A selection of reviews by Irish Timeswriters
Macbeth at The Empty Space, Dublin
A play in which reality mingles uneasily with apparition, where the diaphanous prophesy of witches can yield brutally real results, where daggers sometimes exist in the mind alone and blood may stain hands forever, the events of Macbeth depend on how you perceive them. That is certainly true of Siren Productions' startling vision of the play (the company last tackled Shakespeare with 2005's sensational Titus Andronicus), investigating its familiar turns from bracing new angles.
The cavernous Empty Space lends the right atmosphere for this relentless, confined tale, its stone walls and earth floors supplying a playing space both sepulchral and mesmeric. But the more striking element of Jean-Guy Lecat's design is its panelled mirrors, ones that reflect the audience back to itself, implicating us in the crimson glow of bloodlust and ambition.
Without tethering the play to any specific context - there are no facile allusions here to time or place - director Selina Cartmell fills this expanse with scattershot references to all warfare. When we first meet Rory Keenan's Macbeth, he is as dusty and weary as a desert soldier, while his allies wear Soviet uniforms and his liege, King Duncan (Gerard McSorley), strikes an absurd figure in bowler hat and white gloves, as though he has been rummaging through Mussolini's wardrobe.
Casting Barbara Brennan as Lady Macbeth, the principle architect of her husband's murderous desire, may inspire Oedipal shivers, but Brennan plays the role younger than her years. Though they hatch their plans in a sexual clinch, Cartmell underscores the growing distance between the couple within the spiral of destruction and moral numbness that follows the bloody assassination of Duncan.
A more consistent companion is Olwen Fouéré, who almost conflates the three witches into a single entity: a milky-eyed hag nursing a gurgling infant in a pram, while pregnant with another. Fouéré is never far away, reappearing as a spectral servant or, in one bold sequence, representing the dagger in Macbeth's conscience-addled mind, suggesting a continuous cycle of malign influence.
Macbeth is not known for its comic possibilities, yet Cartmell finds brilliantly absurd moments within the play, staging the fateful banquet as a bizarre display of gameshow-host smiles and canned applause while Macbeth's grip on sanity loosens. Any staging that finds room for a blood-red pool table or, at one fevered point, a chainsaw massacre, runs the risk of whirling irreverence. But Keenan anchors the increasingly carnivalesque interpretation with a tightrope balance between the horrific and the ridiculous.
Although Cartmell's vision eventually aligns him with the moustachioed villains of history, another paranoid despot self-destructing in a bunker, Keenan's command of verse, together with the assured support of a magnificently malevolent McSorley (reappearing as one of his goons) and Robert O'Mahoney (as Macduff), ensure that Shakespeare's terse poetry still shines through.
Assiduously paced, strikingly lit and hauntingly scored, the satirical thrust and warped phantasmagoria of this Macbeth may lessen its tragic impact, but its inspired images and savage beauty will haunt your dreams. PETER CRAWLEY
Runs until Mar 15
RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Markson at the NCH, Dublin
Verdi - Requiem.
The performance of Verdi's Requiem by the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Gerhard Markson brought to mind two earlier performances for immediate comparison. The first, of the Requiem itself, was given last November in Belfast by the Belfast Philharmonic Choir and the Ulster Orchestra under Celso Antunes. The second was the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir's contribution to the opening concert of last month's RTÉ Living Music Festival.
Crudely put, Markson was more straightforward, even at times more utilitarian, in his handling of the Requiem than Antunes. Yet it was the Dublin performance which gave the greater yield. Markson's approach was focused and central, and always got to the point. Antunes seemed, by comparison, at times merely fancy.
The RTÉ Philharmonic Choir sang with freedom and enthusiasm, and also with a frequently touching plaintiveness of tone. They don't at the moment have quite the polish that the Belfast Philharmonic can muster, but they were unrecognisable as the same group of voices that moved so tentatively through Arvo Pärt's Berliner Requiem just a couple of weeks earlier. This, I suspect, is less a matter of raw technical challenge than the singers' greater familiarity with 19th-century idiom.
Tenor Peter Auty was the weak link in the line-up of soloists, blowing hot and cold in the apparent pursuit of effects that rarely quite came off. Mezzo soprano Jane Irwin and baritone Jun Mo Yang were more constrained, but perfectly solid, with Irwin showing an impressive evenness throughout her range. Soprano Cara O'Sullivan was in gloriously radiant form for Markson, soaring on high with ease, and making every smallest musical gesture meaningful. MICHAEL DERVAN
