It is rather apt that the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival should culminate with two short plays performed by companies whose main focus is on youth and development.
The existence and obvious success of the festival is a mark of cultural change, especially for those of us old enough to remember when the mere appearance of Gay Sweatshop at the Project Arts Centre was enough to prompt complaints about "funny bunnies" and calls for the closure of the theatre.
And the shift is all the more evident in the capacity of youth companies who don't have a specifically gay and lesbian focus to engage with confidence in work which does. The old fear that the young would be corrupted by contact with such shocking material has been replaced by cheering evidence that the young have, in fact, had their morals deepened.
Emma Donoghue's Don't Die Wondering is given its premiere by DAYMS - The Musical Workshop, the developmental affiliate of the Association of Irish Musical Societies. Previously broadcast as a radio play by the BBC, it is little more than a briskly entertaining sketch. Saoirse (played with real charm by Aimee Shields) returns from New York to work as a chef in her home village in Ireland. When she reveals her lesbianism to an obnoxious customer (played with repulsive relish by Dave Lyons) she is fired. She places a picket on the restaurant, threats of violence ensue, and her old schoolmate, now a Garda (Jennifer McGann) is sent to protect her. Love, of course, blossoms. The characters and plot are thin ice, but the cast under Philippa Alford's deft direction skates along merrily, making the most of Donoghue's lively dialogue.
Mark Ravenhill's Citizenship is a much more substantial piece of work. At a playing time of around 80 minutes, it is a somewhat unsatisfactory length, too long to be a vignette and too short fully to develop its story. But, as a play for young actors, it is intelligently conceived, sharply written and achieves an almost perfect tone. It is honest and direct, without being raw or crude. It is simple without being simplistic. And it deals with the confusions and awkwardness of adolescence without being, for a single moment, condescending.
Citizenship is a confident play about uncertainty. Its central character Tom, who we encounter over the course of around a year when he is 15 and 16, has dreams in which he is kissing a figure whose gender he cannot determine. He plays with the fragile emotions of his troubled, self-harming friend Amy. He develops a crush on a young male teacher. He comes on to his closest male friend Gary, who is taunted for being gay, but isn't. Ravenhill dips us into the primaeval soup of teenage sexuality, with all its contrary impulses and mixed-up desires, and has the honesty not to suggest that a fully-formed personality can emerge without pain, hurt and loss.
Precisely because it doesn't patronise young people with pat morality or sentimental solutions, Citizenship is obviously a piece of work that young actors can recognise. And in this excellent production by Peter Hussey for Kildare Youth Theatre, the youth wing of Crooked House Theatre Company, the cast repays the compliment with thoughtful, intelligent and utterly committed performances. Young actors would not expose themselves to such a delicate exploration of sexuality unless they had complete trust in the process, and it is evident that Hussey has earned the trust and respect of his company. Niall Moore is quite superb as Tom, capturing all the gaucheness and hesitancy of the character without being either gauche or hesitant, and there is terrific work, too, from Louise Lonergan as Amy and Cian O'Dowd as Gary. In general though, it is the ensemble work that impresses most. When a young company is capable of taking such a sensitive, compassionate and skilful approach to a difficult subject, it is impossible not to conclude that, for all its problems, this place has grown up fast. - Fintan O'Toole
The final performances are at 3 pm and 8 pm today.
RTÉ NSO/Markson - NCH, Dublin
Beethoven - Symphonies 1, 2 and 5
In all the years that I've been attending concerts by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and its predecessor, the RTÉSO, the great music of the classical period - the works of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn - has been the area of repertoire to cause the greatest problems in performance.
At times, it's almost as if there's a mismatch, musically, emotionally and technically, between players and composers. The consistency of pressure that yields results in romantic melodic writing is frequently mis-applied, and the necessary clarity of line and interplay between instruments can be replaced with a view that's more reminiscent of something seen through the murk of a grimy window. Instead of the necessary rhythmic definition you may find a more generalised thrust. And motivic give and take between wind and strings can become a one-sided affair, in which the instruments with the greatest natural weight automatically dominate.
Gerhard Markson, who began his five-day Beethoven symphony cycle at the National Concert Hall on Monday, has in the past managed to invest the orchestra's Beethoven playing with a high degree of tension and energy.
In Monday's programme of the First, Second and Fifth symphonies, that energy was only fitfully in evidence, and the long-standing limitations were all too clearly evident. Markson and his players seemed altogether more comfortable with the gravitas of the Fifth than the unstressful and sometimes effervescent moods of the First and Second symphonies.
The First was the slackest in performance, with the slow introduction sounding unnecessarily drawn out, and a strangely ambling quality for much of the first movement's main Allegro. The slow movement sounded almost brisk by comparison, and it was only in the Scherzo and particularly the Finale that any real sharpness of focus materialised.
The Second Symphony came off better, but the problems of internal balance persisted. The lightness and sharpness for the very end of the Larghetto suggested a change of mode; this was quickly contradicted, however, by the rough ensemble at the start of the Scherzo.
The Fifth Symphony continued the pattern in which the endings of movements seemed to be finding their expressive point much more successfully than the openings - this was especially true of the Andante - and the playing was more consistently alert than in either of the works before the interval.
With significantly more string players on the stage for the Fifth Symphony, Markson indulged in a richness of sonority that he had avoided in the earlier symphonies.
He let the music have its head from time to time, without letting it run away with itself, though the exercise of restraint created a flat spot in the middle of the Finale. All in all, it has to be said, a curate's egg of an opening to an eagerly anticipated series. - Michael Dervan
