A look at what is going on in the arts by Irish Timeswriters

Philadelphia, Here I Come!
The Helix, Dublin

It would be a bold experiment, and not one that an audience might voluntarily pay to witness, to have Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! performed without one essential character - Gar Private. This might strike you as complete folly, like staging Hamlet without the prince. Or, given that the onstage embodiment of an internal voice was such a bold experiment to begin with, a reactionary response coming several decades too late.

But, in his frenetic routine of commentaries, interjections, vibrant fantasies, comic accents and acerbic piss-takes, Gar Private is a rebel against silence. In fact, he fills that silence of his suffocating home in Ballybeg to such a degree that in Second Age's crisp, clear production of Friel's first play, it's easy to overlook the ache of silence that might split a young man in two, to feel those excruciating stretches.

Not that you would want Marty Rea, an actor of bracing versatility and striking focus, to take the night off. Dressed as neatly as a job applicant, his Gar Private is otherworldly, certainly, but no rampaging id. In fact, as Sean Stewart's Gar Public literally makes a song and dance about fleeing for America in the morning, it's his alter ego who comes across as the restraining influence. "You know what you're doing," warns Private, essentially summarising the play. "Collecting memories and images and impressions that are going to make you bloody miserable." Director Alan Stanford works this double act smoothly, although Private, who can sometimes seem to be more in charge of the play than his author, will always run off with the show. His sardonic, caustic wit - the humour of an imagination frustrated by routine - is one that may resonate with the company's intended school audiences.

There is, from the design to the performance, a great clarity in this production - even in the well-enunciated lines of Áine Ní Mhuirí's quietly tragic housekeeper Madge that might have worked better muttered - but not much that surprises. That may be the consequence of the play's strange journey from a radical to canonical work; less the fault of a faithful production than of the sanction of the syllabus.

There is no use pining for the formal shock of 1964, however, and watching the play today you see a revealing picture of Ireland then, from the penitential posture of the rosary to the empty promise of America with its air-conditioned cars and snowy Christmases.

There may be little embellishment in this production, but there is at least no barrier between us and the play. It still has the capacity to move, nowhere more so than in the quietly significant exchange between Walter McGonagle's tamped-down patriarch SB O'Donnell and John Olohan's absent Canon O'Byrne. Silence is the enemy, urges Private, and that's true enough; but Friel also knew that sometimes it can speak volumes.

Until Nov 16 at The Helix, then The Everyman Palace Nov 20-23, and the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire 29 Nov 29 - Dec 1

- Peter Crawley

Hugh Tinney (piano)
Printing House, TCD

Composer Siobhán Cleary's initiative was commendable: approach one of the country's very top pianists with a wish-list of modern and contemporary works, and ask him to learn them all for a concert.

It was part of New Sound Worlds, a series through which Cleary aims to get leading performers more closely involved in contemporary repertoire.

Hugh Tinney had not previously played any of the pieces on the list when Cleary presented it to him two years ago. Working on them, he said, has given him a "new picture".

Yet it was the more classical, time-honouring aspects of the programme that seemed most to appeal to Tinney's taste. In a spoken introduction, he singled out the quasi-diatonic scales of Pavel Szymanski's Prelude, the sweetly disruptive arpeggios of Tom Johnson's Euler's Harmonies, and the Chopin-like texture of Gerald Barry's Swinging Tripes and Trillibubkins.

Apart from a few mechanical noises from stool and pedals, Tinney's performance of these epigrammatic pieces fell easily on the ear. So too did the dreamy and more extended In a Landscape by Cage, where the phrasing was gently provocative, and the threnodic Éagaoineadh by Fergus Johnston, where blue-note bleakness led to a roaring climax.

With Ligeti's notorious Étude No 13 (L'escalier du diable) - aborted half way through on the first attempt, conquered on the second - and Xenakis's à r. (hommage à Maurice Ravel), the problems were of assimilation rather than technique.

On more familiar ground - Chopin, say, or Rachmaninov - Tinney would equanimously dispatch passages of even greater difficulty. Here, however, the musical delivery was encumbered by his reliance on printed scores.

But not so with Scelsi's slow and swamp-like Quattro illustrazioni, where authoritative playing brought the composer's discursive ruminations engagingly off the page.

- Andrew Johnstone