The Irish Times reviews the arts scene
The Death of Harry Leon
Smock Alley, Dublin
In Joyce’s Ulysses the anti-Semitic Deasy offers a reason why Jews escaped persecution in Ireland: they had never been let into the country. That’s a spiteful untruth on two counts, contradicted by the figure of Leopold Bloom himself and the sting of discrimination he encounters. Conall Quinn’s fascinating new play for Ouroborus offers both a redress and a cautionary fable, sketching a nimble history of Dublin Jews in the second World War, then conjuring an alarming alternative reality in which Ireland aligns itself with Germany.
Harry Leon, played with quiet assurance by Peter Gaynor, is a writer without a cause. A Jewish intellectual whose poetry avoids politics, his unlikely stance is chided by his friend, Tommy Stein (Karl Shiels), whose own politics flare as regularly as his passions, and by his spiritual mentor, Solomon (Gary Murphy): “The luxury of being a poet means you need not have firm beliefs on anything.” The criticism is overstated – Leon’s sombre output sounds firmly political – but the play is keen to stress that, artistically and politically, there is little virtue in neutrality.
With great skill for exposition and delicate detail, Quinn paints a backdrop of dictatorships, dispossession and a huddled Jewish community drawn from Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Russia. His writing has a classic elegance, but also a contemporary wit. “You think name-calling and throwing a few stones is a pogrom? In Russia it was a pogrom, in Limerick it was Saturday night.”
Director David Horan moves the plot with economy and fluency, letting Liam Doona’s understated design usher us through a series of events, both real and imagined. But while Quinn has clearly given much thought to his historical “what ifs” (De Valera dies, the Blueshirts seize power, nationalist rhetoric tips into fascism), the play’s emotional core is less thought through. Sarah Greene plays Leon’s rootless wife with vigour, but their relationship feels shallow against the tempestuous rows between Sheils’s compelling Stein and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú’s expedient survivor, Ruth White.
For all the talents of the ensemble, the play becomes complex to the point of confusion. Against an imagined burning Dublin, replete with checkpoints on Capel Street and concentration camps beyond, efforts to encapsulate the play’s meditation on art and politics seem pat: Denis Conway’s engaging German tyrant becomes drunk on Wagner and whiskey, while Leon develops a late admiration for the politicised art of WB Yeats. While there are uncomfortable echoes in the question of a homeland (moving to Palestine is held as a fantasy of unproblematic escape), the significance of Leon’s final act becomes lost in the tangles of this parallel universe. But there are worse things than losing your way in an intelligent puzzle, and long after other plays are forgotten, this will be provoking ideas and raising questions. Until Feb 14
PETER CRAWLEY
Dwyer, RTÉ NSO/Maloney
NCH, Dublin
Benjamin Dwyer’s pre-concert talk fitted comfortably with the music we heard afterwards. For this third instalment in the Horizons series, Dwyer chose three pieces, including Embers, by Raymond Deane, one of the few Irish composers, Dwyer said, to have influenced him deeply. Speaking effectively for a non-specialist audience and using recordings, he discussed composition as craft, demonstrating ideas and how they relate and may be used. All his points could readily be heard in the concert that followed.
The way in which Deane’s Embers (1979, revised 1981), for string orchestra, relates melodic fragments on solo violin (Alan Smale) to subtly massed sonorities in the strings, is imaginative and effective. It was easy to understand why Dwyer chose such a well- crafted, single-minded piece.
Dwyer, who initially made his name as a guitarist, played the solo part in his Concerto No 1 for Guitar and Strings (1998). This 20-minute, single-movement work celebrates and commemorates the Spanish poet Lorca, and does so with flair, wearing technique on its sleeve and enjoying the banter between, and development of, clearly presented ideas.
Dwyer’s Rajas, Sattva, Tamas (2000) is forceful. The orchestra is very large, and the prominence given to the enormous battery of percussion instruments – very capably played by Richard O’Donnell – makes it almost a concerto for percussion and orchestra.
Inspired by concepts from the Indian Vedic tradition, it is in three sections, characterised by distinctive but related materials. Its 20 minutes of intense activity is sustained by holding tightly on to those materials beneath a highly complicated surface; and even though the materials’ possibilities are stretched towards their limits, the result is not prolix. Throughout, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gavin Maloney played with commitment and confidence. Series concludes on Tues at 1.05pm, with music by Derek Ball and Bill Sweeney
MARTIN ADAMS
