The Irish Times reviews Jane Birkin at The Pavillion Theatre, The Red Neck Manifesto at Whelan's, David Grealy at St. Michael's and The Kiss at Bewley's Café Theatre.
Jane Birkin
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Her wraith-like frame and gamine looks belie a formidable presence. Both riveting and unapologetically vulnerable, Jane Birkin, aptly described by Ellen Cranitch in her spirited introduction as a singer, songwriter, actor, writer, director and muse, delivered a mesmerising performance at Dún Laoghaire’s Festival of World Cultures.
Luckily, Cranitch boxed away the mention of Je t'aime . . . moi non plusbefore the lights went down, which left Birkin with a clean slate on which to etch her intensely personal tales of love, sex, courtship and death. This "Enfants d'hiver" tour is a set piece with every note and gesture, every pose and spoken word introduction practised with the sacred attention of an artist who respects her audience. It's a performance that is two parts chanteuse, one part political activist and one part deliciously smouldering siren
From the opener, L'Anamour, Birkin dug deep beneath the skin of each song, immersing herself in its lyric with almost monkish intensity. Not once did she attempt to negate her years; she simply revelled in the picaresque catalogue of life experiences they've bestowed on her.
The late Serge Gainsbourg strode, large as life, through her set, his songs given a renewed vitality by her delicate vocals. Exercise En Forme De Z, Ford Mustangand Ex Fan Des Sixtiesjested with language, revelling in the syllabic rhythms and challenges which they posed to the (not always fluent) bilingual Birkin.
Most revealing was Birkin's own repertoire from her 2008 CD, Enfants d'Hiver. Her lyrical directness was tempered by sublime arrangements for cello, double bass, piano and guitar by composers including Alain and Pierre Souchon and Pierre-Michel Sivadier. Alongside her cri de coeurfor Aung San Suu Kyi, she chronicled a life lived to the full in Les Boîtes, Pourquoiand so much more besides. She chose few props, bar the most delightful umbrella of lights, which illuminated her pathway as she tiptoed through the theatre, making tangible her already luminous presence. Utterly, irrepressibly charmante.
SIOBHÁN LONG
The Redneck Manifesto
Whelan’s, Dublin
The Redneck Manifesto are an Irish institution, sporadically reappearing to rip up small venues.
It’s been roughly 15 months since the band’s last gig, and rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated. In June, the band recorded a new album in Black Box Studios in France, which should make its way into the world fully formed by the end of the year.
Tonight most of the tracks are drawn from it. The band seem to have taken on a bit more groove, carving out riffs and licks and working them relentlessly, resisting the temptation to head straight for the distortion pedals to drive their point home. Instead, they build up layers of melody, shimmering guitar lines skipping over grinding, grooving bass lines, a sharply marshalled drum kit pushing and pulling the whole thing along, while the keyboards ask questions and add intricate texture, before the whole vehicle shunts abruptly down another musical channel, and the crowd roars its approval.
Occasionally, the tracks draw on such a bewildering range of hooks and ideas, it can be a little difficult to grab a handhold. The sudden changing of musical gears, while technically fluid and polished, can appear to link phrases that melodically don’t seem to have a huge amount in common.
This, though, is largely academic for a band who attained cult status a long time ago. This show could have sold out twice over. Within seconds of the opening track, the crowd are stomping and swaying and by the time the band close with I Am Brazil, unleashing crashing waves of distortion for a slightly more straight up and terrifically powerful post-rock wig-out, we are witness to that rarest of things in a small Dublin venue – a mosh pit complete with stagedivers. If de facto frontman Richie Egan asked this crowd to tear the concrete from the walls, the place would be bare in minutes.
This is a hometown band playing a long overdue gig to a crowd that is fully signed up to the Redneck Manifesto, a roaring, swaggering night of the familiar and the riotous. The best-kept secret in the country just got a little more intriguing.
LAURENCE MACKIN
David Grealy (organ)
St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Galway organist David Grealy, currently organ scholar at Westminster Cathedral, and former organ scholar at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin and Galway Cathedral, made his début in the annual series at St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire.
He showed himself to be a serious player, offering a carefully-constructed hour-long programme that covered Bach (four large chorale preludes from the third book of the Clavierübung, presented in contrasting pairs), the 19th century (Mendelssohn's Sonata in A, the most popular of his six organ sonatas), the early 20th century (a Prelude and Fugue by Dupré and Vierne's Les Cloches de Hinckley, the latter apparently inspired by a sleepless night in a Leicestershire town), and a work by a living composer (Arvo Pärt's elegiac Pari intervalloof 1976).
The impression of seriousness was reinforced by a certain severity in the performing style. The double pedal part in Bach's Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV686, was allowed to create a centre of gravity that seemed dangerously low, the rapid figuration of Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, BWV684 to disappear behind the intertwinings of the other parts, and the patient patterning of Pari intervalloto sound without sufficient sense of tension.
It was in those pieces which triggered moments of extroversion, parts of the Mendelssohn sonata and the bell-ringing and exuberant scales of the Vierne, that the true potential of Grealy’s studious style was most surely felt.
MICHAEL DERVAN
The Kiss
Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin
“I am a priest,” Tom Hickey’s character says, sitting alone on the stage, in the subdued tone of a confession, “that most spat-upon, despised and detested individual.”
Writer Michael Harding has every right to be angry. Although this monologue was first staged in 1994, in the wake of the Brendan Smyth scandal, and is here revived 15 years later in the white heat of the Ryan report’s litany of institutional abuse, the most profound and affecting note of his play is not bitterness, but compassion.
Hickey, under Harding’s direction, is a haunted soul, acerbic and abandoned, looking for some succour in music, which trails out – in a perfectly observed detail – from his desktop cassette recorder. Hickey begins with a snippy remark about Desmond Morris’s The Human Animal, sardonically tracing all human achievement and failure as a result of more basic genetic urges.
Harding deftly recognises that such glibness is the precise hazard of his own enquiry.
The priest has had to leave the church and few in the audience won’t hazard a guess as to why, but Harding and Hickey refrain from both shock tactics, prurience or pat answers. Instead, a masterfully contained Hickey seems to construct a tapestry out of tangents, his deceptively discrete recollections conspiring to sketch out a life of faith, desolation, urges and finally transgression.
It is hard to unpick the potency and artistry of the text from the unapologetic intimacy of the performance. But as Hickey recounts a childhood fascination with monastic discipline, the unsatisfying sublimation of sexual harmony into communion (God’s timing was never in sync with his, he tells us), the institutional upheaval of Vatican II (the gaiety of the clergy, the banality of the new sermons, the laity striding around in woolly jumpers), he meets our gaze with soft, steady eyes.
If Harding’s humanism and imagination reach a limit, it is in denying a sense of genuine spirituality to the figure or even its vestiges – in our repulsion for the sins of the church, we tend to repudiate its better values.
They don’t elude Harding, though. In fact, the effect of this quietly devastating piece of work both contradicts and complements the tenets of religion. It doesn’t seek anything as banal as forgiveness or damnation, – it attempts something far more profound. It seeks to understand.
Runs to August 8th
PETER CRAWLEY
