Irish Times writers review Homebody at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, Norma at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin and the legendary Fleetwood Mac at the Point Depot in Dublin.
Homebody
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
Fintan O'Toole
Tony Kushner, the most ambitious US playwright of his generation, must feel the Abbey has a habit of doing things by halves. First it presented a superb production of the first half of his Angels In America epic but never staged the second part. Now it has repeated the trick, giving us a superb production of the first half of his latest play, Homebody/Kabul, without its longer companion piece. Its message to Kushner seems to be: we love you but we're afraid to commit.
The full play is prescient and timely. Conceived and set in 1998, before the atrocity of September 11th, it is a meditation on the relationship between the West and those areas of the world whose names are amalgamated under the general rubric of Trouble.
In the first half, set in London, an odd, middle-aged woman develops a fragmentary obsession with Kabul. In the second half, set in Kabul, she has disappeared in the turmoil of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and her husband and daughter, in their search for her, have to deal with the messy reality.
This tension between us and them, between a world that wants to interfere and the people and cultures that have to cope with the interference, is what Kushner's play is about. To present just the first part is to deprive the piece of the friction from which it gets its energy. The broader political vision, so powerfully pertinent to today's headlines, is dimmed. Kushner's great value as an epic dramatist unafraid of panoramic ambitions is diminished.
That said, Jane Brennan, under Martin Drury's direction, gives a brilliant account of the witty, subtle monologue that is Homebody. The text is as tough on the actor as it is accessible and engaging for the audience. Its liveliness derives from its richness, the way it combines a funny domestic drama of bored marriage with a presentation of Afghan history and a dissection of romantic orientalism.
The Homebody (she has no other name) speaks to us from a comfortable chair, and at one level her story could be one of Alan Bennett's bleakly funny monologues of middle-aged despair. But Kushner turns this despair outwards, making it into a statement of a wider, historic malaise. When she tells us that "the present is always an awful place to be", she is both capturing her own situation and situating humanity in the flow of history.
Kushner's most effective tool is language. He has created a form of speech for The Homebody at once understated and grandiloquent. Reading from a 1960s guide to Kabul, she pauses to remind us, in a magnificently bathetic phrase, that the city has "undergone change" in the meantime. Yet she also uses an extraordinary range of arcane words, littering her speech with jaw-breakers such as "gigantine" and "supercessional". The effect is a wonderful, sometimes almost poetic strangeness in which the small and the big, the overstated and the understated, come together.
Brennan handles these shifts of gear with remarkable skill. Hers is a tremendous display of theatrical intelligence, alive at all times to the small swings and modifications of tone through which horror and humour, the epic and the domestic, the sardonic and the sincere are woven into a seamless whole. The pity is that the National Theatre can't honour that skill, and Kushner's urgent engagement with some of the central questions of our times, by giving us the full play.
Runs until November 29th
Norma
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Martin Adams
Opera Ireland's Norma recognises that this prime bel canto specimen thrives on restraint. And it is good to see a concert performance that avoids sham acting. The soloists and chorus simply march on or off, and when the soloists are on they stay at their music stands and mostly look forward.
In the first performance, on Wednesday, Carlo Cigni had the vocal and personal presence for Orovese, the priestly bass. His singing was on the effortful side, but, like Sandra Oman as Clotilde and Roberto Covatta as Flavio, he was vocally reliable and always good to listen to.
Patricia Fernandez as Adalgisa was strong on the inflections of Bellini's recitatives and showed how a singer equipped for the bigger sounds of later opera could hold back. The tenor Keith Olsen as Pollione seemed uncomfortable in striking that balance, however. His tone fitted beautifully in the first act's closing trio, but in much of the solo work a striving for intensity led to a loss of control.
This performance lived on the precise and sensitive work of conductor Laurent Wagner. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Opera Ireland chorus responded firmly to his characterful direction, which made the most of this music's rhythmic life and colourful scoring.
Regina Nathan's reading of the title role was packed with insight. There was some blurring of detail in the extraordinarily taxing coloratura writing. She understood that this complexity is not merely for display, however, so her definition of gesture was unfailing.
As the French writer Stendhal said of Giuditta Pasta, who was Norma at the première in 1831, her voice could "weave a spell of magic about the plainest word in the plainest recitative".
Ends tomorrow
Fleetwood Mac
The Point, Dublin
Tony Clayton-Lea
Reviled by the punk-rock contingent of the late 1970s and driven together and apart by internal friction of the kind that has kept agony aunts in business for decades, the core members of the good ship Fleetwood Mac - a completely different band from their early days as British blues-pop pioneers, when they were fronted by Peter Green - have weathered the storm well.
Skippered by Mick Fleetwood, a man who bashes his drum kit with a mixture of Captain Birdseye leer and Spike Milligan lunacy, and tethered to a protective AOR harbour wall by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the band might once have been perceived as the epitome of seamless, selfish, drug-soaked soft rock. But, as they sing, yesterday's gone, and such perceptions have been replaced by a willingness to accept that good songs are good songs. Take away the chemically induced and soap opera-elements and you've got a band that rocks in a way that only US ones can.
The songs are, of course, far better than you would like to admit. Don't Stop, Rhiannon, Landslide, Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again, The Chain, Gypsy - they're all performed with heart, soul, intensity and occasional intimacy. The result is as consummate, professional and engaging an old-timer gig as we've seen this year.
Born African
Old Museum, Belfast
Jane Coyle
Matthew Johnston is a white lawyer, mourning the death of his kindly, liberal mother; Nigel is a young coloured man, married to Matthew's sister, Julie; Constance is an elderly black woman, faithful housekeeper and childminder to the Johnstons. We meet them on the day of Margaret Johnston's funeral, when they are nursing private grief. Julie is absent because she has been beaten by Nigel and is ashamed of showing her bruised face. Constance is there, dutifully fetching and carrying, but consigned by Matthew's father to the anonymity of the back row of the church, where blacks rightfully belong. Black, white, coloured; male, female; master, slave: one thing binds them together in modern Zimbabwe: they are all born African.
The play is staged by Over the Edge, a multiracial company that does not shrink from examining life under Robert Mugabe's regime. Three Zimbabwean actors, Zane E. Lucas, Craig Peter and Adam Neill, play the protagonists. With the mere additions of a sarong, an apron, a tie or a hat they also become a neighbourhood drowning in social inequality, internal division, suspicion and violence.
So tangled is the web of background relationships that one wonders how the mess can ever be resolved. One by one they tell us: it will happen only when all Zimbabweans can accept their identity, be proud of it and celebrate their differences. Sound familiar?
Ends tomorrow
