Gerry Colgan saw Boy Gets Girl at the Civic Theatre Studio, Tallaght, while Dermot Gault was at the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music in Queen's University, Belfast.
Boy Gets Girl
Civic Theatre Studio, Tallaght
By Gerry Colgan
This play, by US author Rebecca Gilman, is essentially about the victim of a stalker who disorients her with menaces and sadistic threats. The thriller dimension of the play is hypnotic, and finds a storyline that avoids a conventional denouement. Although Gilman has tried to broaden the scope of her work to add revelation to entertainment, her tangents are not fully convincing. The inherent drama is focused on the stalker's victim and her growing fear.
It opens with a brief meeting between Theresa, a writer for an upmarket magazine, and Tony, a computer programmer, some three years her junior. They have been introduced by a mutual friend, and this is an opening gambit, as it were. They agree to meet for a meal a few days later, but by then Theresa has lost interest, telling as much, kindly but directly, to her date. He appears to accept it with decent resignation but then sends her flowers and turns up shortly afterwards at her office to invite her to lunch. This time she makes her rejection final and plain.
So it begins: more flowers, interminable phone calls, then abusive letters and the direst of threats. The police are called in but cannot guarantee protection. Tony has left his job and cannot be traced, but it becomes clear to Theresa that he is monitoring her movements. In order to escape his attention, she must make sacrifices, changing home and identity.
Dramatically, the story lacks a climax but does carry conviction.
Anna Olson's performance as Theresa is the heart of the play, a portrayal of an intelligent and independent woman forced to acknowledge her helplessness in the face of an irrational hostility. She is wholly convincing, and leads her support cast of six in all the right directions.
Paul Nugent is fascinating in brief early appearances as Tony, and his subsequent absence is logical but frustrating. Pepe Roche, Guy Carleton, Alan Walsh, Lesley Conroy and Aoife O'Beirne are all excellent in a very satisfying production, directed by John Delaney.
Runs until May 17th
Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music
Queen's University, Belfast
By Dermot Gault
music has been relatively scarce in Belfast up until now. All that has changed with the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, which, in addition to music by local composers, featured more than 40 works by composers from Australia and New Zealand. Proceedings got under way with a recital by the New Zealand pianist-composer Dan Poynton, whose album You Hit Him He Cry Out (pidgin for "piano") gave its name to the festival, and whose Nga Iwi E reworked a Maori song in a lively impressionistic mélange, which made use of prepared-piano and in-piano sonorities.
In the following lecture-recital, Poynton discussed New Zealand composers' concerns with the issue of cultural identity, an issue which, as in Ireland, throws into relief the problem confronting all present-day composers of developing a personal style in the face of a whirl of competing stimuli.
Similar issues were raised by Gordon Kerry in a methodical exposition of Australia's music traditions, from Leipzig-trained Alfred Hill, who played for Brahms and Dvorák in the Gewandhaus Orchestra, to more recent composers, such as Peter Sculthorpe, who have sought to develop specifically Australian idioms. Given the background of dispossession and exploitation which Kerry outlined in his talk, the music in the subsequent Ulster Orchestra concert, including Naga Baba by New Zealander Gareth Farr, Sculthorpe's Nourlangie and Kerry's own Upon Empty Air, a Radio 3 commission receiving its first performance, seemed remarkably angst-free, revelling instead in orchestral sonority and freely combining ethnic materials with a post-modernist harmonic idiom. Sculthorpe indeed is quoted as saying that: "Australia is one of the few places on earth where one can honestly write straightforward, joyful music." Elena Kats-Chernin's smoochy, slightly decadent Heaven is Closed was refreshing after all this open-air enthusiasm, while Elaine Agnew's Slasp, another Radio 3 commission, showed growing sophistication and maturity. David Porcelijn handled the intricate orchestral textures with assurance.
The Australian trio Elision preferred more wispy, fragile-textured works, although one was not persuaded that the music chosen supported the extravagant weight of associations which the programme notes invited us to consider. There was more substance in the two concerts given by Lontano under Odaline de la Martinez. In the first of these, Annea Lockwood's Monkey Trips was enlivened by elements of music theatre and improvisation, while in the second, Ian Wilson's Timelessly This and Deirdre Gribbin's How to Make the Water Sound, both showed developing concentration and depth of feeling. In the epic Hotspur by Gillian Whitehead, New Zealand's most distinguished living composer, mezzo-soprano Alison Wells gave a bravura performance of Fleur Adcock's text.
Elsewhere, there were recitals by the Australian guitarist Alan Banks and the Polish oboist Kazimierz Dawidek, who explored the world of oboe multiphonics in a recital and in a lecture, delivered in German and translated extempore by a student. The week-long festival, introduced with infectious enthusiasm by New Zealander Hilary Bracefield, also included concerts by students from Queen's University, the University of Ulster, and disabled musicians working with the Drake Project.
