A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.
Ladybird, Focus Theatre, Dublin
The great irony of the cultural ideology of the old Soviet Union was that realism was at once demanded and rendered impossible. Writers were supposed to represent the world as it is, with no fancy bourgeois-decadent tricks and a proper measure of moral uplift. But actual contemporary realism, telling the truth about political repression, social problems or even plain old human unhappiness, would get you into trouble.
The great irony of the collapse of that system is that it has given writers the freedom to be realistic but far too much to be realistic about. The botched transformation to raw capitalism, with its robber barons, mafias and mass impoverishment, has served up a beggars' banquet of squalor and despair. Once the uplift was free and easy and the reality was dangerous and difficult. Now, the reality is overwhelming and the road to optimism is long and hard.
Vassily Sigarev's play, Ladybird, first produced in English in Sasha Dugdale's translucent translation by London's Royal Court last year, is a fascinating case in point. Sigarev, born in 1977, is a child of the Soviet Union's implosion, and Ladybird is a relentless anatomisation of its human consequences.
In a high-rise flat beside a cemetery, in an area known as Dead and Alive, Dima (Jason Gilroy) spends his last night before going to war in Chechnya. His father (Oliver McQuillan), a former minor apparatchik, is a hopeless alcoholic. He and his junkie friend Slavik (Niall Power) make money by stealing gravestones and selling them to the local hood Arkasha (Art Kearns). His young neighbour Lera (Tara Nixon O'Neill), who arrives with her richer cousin Yul'ka (Aoife Espinosa) in tow, is on the fringes of prostitution, but believes she has won a prize in a cynical marketing scam and will soon have a flat and a car.
In some respects, all of this is simply a return to an older Russian tradition of dirty realism. Ladybird is a kind of updating of Maxim Gorky's celebrated 1902 play, The Lower Depths, with similar themes of the uses of illusion to fend off hopelessness. But the hiatus in Russian realism also means that a form that has become rather jaded in the West retains a freshness and energy. Sigarev describes a mental world whose poles are a memory of the old system on the one side and a fantasy of America, represented by the Muppets and Madonna, on the other. Though it lacks the humour that typically enlivens Irish tales of despair, Ladybird is saved from mere gloom by the vigorous dialogue and the simple but strong visual imagery of the stolen headstones.
Its problems lie in its attempts at meaning and metaphor. Sigarev is good enough to know that there has to be more than simply squalor. One of his added ingredients is a peculiar sado-masochistic psychodrama centring on Yul'ka that, in Tim McDonnell's production at least, is unconvincing. The other is a rather heavy-handed imagery of natural renewal that is not justified by the action.
These elements of gaucheness are somewhat exacerbated by McDonnell's uneven direction of a cast made up of his students at the Stanislavski studio. The pace is deliberately slow, making for a running time of around 130 minutes compared to 90 for the Royal Court production. Sometimes the sense of deliberation is perfectly justified, allowing for genuinely realistic detail. At other times, however, it creates a ponderousness that exaggerates the play's own more cumbersome elements.
When it does move quickly, though, Ladybird can be gripping. O'Neill's Lera has the relentless drive of a trapped animal, as she throws everything she has at a pitifully doomed hope. And while Gilroy's Dima seems softer than he ought to be, he has an emotional control that makes his stoicism and compassion truly moving. For all its intermittent awkwardness, this is an absorbing view of the Russia that makes Roman Abramovich's Chelsea possible. - Fintan O'Toole
Until Sept 10, starting a season of contemporary eastern European plays
Andrew Murray, Whelan's, Dublin
Nova Scotia singer/songwriter RyLee Madison lent impressive support to Inisbofin singer, Andrew Murray's first headliner in Dublin. For a venue that prides itself in its impeccable music taste, Whelan's sometimes displays a cavalier disregard for its faithful punters. Low-key singer/songwriters have a tendency to tell their stories with a tincture of subtlety, and for another live band to be booked in the adjoining bar, belting it out for all of Wexford Street to hear, is plainly an insult to the audience. Madison's disposition was luckily of the relaxed variety, with echoes of the Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmons, and she ambled through a gently persuasive repertoire, drawing her audience in with some fine pen pictures including In Tears and Family.
After a frustratingly tardy start, Andrew Murray cut a surprisingly anxious figure on stage. He declared his allegiance to Richard Thompson from the opening, Oh Never Again, and borrowed a further two songs from that Fairport Convention lynchpin before the night was out.
Murray's voice is an exceptional instrument: it's almost subterranean in the depths that it plumbs, its layered tones lending each song a particularly forceful personality. In his hands, the smallest, most vulnerable of songs metamorphose into big, powerful nuggets that sink deep within the subconscious, only to rear their beautiful head hours later for a reprise.
Murray handles the stalwarts of the Scottish tradition with the same ease he does the contemporary gems he has borrowed and reinvented: Jock O'Hazeldene soars haughtily atop its magnificently medieval lyrics (borrowed from Walter Scott), while Thom Moore's Little Miss Kelly is afforded a truly three-dimensional treatment, with percussion, driving double bass, piano and guitar. There were a few dud notes from a band who've spent too little time together yet on the road, and at times the arrangements erred on the side of flowery (particularly on Dougie McLean's Another Story), but the core elements were all present and gloriously correct.
Murray's bold song choices - Tom Waits, Ewan MacColl, Kevin Doherty and a generous share of traditional stalwarts (including the divine Lord Franklin) - hint at a singer who refuses to be fenced in by expectation. The calibre of his voice could take him to Broadway, to Nashville, to Abbey Road or to Miltown Malbay - but a tincture more tightness in the arrangements, and a bold producer's ear would go a long way toward sanding down the rough edges of an astounding vocal talent. Siobhán Long
