Irish Times critics review Victory at the Dirt Palace at The Helix, DCUand a performance from the National Chamber Choir with David Brophy at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Victory at the Dirt Palace at The Helix, DCU
The Dirt Palace is staged by The Riot Group, a small but explosive theatre collective founded in 1997. Its style combines the absurdist comedy of Ionesco, with raw, confrontational political content and a hyped-up, fast-paced performance style. The in-your-face ethos is exemplified by the title of its first production in 1998, Why I Want to Shoot the President.
This new piece, which premièred at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, exemplifies the strengths of a tightly-knit collective in which the traditional boundaries between performer, director, designer and playwright are largely ignored.
With The Dirt Palace, Adriano Shaplin is both the author and one of the four performers and direction is by the group as a whole. This fusion of skills gives coherence and drive to a work that might otherwise be incoherent and aimless.
The plot, such as it is, is a compound of Network News, King Lear and a tab of acid. America's two most popular news anchors, James Mann and his daughter K, fight to the death for dominance in the ratings. His dementia and her predilection for sado-masochistic sex are woven into a series of disconnected quotations from King Lear and a bravely absurdist take on the atrocity at the Twin Towers and the war in Afghanistan.
If The Riot Group were not inconveniently Californian, the piece could be denounced as anti-American. Yet its satire is in fact very American. The combination of political commentary and psychodrama is a genuine reflection of the way television presents world events, with shocking realities filtered through the personalities of the star presenters.
The daring nature of the piece lies in its tone, which refuses to be merely zany but combines madcap hysteria with high seriousness. Its wild humour is contained within a stark, beautifully simple form.
There are no elaborate sets, just two desks, two chairs and a table. At one desk, sits the ageing James Mann (the wonderful Paul Schnabel), with his scheming sidekick Andrew (Drew Friedman). At the other, is his icy daughter (Stephanie Viola), with her kinky lover, executive producer and nemesis Spence, played by the author.
This potentially static set-up is kept in motion by the sheer intensity of the ensemble playing and the ferocious pace of the action, which is packed into a breathless 70 minutes. The methodical madness builds towards a perfectly pitched crescendo of lunacy, followed by a wickedly hilarious epilogue. Strange as it may seem the frenetic, wired style does achieve a kind of mock-Shakespearean grandeur that makes the use of King Lear not entirely bathetic.
It would be nice to think that a piece as strange as this could be regarded as a far-out exercise in avant-garde experimentalism. The unfortunate truth, and the reason the play has such an immediate edge, is that it is only slightly less weird than the reality that is shaping the world.
Runs until Tuesday
Fintan O'Toole
National Chamber Choir/David Brophy at the
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
English Madrigals from around the year 1600, by Bennett, Farmer and Weelkes, with their nymphs and shepherds and floods of tears and fa-la-las, set the scene for a light-hearted recital of part-songs by the NCC in the Hugh Lane Gallery.
Without touching any depth of feeling, they balanced the three songs that ended the recital: Tea for Two, Blue Moon and Let's Do It.
"Hark, all ye lovely saints above Diana hath agreed with love" means as little or as much as "People say in Boston even beans do it, let's do it, let's fall in love". One would not immediately connect Thomas Weelkes with Cole Porter, but the NCC's style, bland and polished as it was on this occasion, allowed the two composers as it were, to shake hands across the centuries.
German Romanticism was represented by two Schumann settings, Morike's Schon Rotraut and Schiller's Der Handschuh. These are both ballads (Schiller's ballad about the lady who challenges her lover to fetch her glove from a den of lions used to be well know in an English translation 60 years ago) and have inspired other composers as well. Schumann's word setting is neat but one feels he was happier with Eichendorff or Heine.
The NCC had more opportunity to use its dramatic and vocal skills in two part-songs by Elgar and in Set Me as a Seal on Thine Heart by Walton and in the involved and involving chromaticism of Three Madrigals (1967) by Boydell. Here one felt that the choir, conducted by David Brophy, was penetrating most deeply into the poignancy that music can arouse.
Douglas Sealy
