Reviewed: Submarine Man, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Marwood, RTÉ NSO/MacMillanand the Bray Choral Society/Kelly
Submarine ManAxis Arts Centre, Dublin
Can you tell the true story of an inventor without embellishment, or does it require some invention of your own? That question plunges and resurfaces throughout Aidan Harney's charmingly playful but ultimately muddled bio-drama of the father of the modern submarine.
Sub-titled "the little-known life of John P. Holland", Harney's play for Upstate uses our unfamiliarity with the Clare-born inventor, whose scientific advances occurred with his emigration to America, to play fast and loose with history. It is true, for instance, that Holland abandoned the Christian Brotherhood for the Fenian Brotherhood (who funded his early experiments), but I'm not so certain that he came up with the blueprint for curried chips. It's a throwaway gag, of course, but it underlines a fearfulness that even a man ahead of his time may now seem stodgy, his life in need of some added spice.
It also needs dramatic structure, and Harney tries to slip Holland into any number of genres and stock plots. As Miche Doherty's nervy Holland follows his fiery housekeeper Maggie (Janet Moran) to New Jersey, the play tips towards Shakespearian comedy and farce. Maggie cross-dresses her way into both the Fenian ranks and Holland's heart, while Holland later hides beneath her petticoats like the rear of a pantomime horse. After such high camp, it is hard to know what to take seriously.
Karl Quinn, playing a number of broadly comic roles, prompts the man-of-conflicted-conscience narrative. His Fenian schemer and, later, myopic American contractor, each demand a deadly weapon, while Holland insists, with implausible uprightness, that his undetectable deep-sea vehicle has only honourable intentions.
If Holland seems oversimplified for the sake of plotting, his progression does allow David Horan's production an entertainingly nimble physicality.
Unable to haul a submarine on stage, the cast's graceful manipulation of a barrel and a bathtub cleverly evoke submersibles, making satisfying nods to the theme of Archimedean inspiration.
A life won't be parcelled up so neatly, however, and while imaginative stagecraft glosses over several contrivances and elisions, Holland's later years of rumbled patents and litigations become more difficult to parse. The fantastic voyage sinks in the tangles of history, and ultimately the play feels debased on a true story. - PETER CRAWLEY
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The Academy, Dublin
Despite the rebelliousness promised in their name, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are a safe, conservative group of musicians. The Californian band make sure to never stray off the well-worn path of standard rock convention, steadily and predictably running through motions invented and perfected by dozens of bands before them.
Listening to their songs, one can't help but check off the long list of obvious influences - a little Led Zeppelin here, a dash of Jesus and Mary Chain there - but their material never threatens to amount to the sum of those influences.
Of course, there are plenty of bands who successfully and entertainingly peddle trite blues rock, but the key is usually a level of self-awareness that seems to have escaped BRMC - The Dandy Warhols and Kings of Leon, for instance, manage to plough a similar furrow with a good deal more energy, and even originality, than BRMC manage.
The hackneyed music would also be vaguely forgivable if the band possessed an ounce of charisma, but what they try to pass off as cool insouciance is actually just boring dullness. Robert Levon Been and Peter Hayes share singing duties, but neither managed to bring much liveliness to proceedings.
They are so bereft of originality that they wheel out a tired, bog-standard Dirty Ol' Town as a crowd-pleasing acoustic number, a gesture that was as breathtakingly cliched as it was poorly performed. It speaks volumes, too, that it was far and away their most well-received song of the night.
Their set veered between rock wigouts and the bluesier Americana they experimented with on their third album, Howl, and while they occasionally hit the mark, the sudden lurches in style were jarring rather than invigorating.
Perhaps they were still tired after playing the Trinity Ball in the early hours of the morning, but the performance was as insipid as the music was derivative.
Ultimately, while they may ape the look and sound, BRMC are wholly without authenticity. - DAVIN O'DWYER
Marwood, RTÉ NSO/MacMillan
NCH, Dublin
Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis; Thomas Adès Violin Concerto; Holst The Planets.
What you know about how a piece was composed can be of limited benefit when you're listening to it.
It's interesting, for example, to read in his publisher's note how Thomas Adès wrote his 2005 Violin Concerto combining large and small independent cycles and using "sheets of unstable harmony in different orbits". But it's all a long way from the listening experience, where what really strikes you is Adès's conversation-like dynamic between soloist and orchestra.
In the long second movement it's a conversation between the lyrical, human voice of the violin and the hostile strings and timpani, the brass also less than sympathetic. But the solo part is firm and fearless, gradually winning them all over to a viewpoint which is, nonetheless, rather dark and sorrowful.
Violinist and dedicatee Anthony Marwood breathed powerful yet understated life into the solo's humanity, as well as tossing off with apparent ease the swift, virtuosic passagework of the brief outer movements.
The listening experience in the Vaughan Williams Fantasia strikes me, similarly, as being far removed from what's conventionally seen as its most salient feature, namely the unusual forces of double string orchestra and string quartet. In the playing, what came across was the warmth and Englishness of a piece that epitomises Vaughan Williams's pastoral style, and, by virtue of the presence of Tallis, of a deep sense of the passing of centuries.
Directing the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in strong, instinctive performances was composer-conductor James MacMillan whose graphic style meant that the way it looked was the way it sounded.
This continued in a stirring and energetic account of Holst's The Planets, the evening's third of three works by Englishmen.
I stand over my belief in Ireland's collective blind spot regarding English music, at the same time acknowledging a recent knuckle- rapping on this topic in the Letters page (and the irony in nearly my next assignment being two consecutive all-English programmes!). Fine concerts like this one show how it's a blind spot we ought to get past. - MICHAEL DUNGAN
Bray Choral Society/Kelly
NCH, Dublin
John Rutter Requiem; Karl Jenkins The Armed Man.
The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace is eclectic in both text and sound, lines from Christian liturgy and Rudyard Kipling rubbing shoulders with others from Tennyson and from the Mahabharata, the immense Indian epic. Similarly, the music covers a wide stylistic range, all of it accessible and direct, much of it redolent of music associated with the stage and screen.
Its popular appeal must be as rewarding to its composer Karl Jenkins as his royalties, since the anti-war message he intended is reaching such a wide public.
For many people, the critical importance of this message persuades them to overlook the work's less attractive features: its use of musical cliché, how it strays across the boundary of the emotional into the sentimental, and a suppression of musical ambition.
The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges argues that war disguises its own horrendous reality with a heroic, patriotic mythology that "allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death".
The Armed Man acknowledges this deception by assigning some rather exciting music to texts about preparation for war and then suddenly turning harsher when considering the reality of war's consequences. The work concludes with an appeal for
peace.
An issue in this performance by the Bray Choral Society under Frank Kelly was the decision to accompany the music with Hefin Owen's The Armed Man Film archive footage - some of it utterly harrowing - drawn from nearly a century of warfare. It is so compelling that it diverts attention from the music.
That said, Jenkins's stage-and-screen style seems tailor-made for visual support. In the end, it produced the most subdued standing ovation I've ever seen.
The concert opened with the Requiem by John Rutter, similar in surface sheen but a little more intricately crafted underneath. In both works the choir - including the Bray Youth Choir for the Jenkins - were let down only by uniformly flat vowels.
Otherwise their performance under Kelly was lively and secure, balanced and nearly always in tune, and full of committed responses to the words. - MICHAEL DUNGAN
