced us with his presence for a short, and not so sharp, interlude.
Siobhán Long
