Irish Times reviewers today focused on classical music, stage plays and a peculiar musical in west Dublin.
Blood
Project, Dublin
At the start of Blood, Ingrid Craigie's Rosa, a Chilean exile in France and a famous journalist, is interviewed in a television studio about a book in which she reveals that her seven-year-old son was taken from her after the coup and that she has been unable to find him since. The TV presenter, as it happens, is played by one of the best broadcast interviewers in Ireland, Carrie Crowley. It seems safe to assume that this scene, at least, will carry great conviction. When it turns out to be so awkward and stilted that it is hard to believe in it for a single moment, it is not unreasonable to fear there may be trouble ahead.
Blood, by the Swedish playwright Lars Noréhad its premiere in 1995 and was staged at the Royal Court in London two years ago. It has high ambitions, presenting itself quite explicitly as a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex, and asking whether, in the words of the TV presenter near the end, every generation is "compelled to re-enact the same tragedy". But this very self-consciousness - Oedipus is name-checked again and again - makes it less a version than a parody of the myth. Where Sophocles's play has a sense of tragic inevitability, Blood is painfully contrived. Where the original has a ferocious purity, Blood flirts with so many big subjects - Pinochet, torture, Aids, post-modern philosophy, sado-masochism, anti-semitism, the media - that its heavy-handedness becomes more farcical than tragic.
What is particularly unfortunate is that Norén's lack of subtlety extends into the most sensitive terrain. Rosa's sexuality, he suggests, is warped by her experience as a victim of torture. In a scene that seems to be inspired by Ariel Dorfman's more sophisticated and thoughtful play Death and the Maiden, he has Rosa push her psychologist husband Eric (Conor Mullen) into a sado-masochistic re-enactment of her torture. The point - that the victims collude in the cycle of terror - is crude, and even Craigie's immense dignity can't rescue the scene from its sheer bad taste. After it, the lurid nature of the play as a whole - its use of violence, Aids and psychiatric illness as a shortcut to terror - is impossible to ignore.
The pity is that alongside Craigie's intelligence and restraint, there is much to admire in Annabelle Comyn's production for Hatch Theatre Company. It is cleverly and creatively designed by Paul O'Mahoney and Comyn's technical abilities, her control of space and movement, are emblems of great promise. Such abilities deserve a better play.
Runs to Dec 3
Fintan O'Toole
Assassins
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
This cult musical, with songs and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by John Weidman, was first produced off-Broadway in 1991. Because of its theme - the assassination of American presidents - it was deemed unwise to transfer it to Broadway, and it made the move only last year. Now it is here, as the inaugural show of Next Stage Productions.
Despite the eminence of Sondheim, now in his mid-70s, this is an odd one. It opens at a circus booth, where passers are invited to shoot at moving pictures of presidents. John Wilkes Booth turns up, and the next scene has him shooting Abraham Lincoln. He claims that Lincoln had fomented civil war, and that his motive is revenge.
Next is a spoof scene in a bar, waiting for Nixon to come in. Roosevelt's life is saved almost by chance. Two women who were acquainted with Charles Manson agree on an assassination attempt in his name. A young man wants to kill Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Jodie Foster.
By now a theme of sorts has emerged. The US confers on its citizens the right to their dreams and happiness. If they are defeated in life, their natural target is the father-figure who failed them, and fame at least may finally be theirs.
It is a foolish thesis, albeit meant satirically, and its characters here do not, in philosophy or politics, support it - least of all Lee Harvey Oswald in the final scene.
There is one good song, Unworthy of Your Love, and the rest are all clever composition and lyrics, but there is nothing that stays in the mind. The hard-working cast, led by Simon Delaney, delivers a competent show, but cannot redeem its defects.
Runs to Nov 26
Gerry Colgan
Requiem of Love
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
Patricia Burke Brogan's plays have always seemed a little ahead of their time. Her 1992 Eclipsed was one of the first attempts to expose the abuse of women in the Magdelene laundries and, 10 years later, she courageously called for a more balanced view of Ireland's Catholic past in Stained Glass at Samhain. Requiem of Love is more personal and retrospective than either of those works, focusing on a man's attempts to come to terms with the death of his estranged wife. But although Burke Brogan is exploring new territory here, the moral generosity and painterly sensibility of her earlier plays remains evident.
John O'Kelly (Donncha Crowley) stands at the graveside of his wife Nora. He'd left her many years before, after being accused of a death for which he may have been responsible. Nora was left alone to raise their children; O'Kelly brawled his way drunkenly through Australia, sobering up on Good Friday each year to write her letters he never sent. Instead he carries them around, wrapped in an Irish tricolour.
Crowley performs O'Kelly as a frenzied and pathetic figure, who veers from self-serving bombast to the terrible desire to make amends when it's no longer possible to do so. Burke Brogan presents to us a man whose life has been ruined largely because of his own weaknesses - but by using tightly constructed images of forgiveness and transformation, she also leaves open the possibility of redemption for her character.
Requiem of Love therefore manages to be rich without being dense. It draws on a range of allusions to song, visual art, the natural world, and other cultures' funeral rituals, but never loses narrative impetus - indeed, the action is presented too quickly at times. The set (designed by Burke Brogan and director Caroline FitzGerald) is simple but evocative, using puppetry, sculpture and light to emphasise the script's haunting tone. This results in a production that creates a strong, lingering contrast between O'Kelly's hopeless situation and the beauty of the language used to describe it.
In Galway until Sat, then in the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, Dec 7-9
Patrick Lonergan
O'Leary, ConTempo Quartet
National Gallery, Dublin
Haydn - Quartet in E flat op 20 no 1
Jane O'Leary - Piano Quintet
Beethoven - Quartet in C op 59 no 3
Speaking before its first performance last Sunday, composer-pianist Jane O'Leary denied the importance of melody and structure in her new Piano Quintet. Yet it soon became clear that this 4four-movement piece is no random soundscape, but a patiently cultivated one.
It's not that there are themes and forms as such. But a continuous sense of objectivity results from her thoughtful use of colour and texture. Some non-keyboard piano sonorities develop an interesting common ground with special pizzicatos, bowings and harmonics in the strings. These were executed with absolute confidence and precision by Galway's ensemble in residence, the ConTempo Quartet.
Not for nothing do the members of this group spend more than the usual amount of time tuning their instruments. They're more particular about intonation than the average quartet, and it shows. Octaves don't sound like octaves, but like single notes with a new voice. Chromatic harmonies are custom-tuned for every context, and there' is acoustic transcendence in even the simplest major and minor chords. Neither is the harmonic coalescence disrupted by vibrato, which is used so sparingly and selectively that it gains considerably in expressive potency.
The ConTempo Quartet matched this extraordinary integration of technique with extraordinarily integrated readings of the works by Haydn and Beethoven. The musical argument was laid bare, as individual notes seemed to disappear in the way that individual syllables disappear in fluent speech. Nor, in the resulting fusion of composition and performance, was there ever any sense of contrived interpretation. Nothing, it seemed, was being lost in translation from score to sound
Andrew Johnstone
NCC/Rademann
National Gallery, Dublin
The open-ended title of the National Chamber Choir's current winter series - Audible Landscapes - can accommodate mixed-salad programmes such as the one they sang at this early-evening concert at the National Gallery.
The programme jumped merrily and without much logic between different countries and centuries. But what emerged was a striking demonstration of one of the strengths the choir has developed in recent years, namely the use of different vocal styles.
This ability to change gears is something the choir didn't always have. But for guest conductor Hans-Christoph Rademann they made sharp changes of vocal production, which meant there was a strong stylistic distinction between, for example, psalm-settings from the late-Renaissance by Johan Hermann Schein and others from the 19th-century by Mendelssohn.
For the Palestrina-influenced Schein pieces (from his 1623 collection Israelis Brünlein the voices were warm yet clear, with the independent lines nicely balanced and subtly judged as they emerged and receded in turn.
For Mendelssohn the use of vibrato was more prominent and the dynamic range wider, giving a more openly emotional and less internal perspective on the texts. The choir returned to this style for the evening's final piece, Brahms's Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen. In both styles Rademann drew out much expressive detail so that the singing was constantly alive, never merely cruising.
The leap to the 20th century was more temporal than stylistic, all three works being predominantly calm and tonal in a way that made them sit quite easily beside the Mendelssohn and Brahms.
The Fac me tecum extracted from Szymanowski's Stabat mater featured two fine (though unnamed and unacknowledged) soloists, and Rademan controlled a smoothly-graded central climax and crescendo in the Agnus Dei by Penderecki.
Michael Dungan
