Critics from The Irish Timesreview The Deep Blue Sea at the Gate Theatre, McChrystal - Smith String Quartetat the Coach House in Dublin Castle and Sia/Har Mar Superstarat Crawdaddy also in Dublin
The Deep Blue Sea
Gate Theatre, Dublin
The characters in Terence Rattigan's 1952 play are all, to some extent, standing trial; facing judgment by a jury of their peers for their emotional failings and social lapses. In Hester Collyer's case, even an act of abject despair has placed her on the wrong side of the law.
"Attempted suicide is a crime, isn't it?" one neighbour notes when Hester has been discovered slumped before a gas fire in her drab London boarding house.
It is immediately hushed up, but Hester's real transgression has already occurred. In an emotionally stunted post-war Britain she has allowed herself to act on feeling; hers is a crime of passion.
With restrained despair and fragile composure, Ingrid Craigie makes Hester's entrapment quietly astonishing, woozily recovering from her suicide attempt while looking her neighbours in the eye as though nothing had happened. Such concealment is almost second nature to Rattigan's heroine. Having abandoned her marriage to an affluent judge (Bryan Murray) for a one-sided love affair with a raffish, feckless RAF pilot (Risteárd Cooper), Hester is living a double life. That Rattigan's drama was inspired by the suicide of his former lover, Kenneth Morgan, at a time when homosexual activity was also illegal, brings a more acute poignancy to a play about illicit feelings. It is not just the cliché of stiff upper lips and emotional rationing, you suspect, that accounts for Hester's hesitance when tentatively expressing her feelings: "Shall we call it love?"
A play populated by stilted and awkward characters almost inevitably succumbs to a similar pace. Although director Alan Stanford sustains a tone of frosty propriety among a devastatingly good cast (even peripheral roles are granted keen characterisations by Barbara Brennan, Marion O'Dwyer and Stephen Swift), the chilly distance he leaves between characters, often stranded behind by the furniture of Eileen Diss's scrupulously authentic set, can over-emphasise their reserve to the point of parody.
More convincing are the competing male figures, whose postures speak volumes about their moral deportment. As the good-hearted Collyer, Bryan Murray is ramrod straight, offering Hester a love without passion, while Risteárd Cooper invests his boozing test-pilot with as much beleaguered sway as boyish swagger, cruelly weaving free of the tangle "of other people's emotions". With his terse and sardonic former doctor, Miller (whose own transgressions reach us in misty allusions), John Kavanagh provides Craigie with a brusquely compelling kindred spirit.
It is this relationship between two isolated figures, both socially adrift, that comes to the fore in Rattigan's still troublesome third act, one that rather too neatly leads Hester right back to square one. Advised to live a life without hope, but beyond despair, she is encouraged to funnel her feeling into art - much as Rattigan has done here. Rather than sounding Ibsenite criticisms of a society where a woman cannot be herself, Rattigan seems to give in to its repressions, submerging love and passion. It is a tragically stoic solution to being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: if you can't beat him, drown him.
PETER CRAWLEY
McChrystal, Smith String Quartet
Coach House, Dublin Castle
The Smith String Quartet is one of those chamber ensembles which, like the Kronos Quartet, has a penchant for presenting contemporary music programmes with a popular or vernacular twist.
The group's current Music Network tour with saxophonist Gerard McChrystal embraces arrangements of Chick Corea, Debussy, Ravel, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Michael Nyman along with quartets by Kevin Volans and Donnacha Dennehy, and Ciarán Farrell's The Pilgrim's Return for saxophone and string quartet.
The arrangements are a mixed bunch. Strangely, neither Debussy's Syrinx (originally a flute solo) nor Ravel's Pièce en forme de habanera (originally a vocal exercise) weathered the transition to the world of the saxophone particularly well. The lighter sections of Ó Súilleabháin's Oíche Nollaig flew delightfully under the fingers of quartet leader Ian Humphries, but the heavier moments missed the weight that either a piano or a larger number of strings could bring.
Michael Nyman's If and Why sounded too intentionally downmarket to be worth the effort of transcription in the first place, while a selection from Chick Corea's Children's Songs made a split impression, with McChrystal's sense of playful ownership in stark contrast to the more studious and slightly kitschy approach of the string players.
There was kitsch, too, in Ciarán Farrell's The Pilgrim's Return, where it seemed to be more the responsibility of the composer than of the players. Donnacha Dennehy's new commission, STAMP (to avoid erotic thoughts), was born out of a fascination with 14th-century dances from Italy (a saltarello) and France (an estampie). The bracketed section of the title is a reference to a 14th-century claim that the estampie was so complicated for the dancers that it forced young people "to concentrate and avoid erotic thoughts". Dennehy opens the work with a typical freshness of texture, but in spite of some real physical stamping towards the end, this performance didn't manage to sustain the kind of energy the opening promises.
Volans's Hunting, gathering is the product of a more subtly inclined imagination, with effects which lingered in the ear with almost eidetic effect, even in this less than thoroughly persuasive performance.
MICHAEL DERVAN
Sia/Har Mar Superstar
Crawdaddy, Dublin
This was the last night of a UK and Irish tour with the unlikely combination of Har Mar Superstar supporting the Australian singer, Sia Furler. They make such an odd couple because Har Mar's fat-white-guy R'n'B lothario schtick is essentially one big joke, while Sia's elegant, down-tempo, jazzy numbers boast an admirable seriousness. In practice, the pairing made for a thoroughly entertaining double bill, however.
Har Mar plays on his resemblance to venerable porn star Ron Jeremy - all tubby belly and long, balding mane - and matches it with some genuinely funky tunes and wild dance moves. His idea of a costume change involves yet another item of clothing being theatrically discarded until he is prancing around stage in his boots and briefs. (His under-dressed and overly sweaty state meant the crowd parted like the Red Sea when he dived into the audience to sing a tune and order some drinks at the bar.) For a one-joke act that should become quickly tiresome, Har Mar pulls it off through the sheer conviction with which he plays the part.
Nobody would have expected to laugh as much during Sia's set, but when she and her five-piece band squeezed on to the tiny stage wearing glow-in-the-dark costumes that offered a kind of playschool-meets-Daft Punk effect as they ripped through a terrific Buttons, it was obvious everybody was going to have a blast.
The occasional Zero 7 vocalist then charmed the crowd with her delightful and infectious onstage demeanour, between showing off her outstanding vocal range on tracks from her three albums, including the most recent, Some People Have Real Problems.
Her songs are "middle-of-the-road pop", as she archly put it, of a very high calibre, bolstered by her extraordinarily versatile and powerful voice. Not all her material matches the emotional pull of her standout track, Breathe Me, which received a startling rendition at the end of the night, but it would be only just for Sia to earn the mainstream success currently enjoyed by other, inferior, singers. Until then, however, it was a pleasure to see her in a venue as intimate as this.
DAVIN O'DWYER
