Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events
Faithful
Mill Theatre, Dublin
Nobody would ever confuse Chazz Palminteri, an actor familiar from a string of tough-guy film roles, with Eugene O’Neill. But there is a mist of similarity in the central figure of his comedy-thriller and the spectre of infidelity and death in O’Neill’s tragedy; so much so that we could propose an alternative title, “The Hitman Cometh”. Whether the Mill Theatre’s new production is actively seeking such depth is another question, but Tom Kibbe’s production has much here to untangle.
Somewhere between a wise guy and a morality-tale device, Don Wycherley’s Tony is Death with a semi-automatic, to whom Carrie Crowley’s Margaret must justify her existence. “You shoulda been faithful,” he tells her, with the flat tone of a principled professional reaper.
Naturally the hit is complicated by innumerable implausible plot contrivances. Margaret is apparently more sinned against than sinning, and whether clinically depressed or a manipulative mastermind, seems as unbothered as a woman tied to a swivel chair with a gun in her face can be. For reasons that are less than clear, Tony must wait for a telephone signal from her husband, Jack (David O’Meara), allowing time for much banter. Crowley, appealingly languid and slightly amused, is paradoxically the more comfortable of the two. Even her Italian-American accent seems less fretful than that of her captor, who paces Tom Ronayne’s beige set with shoulders hunched in an ill-fitting suit, his eyes cast down.
Then again, Palminteri’s play deals with broad comic opposites. Tony, like every mobster since the early 1990s, is in therapy, with an offstage shrink who demands constant psychological reassurance, and everyone, essentially, is a cartoon.
What utterly upsets the balance of the play, however, is that Tony has not only been commissioned to kill Margaret, but to rape her beforehand. Black comedies about principled hired killers we have learned to accept; but black comedies about a principled hired rapist? An unnecessary conceit made more alienating by Margaret’s complicity (“Let’s make it fun for both of us”), this unbalances Palminteri’s set-up and – despite the performers’ best efforts – poisons any sense of characterisation.
It doesn't help that, in general, the play's gender politics have been disinterred from a chauvinist time capsule. Men can't be faithful, we are told, because they live longer and there are too many cocktail waitresses; while, in the eyes of the world, a woman can never be a failure, only a housewife. Depthless one-liners that go uncontested, these further taint a play that, itself, shoulda been faithful to either a thriller designed to startle or a by-numbers don-com. Until Aug 22 PETER CRAWLEY
Kilkenny Arts Festival: Mitchell, Leschenko
St Canice’s Cathedral
Schnittke – Sonata No 1. Mendelssohn – Sonata in F. Bartók/Szekély – Romanian Folk Dances. Grieg – Sonata No 3.
British violinist Priya Mitchell and Russian pianist Polina Leschenko give the impression of being an inspirational duo, and it would be hard to imagine two musicians being more deferential to each other than they were at St Canice’s Cathedral this week. Each was prepared to hover in the background while the other took the leading role, and that collegial submission allowed whichever player was calling the shots to do so with an uncommon kind of freedom.
In the recording studio, the repertoire for violin and piano is often treated as a giant-and-pygmy combination, the violin morphing into an artificially large presence that can swamp anything the piano might do.
There were no such distortions in these performances. In the first place, Mitchell is not a large-toned player, and when the stage at St Canice’s is open behind the players, the acoustic is particularly unkind to this particular combination of instruments. The sound seems to escape away from the audience, and the effect is of a slightly uncomfortable remoteness, with the instruments appearing physically much closer to the eye than they seem to the ear.
The overall effect at this concert was to allow the duo to create any number of moments to admire. There was the feline grace that Mitchell brought to the angular modernism of Schnittke’s First Violin Sonata. There were the incredibly flexible melodic contours that Leschenko outlined in a performance of Mendelssohn’s F major Sonata, where the pianist came and went with the freedom of the Cheshire Cat. And there were some extraordinary ethereal whistling violin harmonics in the third of Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, and an impressively gutsy spirit to the stomping dances in Grieg’s C minor Sonata.
Yet, for all there was to admire in the evening's music-making, most of it remained somehow at a distance. Perhaps it was that the sense of active engagement between the players was limited by the very extent of their mutual deference. They were often like a couple whose behaviour was simply too polite. And when it wasn't, as happened in the more boisterous of Bartók's dances, the violin was simply obliterated by the piano. Or perhaps it was just that the acoustic didn't focus the sound sufficiently well. There was a lot to admire, but the grip was very mild. The centre didn't hold. MICHAEL DERVAN
O’Sullivan, RTÉCO/Brophy NCH, Dublin
Walton– Spitfire Prelude and Fugue.
Mancini– Moon River. Kern – Bill.
Vincent Kennedy– Dublin: Overture to My City. John Williams – ET: Adventures on Earth.
Di Capua– O sole mio. Bizet – Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum. Coates – Dam Busters March. Goodwin – 633 Squadron.
This concert’s on-stage presenter, Evelyn Cockburn, described the programme as being built around music to do with flight. With one exception, all the orchestral works were written for film.
The kinds of musical evocation that one associates with film music, and with certain kinds of programmatic music, are strongly present in Vincent Kennedy's Dublin: Overture to My City, an RTÉ commission which was receiving its first performance. This straightforward music, with recognisable references to places, is effective in portraying a bird's-eye view of the city, and was warmly received by the audience.
One of the consistent strengths of this concert was the rhythmic vitality and long-breathed phrasing produced by conductor David Brophy and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. It was especially apt, essential even, for music so concerned with flying. The one consistent weakness was that quiet playing was hardly ever sustained, even in places where that would have been welcome.
It would have been especially welcome in two of the items featuring soprano Cara O'Sullivan. In every respect she was on strong form, but the songs Moon Riverand Bill, in these arrangements at least, emphasised the middle parts of her register, where her voice can be pleasingly dusky. You could always hear her, but the orchestral playing was just too loud for this style of song.
The balance between singer and orchestra was better in O sole mioand Beat Out Dat Rhythmfrom Carmen Jones. It was helped by the fact that these are true soprano songs, where the voice floats readily above the instrumental textures.
Cara O'Sullivan's warm, communicative performances had several members of the audience singing along or beating time with her. MARTIN ADAMS
