Irish Timescritics review recent performances
The Dead School
Backstage Theatre, Longford
The Dead Schoolopens with an image of the aftermath, but Pat McCabe's disturbing play is only beginning. Set in the derelict living room of schoolteacher Raphael Bell, the fragmented drama dances between the past and the present of the haunted schoolmaster, who has finally succumbed to the madness that has been stalking him throughout his life.
McCabe's adaptation of his 1995 novel is bold in its experimentation with form, translating the vivid imagery of his prose into rich, physical theatrical metaphors, while confidently using music and song as a key structural and expositional tool.
Although The Dead Schoolis firmly set in Ireland in the 1970s, to emphasise the decaying social fabric as the catalyst for incipient madness would do McCabe a disservice, because The Dead School'sastute social observation is perhaps less vital than the play's relentless, exhausting representation of mental illness, which brilliantly captures the complexity and chaos of a disintegrating mind.
Director Padraic McIntyre harnesses the crazy energy of the piece and, with his supreme control over the complex material, creates a coherent and visually arresting production. The cast is brilliantly choreographed in sequences of restless movement, but there are moments where the action slows down too, pausing in contemplation with images of transient beauty and foreboding: the still of a wedding photograph, a frozen dance.
Maree Kearns's stunning subsiding set is endlessly inventive, opening up like a gothic doll's house to reveal the hidden spaces of the mind where madness lurks. Her costume design is equally remarkable, adding to the playful texture of the production's aesthetic, which enriches the encroaching ominous denouement with delicious irony.
That there are only five actors employed in creating McCabe's vivid, sprawling world is almost astonishing. Sean Campion, Carrie Crowley, Peter Daly, Eamon Owens and Gemma Reeves display remarkable vigour over two and half hours, as they appear and reappear like spectres or puppets, crouching underneath desks, towering over the schoolroom.
The unnerving intensity of Campion's performance is especially unsettling, the measure of a man slowly losing his mind.
If the second half of the play drags a bit, it is because the double-plot that opens up threatens to undo the carefully balanced tension through repetition. However, McIntyre and his tireless cast maintain unyielding tight control as The Dead Schoolunravels to its bleak and powerful finale. - SARA KEATING
• Until tomorrow, then touring to Mullingar Arts Centre (Nov 11-12); An Táin, Dundalk (Nov 14-15); Iontas, Castleblayney, Co Monaghan (Nov 18-19); Roscommon Arts Centre (Nov 21-22); Ramor Theatre, Virginia, Co Cavan (Nov 26-29); Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda (Dec 2-3)
Alagna, Manfrino,
RTÉ NSO/Marin
NCH, Dublin
Start a little south of the first note, curve it up so it's buzzing inside that part of the face they call the mask, then stoke up the vibrato for the rest of the phrase. This is the technique that Roberto Alagna taught himself largely from the records of tenors such as Gigli and Björling, which won him the Pavarotti competition in 1988 and which was on display in this Irish TimesCelebrity Concert.
Fears that the Franco-Sicilian star might flounce off the platform, as he did at La Scala in 2006, proved unfounded - the adoring audience at the National Concert Hall could have given him no reason to do so.
This was in spite of a programme that until the final billed item, E lucevan le stelle, from Puccini's Tosca, had relegated the usual opera gala potboilers to the back-burner.
Instead, Alagna powered through extracts more respectable than popular from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, and - in an ill-advised excursion into German - Flotow's Martha.
Although Alagna had declared it "fantastic", O lumière du jour, from Rubinstein's Néron, proved a monumentally forgettable tune. The memorability was all in the exceptional tone, the occasional hint of a sob, the marvellously distended phrases that seemed barely to impose on the lungs.
All was backed with unobtrusive smoothness by conductor Ion Marin and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, who threw in a spit-and-polish La forza del destinoOverture by Verdi, a safe and serious Waltz and Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, and a Candide Overture by Bernstein that wound up to the brink of raucous humour.
The principal diversions, however, came courtesy of rising French soprano Nathalie Manfrino, with whom Alagna relished duets by Gluck, Gounod and Massenet.
Opposite his cultivated stardom, and in her passionate solo account of the Mirror Ariafrom Massenet's Thaïs, Manfrino's unconditional surrender to the gush and glory of grand opéra was intoxicating. - ANDREW JOHNSTONE
