Reviewed: Night Mother and Gerard Gillen

'Night Mother

Andrew's Lane Studio, Dublin

A play about a middle-aged woman preparing to kill herself and her mother's desperate attempts to prevent her, Marsha Norman's emotionally exhausting drama won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. In a way it's easy to understand why: Norman, an American playwright who hails from the Eugene O'Neill school of psychological realism, presents us with something toweringly worthy, a long night's journey into oblivion.

Although Blue Transit Theatre Company's debut production represents a staggering commitment to the bruising movements, psychological excavation and elusive southern accents of Norman's setting, 'Night Mother's anatomy of failed family dynamics is ultimately fatally uninvolving.

This is no fault of the cast. Lynda Thompson plays Jessie with harrowing efficiency: hunting for old towels, plastic sheets and her father's gun, while preparing her dependant mother for the days without her. As Thelma, Peigi Daly allows a gamut of emotions to flit across her soft features, moving from disbelief to reassurance, from aggression to abject distress.

But, unlike the engine of classical tragedy, Norman's play never offers even a glimmer of escape. The confines of this dreary kitchen, its unwaveringly harsh lighting, and the dull momentum of the plot (rationing out details of Jessie's profoundly troubled life, from chronic epilepsy to failed marriage to drug-addict son) present the audience with a grave realisation: there's only one way out. "I can't do anything about my life," Jessie insists. "But I can stop it." Rendered so powerless, even the most compassionate spectator may experience a self-protecting lapse of sympathy.

Nor does Norman's premise offer a convincing engagement with the psychology of suicide, the tragedy of self-harm being that there is no rational explanation, no advance debate. Thompson and Daly demonstrate tremendous focus and Brian Nutley is a painstaking director of psychological performance. But 'Night Mother loses its characters behind a case study and you leave it weary but inured. - Peter Crawley

Gerard Gillen (organ) Pro-Cathedral, Dublin

Franck - Choral No 2 in B minor. Messiaen - Offrande au saint sacrement. Apparition de l'église éternelle. Alain - Premiere fantaisie. Choral dorien. Choral phrygien. Variations sur un thème de Clément Janequin. Litanies.

The annual series of September organ recitals at the Pro-cathedral began with Gerard Gillen presenting a programme of French music composed between 1890 and 1937.

Everything fitted together nicely - music for which this instrument and building are especially suitable, played by a musician who, being the cathedral's titular organist, knows the instrument inside-out and who has issued well-received recordings of French music from this period.

The programme concentrated on works that, in one way or another, were inclined to the religious side of French organ music.

Franck's three chorals from 1890 were his last completed compositions, and unlike the symphonic organ music of his younger contemporaries Widor and Vierne, are infused with a strongly religious spirit. Gerard Gillen's playing of the Choral No 2 in B minor revealed this persuasively through a highly romantic, flexible rubato that created a blend of meditation and ecstatic drive, and that made the final thematic statements a true denouement.

One of the most striking aspects of Messiaen's Apparition de l'église éternelle lay in well-judged changes of highly coloured registration.

These helped create a sense of progression across a piece that epitomises this composer's inclination to create a meditative atmosphere through non-mobile rhythm.

Listening to five pieces written by Jehan Alain between 1933 and 1937, one had to agree with the common perception that this composer's premature death in 1940 was a major loss to French organ composition.

These pieces are not of equal quality; but Gerard Gillen's insightful playing underlined just how accomplished Alain was at combining improvisatory harmonic style and a disciplined concept of musical design. - Martin Adams