Irish Times critics review Mary Gauthier at Whelan's in Dublin, the NCC/Antunes at the National Gallery of Ireland and The Twelve Pound Look at Bewley's Café Theatre
Mary Gauthier
Whelan's, Dublin
Cheaters, liars, pick-up trucks - and of course Leroy lurkin' round the next street corner. Mary Gauthier speaks in the vernacular of country music with a glorious Louisiana fluency that simply cannot be faked or forced. This ain't no Nashville newcomer, aiming to inherit the mantle left idle by the big hat brigade. Gauthier is 100 per cent proof all right, just as her albums hinted she was all along.
Country music that's tinged with the voodoo magic of New Orleans makes for interesting listening. This is a world that's tinged with the deep mists of the bayou and the celebratory defiance of the Mardi Gras. But most of all, Gauthier's world is full of dark shadows populated by fascinating characters - most of them haunted, troubled, or just plain down on their luck.
Her real strength, apart from being one hell of a songwriter (with more than a passing resemblance to Gillian Welch in the subject matter she tackles, and in her family background), is her magnificent ability to tell tales in between her songs, weaving her characters into the fabric of her audiences' lives. Woody Guthrie did this to pitch perfection, and she does it so well, and with such ease that I'm thinking that maybe Mary Gauthier carries some elusive Guthrie gene in her orphaned soul too.
With a repertoire that stretches from ornery tales of loneliness (I Drink) to picaresque word pictures of life on the road (Camelot Motel and Sugar Cane), Gauthier's canvas is suitably broad, its colours and shades borrowed from the hairpin bends and boreens she navigates with such morbid fascination. She's had more than her fair share of epiphanies, but unlike lesser writers, she doesn't dress them up in lights. Instead she peeps beneath their skin, in search of that elusive secret that just might help her know which fork on the road to take.
Gauthier's got just the right vocal chink to catch the elusive butterfly that Townes Van Zandt spoke of, when he talked about the elusiveness of songwriting. There's a tincture of Lyle Lovett in her dark humour and her love of language, but Gauthier's real magic lies in her attention to the pinprick detail of life. Mercy Now, the title track of her most recent album, whispers of the personal, the intimate, and yet still manages to tackle life's bigger questions, like those of forgiveness for the demonic actions of her own country.
With her pinched, lopsided smile (occasionally reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis' androgynous impishness) and darting gaze that penetrates to every corner of the room, Gauthier doesn't just sing to her audience. She positively weaves her tales of falling out of love, of death and of small celebration in between their hairlines and their finger tips. A spellbinding performance that made us wish for just another night of not-so-tall tales and wide open spaces.
Siobhan Long
NCC/Antunes
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Morales - Requiem
Lotti - Requiem (exc)
Milhaud - Cantate pour la paix
Xenakis - Pour la paix
Thursday's concert in the National Chamber Choir's Mare Nostrum series exploring Mediterranean connections fell into two distinct halves. The first consisted of highly-contrasted requiem settings from the 16th and 18th centuries, the second of two even more highly contrasted 20th-century works on the theme of peace.
Xenakis's Pour la paix of 1981 sets short texts by the composer's wife, Françoise, which are both evocative and provocative, and the composer adds elaborate interludes in which he treats the choir as a seething, soaring, dissonant mass, relentless in its energy of attack, devastating in its emotional punch.
Celso Antunes is one of those conductors who treats the most demanding of modern scores as a challenge to be met as thoroughly and as painstakingly as a familiar classic. His Xenakis had that aura of fearlessness, of mastery of the almost but not quite impossible, which this composer's music needs in order to make its aesthetic point.
The effect of the Xenakis is such that it could only be placed at the end of this concert, and even there it was more than likely that it would overshadow the rest of the programme. When it was over, there was an almost palpable sense of wonder on some of the singers' faces at what they had individually gone through and collectively delivered - Antunes chose to tackle the work with half the recommended number of voices.
Milhaud's finely-crafted Cantate pour la paix was musically rather anodyne by comparison. The juxtaposition of the two requiems was interesting. Antunes treated the Morales to a mesmerising, sonorous, slow unfolding, the "Dies Irae" section intriguingly breaking the choir up into smaller groupings, and even into solo lines.
The excerpts from Antonio Lotti's Requiem was much more concerned with the harmonic outcome, subjugating contrapuntal movement to clarity of chordal progression in a way that genuflected to earlier practices while having its true focus on 18th-century concerns. As ever, Antunes's performances were notable for their fine observation of stylistic differences, although the blend within sections was not always ideally pure.
Michael Dervan
The Twelve Pound Look
Bewley's Café Theatre
J M Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was also a prolific playwright and novelist for some 40 years extending into the 1930s. The lunchtime production now showing at Bewley's is one of his short plays, first staged in London in 1910 and subsequently on Broadway and elsewhere. Even at this remove, it is easy to see why it was successful.
Satire has the advantage over comedy in that it is the issues rather than the gags that matter most, and some issues remain much the same despite the passing of time. Here we have barrister Harry Sims about to be knighted, and rehearsing his ceremonial moves with the assistance of his submissive wife Emmy.
He is the essence of plummy self-satisfaction, with an ego that seems indestructible.
He has sent for a professional typist to churn out letters of acknowledgments to the many congratulations and good wishes he has received.
When Kate arrives, she turns out to be the first wife who deserted him 14 years previously. He is furious, but takes the opportunity to question her about the identity of the man she left him for, which he had never found out.
They make a deal; you tell me this, I'll tell you that.
Several themes jostle with each other for prominence. The role of married women (remember the time), the male ego in full plumage, the dawning of women's lib, the absurdity of high society and its pretensions; all are seen with a perceptive eye. Sir Harry's comeuppance makes for a subtle, tip-of-the-iceberg ending.
Noelle Brown's excellent direction has the benefit of a seasoned cast in Fionnuala Murphy, Robert O'Mahony and Elizabeth Moynihan, and an effective set design by Bianca Moore. Nice one.
Runs to September 3rd
Gerry Colgan
