The Irish Timesreviews the latest goings-on in the arts

Gate Friel: Faith Healer Gate Theatre, Dublin

A daring experiment when it premiered in 1979, Faith Healer is the play that launched a thousand monologues. Trailed by the ghosts of extraordinary past performances, it is a work that requires dauntless actors, yet is staged ultimately in our imagination. A deft piece about the impossibility of homecoming and the hair’s breadth between miracles and confidence tricks, it is wickedly sardonic but somehow never cynical. It is a masterpiece that risks so much with its words and structure – like a precision-engineered plane which no one is entirely sure will fly – that it reflects the endless tension and possibility in live performance itself.

In short, this play is the reason we go to the theatre.

Francis Hardy, the tormented faith healer who drifts through parish halls in Wales and Scotland with his wife Grace and manager Teddy, knowing “nine times out of 10, nothing happened”, stands before us in the shape of Owen Roe (below). An actor of easy warmth and fluent self-deprecation, Roe softens Frank, turning him into something more personable and vulnerable than previous depictions, an interpretation that admirably makes the part his own. Whoever defines Frank, however, will always be in competition with Friel, whose charismatic weaver of fictions and creator of characters may count as a disguised self-portrait.

Although Paul O’Mahony’s muted design seems to have been largely inherited from Jonathan Kent’s 2006 Gate production, new director Robin Lefèvre matches Friel’s work with some risks of his own. The Gate’s house lights are never extinguished for the four successive scenes of direct address, something that has a sharpening effect on the audience, making it less a monologue play than a dialogue in which we are silent partners. With no strict division between our reality and that of the characters, our self-awareness is never obliterated by the suggestion and incantation of the words.

If Ingrid Craigie, who reprises the role of Grace, seemed timorous for Kent, she is emboldened in Lefèvre’s production, becoming considerably more than a neurotic observer. Unlike Francis’s charismatic huckster, or the cajoling, fast-talking Teddy (who, in Kim Durham’s hilarious and affecting performance, treats the audience both as fast friend and slow-witted client), it is unclear what propels the isolated Grace to speak. When she finally recognises herself as one of Francis’s “fictions”, it isn’t clear whether she has been discarded by her husband, or by her writer.

Such stimulating ambiguities linger, much as Friel always folds the cerebral into the emotional, his characters at once flesh and symbol.

This production honours the complexity and the thrill of the play, it honours the writer too, but, more importantly, it honours the audience. It is a meeting of chance and accomplishment, the recipe for a miracle, seeking not to restore our faith in theatre but to remind us, stirringly, why we keep it. Gate Friel continues in repertory, with Afterplayand The Yalta Game, until Sept 19

PETER CRAWLEY

Doyle, Kimura

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

The third concert of Music 21’s current series brought together two staunch advocates of modern and contemporary repertoires: Irish flautist Susan Doyle and Irish-resident Japanese pianist Izumi Kimura.

Their programme chiefly explored the last two generations of Japanese composers. Kazuo Fukushima's Ekagra(1957), for alto flute and piano, and Toru Takemitsu's Voice(1971), for solo flute, turned the spasmodic rhythm of Noh theatre into an interesting correlate of the European avant-garde.

Akira Miyoshi's Mouvement Circulaire et croisé II(1998), for piano solo, proved an accomplished essay in post-Messiaen style, while a pioneering work for piano with digital delay, Somei Satoh's Incarnation II(1977), fell mesmerically on the ears.

Composer Benjamin Dwyer, the artistic director of Music 21, dipped into these oriental waters with a new work of his own, which had been publicised with the intriguing title Erotic Japanese Texts.

In the event, his source material had been pared down to a single song, with words written 1,000 years ago by the unchaste Japanese courtier, Lady Izumi Shikibu.

The actual, more decorous title is Four Japanese Prints – “print” being a character-piece label like “sketch” or “album leaf”. With the common melodic matter lying below the audible surface, and a different size of flute deployed in each movement, the emphasis is on calculated contrast.

Effort had clearly gone into realising Dwyer’s stated intention “to create a space where notions of intimacy might be suggested and experienced”. There were, however, some minor disruptions.

In the second movement, Dwyer had allowed his usually tight harmonic idiom occasionally to slacken, and in the third he had called for whistling overtone effects of questionable effectiveness.

And the intense atmosphere that’s typical of this composer’s slow-moving conceptions had to yield, between movements, to the business of switching instruments – as well as to some uncontainable applause.

ANDREW JOHNSTONE

Peregrine, Breslin

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Beethoven – Variations on Bei Männern. Mendelssohn – Cello Sonata No 1. Debussy – Cello Sonata.

Eibhlis Farrell – Stillsong.

Shostakovich – Cello Sonata.

Chopin – Polonaise Brillante Op 3.

Cellist Gerald Peregrine and pianist Cathal Breslin have formed a new duo, and are currently giving their debut tour, playing in seven venues around the country courtesy of a Music Network performance and touring award.

Although the two players have known each other since their college days, their concert at the John Field Room this week suggested that they still have a lot of issues to work out as a musical partnership.

The most significant one is in the area of balance. Breslin is a forthright, often forceful pianist, while Peregrine paints canvases on a much smaller scale. And neither player seemed inclined to modify their familiar mode to accommodate the other.

This meant, for instance, that the sharing of similar material between the two instruments was very uneven, with the piano dominating the cello even when it was clearly designated a supporting role. You could read the balance issues as being a kind of conflict between an extrovert and an introvert, with the player on either side sticking to his chosen manner.

Breslin was the more straightforward of the two. He showed a liking for clear, sculpted statements, music presented, as it were, as incontrovertible fact. Peregrine may have engaged in a lot of understated, even matter-of-fact phrasing, but he did periodically turn around to offer beautiful, unexpected perspectives, music presented as spur-of-the-moment inspiration.

In the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the most consistent and most satisfying playing came in the sole work by a living composer, Eibhlis Farrell’s Stillsong of 1994, the evening’s only piece for a solo instrument. Peregrine presented it, with nicely textured, easy lyricism, as an expression of loneliness that never became bleak. The sense of identity with the music seemed complete. Tour continues in Waterville, Co Kerry, on Sunday

MICHAEL DERVAN