Irish Times critics review the Dublin Theatre and Fringe Festival as well as Jigsaw at Whelan's in Dublin and the Galliard Ensemble in Waterford.
Portofino Ballade
The Ark
This quirky show based around the life of two puppets who live inside a double bass launches the festival's children's season with aplomb. The large orchestral instrument stands proudly centre stage as Swiss puppeteer, actor and musician Peter Rinderknecht sits on the edge of the rostrum to finish off a game of chess with himself. He casually asks the audience if they wouldn't mind waiting a moment, until the game is over.
This informal dialogue continues throughout the one-man show, as Rinderknecht mingles morsels of instrumental pieces and spontaneous songs - in English and French - with episodes from the lives of the two puppets who live inside his marvellous instrument.
The home of these miniature puppets, a father and son, unfolds when the back of the double bass is opened up. The father, whose job it is to pop out of a cuckoo clock every hour, is at odds with his son, who is bored by the prospect of inheriting this tedious occupation.
Moving the action from tiny puppets to larger ones that he has hidden in the lower reaches of his double bass, Rinderknecht transports us to the small Italian fishing village of Portofino.
These larger puppets bask in the hot Italian sun, the father sipping an espresso (made in a tiny coffee machine also, incredibly, fitted into the back of the bass) served by an Italian waiter while the son lounges on the deck, watching the passing speedboats.
The smaller puppets take up the story again as the father and son are reunited in the desire to leave the cuckoo clock to pursue their dreams.
The son shoots out when the door opens, but his father, chained to years of dutiful service, misses the opportunity. The story ends when the cuckoo clock breaks down, leaving him free to rest.
This is a charming show whose attractiveness lies as much, if not more, in the inventiveness of the props as in the story itself. Portofino Ballade leaves the audience of eight-year-olds and over with an altogether different view of what to expect from a musician and his dignified double bass.
• Ends tomorrow
Sylvia Thompson
ESB Dublin Fringe Festival
Water Elated ***
SS Michael & John
Combining images of a marooned sailor and a message in a bottle, together with an alcoholic poet whose message is the bottle, Broken Collarbone's performance-art piece might have been better titled Drowning My Sorrows. Slowly leading his audience down a spiral ramp, Fergus Byrne enunciates the faltering and abstract poetics of the broken-hearted. "Where does the sea begin?" he staggers, his body beginning to spasm involuntarily. "Where does the sky begin?" We shuffle further into his personal abyss. It's like Paul Durcan dancing you down a plughole.
In sharp counterpoint to Byrne's eye-avoiding delivery, an accompanying flautist writhes on a stage below, pursuing improvisations both fluid and agitated. Here the hollow breath of the drowned and despairing, there the remonstrations of the bitter and uncaring.
Concluding with a fitful, distressed dance, just inches from the audience, the performance remains confined and emotionally suffocating. You emerge gasping for air.
• Run concluded
Peter Crawley
Nina Hynes ****
Spiegeltent
More accustomed to the stale air of bars or the greasy tarpaulins of music festivals, indie-rock acts can seem lost amid the mahogany and velvet plushness of the Spiegeltent. Not Nina Hynes.
Long capable of finding decadence in anything, the albino-blonde musician looks perfectly at home choking with pearls and wrapped up in black plumes and a feather boa. What a flapper! But the pink Stratocaster in her arms spells out an agenda: it's time to rock refinement.
As striking a lyricist as she is a vocalist, Hynes, like many singer-songwriters, has a voice that sometimes resembles a razor cutting glass. But, with exceptional understanding of the texture of her songs, Hynes, unlike many singer-songwriters, balances that airy shrillness with the heavy drag of gutsy guitar lines.
Married to the dark composure of The Husbands, her new band, Hynes gives a lesson in maverick music and ballsy elegance. A class act.
Peter Crawley
Jigsaw
Whelan's, Dublin
Jigsaw is Stan Sulzmann (tenor/ soprano), Marc Copland (piano), Drew Gress (bass) and Jochen Rückert (drums). It's an apt name for the way this superior quartet works. Having given you the picture, more or less, in musical terms, they then break it up and fit the parts, or juxtapose them, to see what interesting aural combinations they can find, before finally reminding you of its original shape and colours.
It's true, in a way, of most jazz, but this quartet is particularly good at it. It helps that the rhythm section is effectively a working group and that the diffident Sulzmann is an extraordinary player who clearly prefers to let his music do the talking. The rapport between them on this tour is obvious, and the music they created was consistently engrossing and often very moving.
And beautiful. Although almost all the material they used - Evie, Not A Ballad, Jack Stix, See You Again, Dark Territory, No Discussion - were originals by either Sulzmann or Copland and therefore probably unfamiliar to most of the audience, they were pieces of character that offered considerable creative sustenance and licence to the players.
Settling fairly quickly, they soon revealed the group's strengths. Sulzmann has clearly profited from the breakthroughs of Coltrane and Joe Henderson, but his lines, very much his own, are quite unlike theirs, and he has a beautiful, cool, rounded tone and a strong melodic sense especially evident on slower material. He revelled, too, in the stellar support he got.
Time and again, Copland showed an astonishing ability to take his work into fresh and interesting areas; his harmonic sense is utterly unlike that of any other jazz pianist, and he repeatedly found ways to reconcile surprise with structure and to respond to and stimulate the activity around him. It was especially true in the context of the trio, where the gifted Gress produced a series of compelling solos and Rückert proved a sympathetic and adaptable drummer.
The second set opened with an attractive medium-up Latin piece by Sulzmann, Warm Lovely Place, a kind of West seasoned lightly with hints of East. The playing was superb, with Gress and Sulzmann outstanding and Copland offering some delectable impressionistic touches yet again. They followed it with a lovely Dark Territory on which Sulzmann switched to soprano to great effect. And, to offer a soupçon of the familiar, the group's only standard of the evening was a distinctive and inventively tackled On Green Dolphin Street. A concert to savour.
Ray Comiskey
Galliard Ensemble
Waterfront Studio, Belfast
Mozart (arr Rechtmann) - Serenade No 12 in C minor. Zemlinsky - Humoresque. Martinu - from Four Madrigals. Haas - Quintet Op 10
The wind quintet is a medium with something of an image problem, somehow evoking middle-of-the-road 20th-century pieces, the "horrible French music" Harrison Birtwistle complained about having to play as a young clarinettist. Martinu's Four Madrigals require only three instruments, and he was Czech, but he was living in France at the time, and the music does have an irritating chirpiness - irritating because there are good ideas mixed in with the note spinning. It was, however, given a sparking performance by the Galliard Ensemble.
The 1929 Quintet by Martinu's countryman Pavel Haas is a far more searching and ambitious piece, whose parodic third movement utilises the medium's propensity for brittle chatter for a serious end. The second movement "Prayer" has echoes of Jewish cantilation, and it all ends with an affirmative chorale-like passage.
Haas became a victim of the Nazis, Zemlinsky ended his days as a refugee in New York. His Humoresque, thought to date from his last years, turns out to be a winning piece: warm, clever and imaginatively written.
And then there is Mozart. He never wrote anything for this combination, but the Israeli bassoonist Mordecai Rechtman has arranged the well-known C minor Serenade for wind quintet. The flute is not part of the original scoring, and for much of the time it seemed a bit redundant, but flautist Kathryn Thomas made up for this by giving us an attractive cadenza just before the coda.
Dermot Gault
