Cold Comfort, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast.
Kevin Toner is not a happy drunk. How could he be? He's a deeply damaged, tormented individual, who, for many years, has numbed private grief with constant, copious intakes of alcohol. He defines himself as a drunk, who lives alone in Kilburn. That's it. David Craig's striking set, strewn with enlarged death notices, portrays a man dwarfed by references to loss and bereavement, one of which, crumpled and marginalised, gives the clue to a terrible event washing around beneath the surface of his consciousness. In close collaboration with writer/director Owen McCafferty, Patrick O'Kane brings a formidable battery of physical and vocal skills to this portrait of a lost creature, returning home for his father's funeral and hell-bent on having the conversations in death that they never had in life. One minute he is flippant, carefree and irreverent, the next a needy boy, abandoned in childhood by his mother and ignored by his drunken father. Love does enter his life, briefly, only to unravel in unspeakably horrible circumstances before our very eyes.
It is difficult to be a spectator during this hour-long outpouring of private grief and cruel humour. One shifts uncomfortably, like a guilty intruder or voyeur, swimming against the tide of what is undoubtedly McCafferty's darkest piece to date. What might have been a grittily realistic reflection on the fall-out from non-communication within a family, has instead been shifted onto a different plane, where the imagination is called upon to supply the pictures. This aptly titled monologue is an affecting vehicle for the assured writing of McCafferty and the dangerous, raw energy of O'Kane, for both of whom it appears to have taken on the mantle of a personal crusade.
Runs as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival until Saturday, then the Town Hall, Galway, Burnavon Arts Centre, Cookstown, Market Place, Armagh and The Playhouse, Derry. Jane Coyle
Dublin County Choir/Dexter, NCH, Dublin,
Elgar - Give unto the Lord
Gerald Barry - Piano Quartet No 1
Rossini - Petite messe solennelle
A sturdy team of instrumentalists appeared with the Dublin County Choir last Saturday in a concert that was decidedly a pro-am event. The programme, too, mixed opposites. After the jaded devotions of Elgar's anthem Give Unto the Lord, the alternating mantras and tantrums of Gerald Barry's Piano Quartet No 1 seemed positively surreal. But David Adams (piano), Michael d'Arcy (violin), Thomas Kane (viola) and Arun Rao (cello) played with a vigorous unity of purpose.
The Mass was headed by a diverse quartet of vocal soloists, of whom Sylvia O'Brien (soprano) displayed a closer affinity with Rossini's bel canto style than did a velvety Edel O'Brien (mezzo), an incisive John Elwes (tenor) and a plummy Gerard O'Connor (bass).
They were backed by a well co-ordinated keyboard trio consisting of two pianos (David Adams and Celine Kelly) and the NCH organ (David Leigh) which proved a dead ringer for the harmonium prescribed in the score. The lion's share of the accompaniment fell to an indefatigable Adams, who was just as comfortable in a Chopinesque reading of Rossini's Preludio Religioso as he had been in the extrovert percussions of Barry's quartet. If the choir found some of the Mass's vocal challenges hard to meet, they nonetheless achieved under the ever explicit direction of John Dexter some tolerable balances, ready dynamic contrasts, and a tone quality that progressed with the evening.
