Gerry Colgan reviews A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, The Nightingale and the Rose/The Happy Prince in Bewley's Café Theatre, Tony Clayton-Lea reveiws Julio Iglesias The Point, Dublin, and Martin Adams reviews David Creevy (guitar) Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin.
A Midsummer Night's Dream Civic Theatre, Loose End Studio, Tallaght.
The Natural Shocks Theatre Company's version of Shakespeare's funniest comedy, laced with excerpts from the story as written by Charles Lamb, goes for the laughs, and gets them in abundance. Six men are deployed to play all 23 roles, which they do with deft irreverence - or perhaps not. The liberties they take with the play are rooted in utter confidence in its author and his material and, by the ending, they have kept the faith.
Each of the three main elements of the comedy is preserved here. It opens with the rude mechanicals, those most amateur of actors, gathered to rehearse their play, and passing the time with some story-telling. Through this process the nobles of Athens and the two pairs of troubled lovers are introduced and wend their way through the numerous complications. The fairy kingdom, ruled by Oberon and Titania, intervenes to confuse them even more, and finally to resolve their problems. The plot is all there.
The craic, and it is mighty indeed, lies in the versatility of the actors as they literally leap between their composite roles. From Hermia to Bottom, from Quince to Puck, from Lysander to Titania; they take these hurdles in their comic stride. It ends with the rude mechanicals' performance of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, a mirth-inducing affair exploited to its slapstick limit. It is an all-conquering finale.
Donnacadh O'Briain, who adapted these sources with the subtitle of Six Characters in Search of an Audience, also directs with an inspired touch.
His actors - Shane Carr, Tim Casey, Padraic Delaney, Peter Daly, Adam Fergus and David Ryan - clearly revel in their task, ending it with a brief love-in with the audience, facilitated by the in-the-round style of the production. This one is special.
Runs until August 16th
- Gerry Colgan
The Nightingale and the Rose/The Happy Prince Bewley's Café Theatre
These two Oscar Wilde stories are usually presented as children's entertainment. Here, they are primarily for adults, with their underlying themes developed as beautifully creative parables, delivered through sophisticated and impressive acting and supported by excellent production values.
Each play has a solo performer who both narrates and animates the characters, human and otherwise. In the first story, Elizabeth Bracken is the love-struck student who must acquire a rare red rose to woo his beloved.
She is then the nightingale who seeks to help the lover by finding his rose, but who must pay for it with her life. Between the narrative links, she is also the selfish girl, a tree, flowers and more.
Her acting background has fostered her impressive skills in movement and mime, and her interpretations here are quite brilliant. Constantly in motion, she fills the small stage with vignettes in a full realisation of the story's dramatic potential.
Michael James Ford (who directs Nightingale) plays all the roles in The Happy Prince, chiefly those of narrator, the prince-statue and the swallow who adored and died for him. The actor has brought an added flexibility to his work here, capturing the audience with vivid inventions and even injecting the humour of recognition into his interpretation of an essentially sad piece. With this performance, directed by Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, he extends his winning streak of recent times.
Wilde's lyrical writing and essential humanity are well served and preserved in these delightful plays, each of which is being presented on alternate days at lunchtime.
Runs until August 16th
- Gerry Colgan
Julio Iglesias The Point, Dublin.
While his son Enrique gets it on for the post-pubescents, Iglesias père tones it down a notch or two and plies his trade among the blazer and blue rinse set.
For a man who has sold in excess of a staggering 230 million records in seven languages - thereby making him one of the most successful artists ever in the history of popular music - Julio milks his audience something rotten: sly digs about his age, "frank" admissions about his sexual adventurism, why he loves Ireland so much, etc.
If it weren't for the fact that this gig was in the Point, you would wonder had Julio missed the turn for cabaret night at Clontarf Castle. Oh, did I mention a comedian (Brendan Burke, unusually but, in the circumstances, sensibly playing the LCD card) came on first to warm up the less than capacity crowd? And where the hell was Sonny Knowles?
The sound of crashing waves and echoing bird cries wafted in Julio's entrance. Surrounded by anonymous session players, stylish black-clad, short-skirted backing singers and roving dancers, Julio cut through selections of his back catalogue like a hot knife through soft butter. His appeal is as obvious as his pearly whites and ready-to-go suntan: Latino looks (fading but still presentable), foreign accent slipping and slurring through the lyrics of Crazy, To All the Girls I've Loved Before, Begin the Beguine, a level of charm school smarm that people of a certain generation and disposition find utterly beguiling and an overall sound not unlike the more horribly bland and commercial moments of Roxy Music.
Indeed, for people who consider the Eurovision song contest as containing mostly songs of value, Julio is their Bryan Ferry. For the rest of us, he is, perhaps, a man who reminds us just a little bit too much of an expensive resort hotel entertainer/heart-throb. Over 230 million records? Maybe you can fool all of the people all of the time. In seven languages.
- Tony Clayton-Lea
David Creevy (guitar) Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin
Program: Albéniz, Bach, Tarrega, Brouwer, Koshkin
The guitarist David Creevy is a graduate of the DIT Conservatory, where he was a pupil of John Feeley. He has been teaching at the Wicklow School of Music and Drama and is about to leave for the US, to study with Christopher Parkening.
On the evidence here, Creevy is a sensitive musician with a knowing, sophisticated side. His unassuming stage presence is at one with a style of playing in which vulgarity seems impossible. However, a consistently aristocratic approach has its limitations.
In this recital everything was admired from a calculated distance.
That does not work with Nikita Koshkin's Usher Valse (1984), a clever specimen of the waltz-gone-wrong. The playing needs to show the strain between the polished dance of yesteryear and the decayed form of the present. This performance was too nice to be dramatic; and because of the lack of drama, the multi-sectional structure felt fragmented.
In just about every other respect this was an impressive recital.
Creevy has a strong technique, and an ability to define layers in a multi-line texture. That was especially valuable in John Feeley's transcription of part of Bach's Third Lute Suite BWV995, and in the evocative Spanish works by Tarrega and Albéniz which dominated the programme. In the "Obstinato" movement of Leo Brouwer's Elogio de la Danza, one could glimpse that drama which was to be needed in the Koshkin. That glimpse was a metaphor for the concert. It suggested the individuality which might lie behind an urbane façade.
- Martin Adams
