Reviews today include Top Girlsat the New Theatre, Museat Marlay Park and the Maynooth Guitar Orchestraat the National Concert Hall.
Top Girls
New Theatre, Dublin
Although the years might have diluted the original shock of Caryl Churchill's dissection of feminism and individualism in 1980s Britain, its daring opening scene still has the power to disorientate. As Marlene (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) celebrates her promotion to managing director of a female employment agency, her dinner guests arrive from the far reaches of history, art and myth.
Here's garrulous 19th-century explorer Isabella Bird (Lesley Conroy), followed by the Japanese emperor's concubine Lady Nijo (Janice Byrne). There's the pleasingly louche ninth-century Pope Joan (Louise Lewis), laconic peasant Dull Gret (Liz Fitzgibbon) and, lately arrived from The Canterbury Tales, Patient Griselda (Elaine Fox). Given that guest list, and their amusing, overlapping chatter on religion, sacrifice, victimhood and success, it's hard to tell where or when we are.
The textbook answer is "Thatcher's Britain". Indeed, Margaret Thatcher casts such a shadow over Churchill's play that you feel there should also be a place set for her. But while Nic Chonaonaigh adeptly presents Marlene as another iron lady, celebrating her achievement with joyless aggression, Jason Byrne's production for Galloglass neither locates nor dates the play. Every accent is Irish, Alyson Cummins's set is flexible and unspecific, her costumes almost dateless.
You take the point. Churchill's feminist critique needs neither a dusting down nor a passport: female success won in aggressively corporate, male terms is still no substitute for women's liberation. Marlene, we discover, has abandoned her daughter to advance her career, while her clients are similarly advised to hide their engagement rings if they wish to succeed, or contemptuously dismissed if they hit a glass ceiling.
Churchill's schematic may be extreme, but the play's politics are hardly anachronistic. As the formal audacity of its beginning cedes to more conventional scenes, however, it loses voltage. The ensemble negotiate a notoriously tricky text well, with Lewis, Fox and Conroy finding intriguing spins for their several characters. But a tone of murmurous realism, with lines thrown away absently, together with Byrne's deliberate eschewal of context often makes a complex play merely confusing.
That's a shame, because acknowledging the specifics of Churchill's play wouldn't lessen its universality. And as an antidote to the vapidity of girl power or the consumerist fantasy of Sex and the City, the play is appropriate and timely: right here and right now.
Runs until Aug 23rd, then tours nationally until Sept 27th PETER CRAWLEY
Muse
Marlay Park, Dublin
To the strains of what sounded startlingly like the ghostly obelisk theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the band take to the stage. Huge satellite dishes whip through the air, strafing the crowd with laser-beam blasts while hypnotic fractals swirl before breaking into industrial-strength red and black as a surging leviathan of guitar, bass and drums rips from the stage; the Muse mothership has landed.
As rock acts go, Muse are something of a scientific experience. Their albums and lyrics betray an obsession with physics and all things intergalactic. The live show, then, is suitably 21st century. Nothing goes unmolested by thousands of LEDs or projected images; even the piano has a glass lid that reflects lights linked to Matthew Bellamy's furious chords.
This is bombastic space rock taken to a viciously loud level that threatens, though thankfully never succeeds, to dislodge the rain from the clouds overhead. To generate this enormous sound, there are layers of synths and loops, which tethers the band somewhat; they don't have the freedom to go off on a full-blooded spontaneous rock explosion when they have to keep in time with the backing track. That said, the performance is near flawless; there is hardly a misstep or odd note in the set, each crescendo is struck and each chorus rings out. But it also feels a little like they've done this many times before, either in a hangar-sized rehearsal studio or to crowds of ecstatic fans around the world.
Resistance is futile, though, in the face of the sheer energy and spectacle of the show. The set is end-loaded, with several of the most popular tracks reserved for ripping the crowd apart and some new material, sounding more muscular and metallic than the band's recent outfits, slipped in mid-set. Muse have only one setting, and it's full space speed ahead. A stadium-shaking Starlight has the crowd in raptures beneath the blanket of green lasers; Plug-In Baby is a furious, pop-plosion; and a set-closing Knights of Cydonia threatens to power the stage up into the air and off into outer space. Had this happened, not a single person in the crowd would have been the slightest bit surprised. LAURENCE MACKIN
Maynooth Guitar Orchestra/Walsh
NCH, Dublin
The word "orchestra" conjures up notions of diversity. Even the relative homogeneity of a string orchestra usually has four different types of instrument, as well as the options of plucking and bowing. A guitar orchestra has very little in the way of diversity. It can pluck and pluck, but it has no ready way of sustaining a steady sound. It's an orchestra that can be expected to trade on homogeneity rather than diversity. And, crucially, it has no established repertoire.
Conductor Brendan Walsh and his new Maynooth Guitar Orchestra are brave enough to tackle these problems. The programme boasted that all of the pieces were arranged or composed "in the last six months". Encouraging composers to write new pieces will be crucial to this orchestra's future.
There were two new pieces here. Victor Lazzarini's Elliptic Transformations wisely stayed within the realm of dance, giving the guitars those snappy things to do that they do so well. Brendan Walsh's Concerto for Violin and Guitar Ensemble was at once more adventurous and more conservative. It was a piece that didn't really manage to make up its mind about what it was doing. It lurched from one mode into another, mixing pop banality with gestures of a more experimental tinge. As a concerto, it unfortunately failed in what most people might regard as its major task. Nothing in the writing for the soloist, the capable Swiss violinist Deborah Landolt, matched the effectiveness or imagination of the writing for guitars.
The range of arrangements was wide, travelling from Mozart (the Symphony No 29 in A) right up to Björk (Bachelorette). The Mozart, arranged by Walsh himself, was a brave if foolhardy undertaking. Bachelorette pulled out all the stops in terms of imitative effects, and, like the other vocal items, had the benefit of the lightly agile voice of Georgia Cusack, whose darting coloratura is surely guaranteed to take her places.
The arrangement which sounded best was from a piano original, Debussy's early Tarentelle styrienne, where the colouring of the two dozen guitars created a unique and haunting effect.
MICHAEL DERVAN
