The Tailor and Anstey
Gougane Barra Hotel, Co Cork
The New Theatre Dublin's presentation of The Tailor and Anstey is the kind of play which you sit through with a smile.
Adapted by PJ O'Connor from the book by Eric Cross, this is an account of a old country-man with an unquenchable appetite for life, a hunger shared by his wife, although she expresses her demands more robustly. It is a story of a marriage and a vanished rural community, told simply enough in the words of the tailor Timothy Buckley himself.
Buckley was a story-teller, locally renowned, whose effect on the journalist Eric Cross resulted in his book, published in 1942. Otherwise delightfully entertaining, the plot stumbles a little where it attempts to incorporate the consequences of the book's publication: a morally fanatical government and priesthood banned it, and caused the couple to be ostracised by neighbours. Few moments are as telling in this production as that in which the tailor and his wife realise the nightly ritual of local companionship has ended forever.
Played to warm applause in a lakeside marquee, the production has all the charm of its environment. But it has its problems: although Ronan Wilmot enters his role as the tailor with authority and wisdom, he over-points the rustic sexuality of his character with the kind of nods and winks the straight-talking tailor would have abhorred. The lighting, especially when it comes to holding the final moments, is jerky, and the stage over-dressed. And while this will seem most unkind to the hard and sincere work of Yvonne Ussher as Anstey, it was a crucial mistake to cast someone so obviously young as a woman in her seventies. Such a physically inescapable error indicates some lack of attention on the part of director Nuala Hayes, who also ignored details - important in an intimate production - such as making sure that Ussher knows how to hold a darning-needle or how to scald the pot before making tea.
And yet: there is a magic here which New Theatre strives to capture honestly. Leaving the marquee is to be beside the little cemetery where the tailor and his wife are buried. To stand by the polished lake and watch the stars over the hills is to remember their headstone inscribed by Seamus Murphy: "A star danced, and under that I was born". - Mary Leland
Sampson, Papp
Kilkenny Arts Festival
Mozart, Barber, Liszt, Britten, Bizet, Berlioz
The English soprano Carolyn Sampson has made quite a splash in the world of early music. At her Irish recital debut at St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny, on Wednesday, it was evident why.
Her voice is exceptionally clear and beautiful, and she uses it with unusual definition and ease. At times it was almost as if the notes were laid out for her within easy reach, like ripened fruit on a tree. The repertoire was anything but hackneyed, and leant away from the period of music where her reputation is highest. She moved from Mozart to Berlioz via Samuel Barber, Liszt, Benjamin Britten and Bizet.
Attractive as the singer's delivery was, the emotional temperature was often on the cool side, and the stylistic distinctions across the wide diversity of music were not always sharply drawn.
Her pianist Jonathan Papp played a major part in this limitation, by taking a secondary role, even in the assertively dramatic gestures of Liszt's Petrarch Sonnets. But Sampson herself also contributed, by avoiding long-breathed phrasing in favour of a flow-impeding, moment-by-moment responsiveness.
She sounded most free in the Bizet. Here her narrative grip was also at its strongest, and the sense of emotional involvement was at its highest. She transcended the Bizet in her single encore, Henry Purcell's Evening Hymn, where voice and music sounded authoritatively and movingly as one. - Michael Dervan
Moya Brennan
ESB Beo Festival, National Concert Hall, Dublin
She's a singer whose voice has grown in both breadth and depth over the years. With Clannad, she occupied a pivotal role as lead vocalist and harpist, but her solo work has allowed Moya Brennan to bend her larynx in shapes she might not have contemplated before. The ESB Beo Festival appearance offered her an opportunity to present her music in surroundings utterly sympathetic to the nuances and subtleties of her recordings - and she seized it with both hands.
Moya Brennan's metier is the ethereal, where myth supersedes reality. Mining her solo albums for her repertoire, she favoured the wraithlike Ageless Messengers and Tara, out-takes from her two most recent releases, Two Horizons and Whisper To The Wild Water.
Backed by a full band, including Cormac de Barra on harp and piper, Seán McKeon, she dipped judiciously into the past, alighting momentarily on The Love Theme from The Last Of The Mohicans and Newgrange. Her traditional roots featured only intermittently, but shone on Dulaman. Her choice of tunes - bookended by Mary Of The Gaels and Father Francis Cameron, and including Cormac de Barra's impish Hobnobs - afforded us a fleeting glimpse of her harp's ability to reinterpret the tradition without losing sight of its essence.
And still the lush arrangements and the genteel harmonies whispered of a music more at home on record than in three dimensions. This was multi-layered music that could either salve or scorch the spirit. For those in search of the ultimate aural balm, Moya Brennan delivered. But for some who hankered after a headier pulse rate, this was a dissatisfying night of soft focus songs that fixated on a narrow spectrum of emotion. - Siobhan Long
