Reviews today looks at The Woman in Blackat the Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork and NCC/Hillier at the Airfield House in Dublin
The Woman in Black
Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork
Even ghosts have a logic in their visitations, and the power of spectral apparitions depends not so much on their appearances, unexpected though these may be, but on their purpose. Susan Hill's eponymous story was adapted for the stage some years ago by the late Stephen Mallatratt, but not even the dedicated playing of Simon Coury and David O'Meara can produce anything other than a succession of cheap thrills from the material for this City Theatre Dublin production.
The woman (an actress deliberately left anonymous to maintain the spook, or spoof, impression of her other-worldliness) operates to such a warped psychology that her presences have none of that unsettling resonance that the best ghost stories evoke; instead a desperately loving mother is transformed by loss and tragedy into a vengeful phantom, haunting the fenland village in which her own child was killed.
Even as a genre piece it doesn't hold up, and although the two actors work well together, not least in enlivening Mallatratt's laboured introduction, the direction by Michael Scott has to depend too much on sound effects.
These, by Mia Van Evelingen, are terrific; the flesh doesn't so much creep as slide right off the bones with shock, timbers are shivered to splinters and the spine is electrified way past the point of tingling.
Those who like that kind of thing will like this kind of thing very much, which explains why the play remains so popular; those who don't may still wonder why a man would search through a mysterious house at night without a light, or ponder a few other inconsistencies of an all-too-corporeal kind.
• Runs until Saturday, then tour continues nationwide MARY LELAND
NCC/Hillier
Airfield House, Dublin
The title of the National Chamber Choir's first touring programme under new artistic director Paul Hillier was Singing Stories and Telling Songs.
But don't take that to mean the choir's repertoire choices have gone soft and mushy. The programme included the automaton-like counting of two Kneeplays, from the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera, Einstein on the Beach; Arvo Pärt's early Solfeggio, which employs simple overlapping and octave shifts to turn a straightforward scale into a 20th-century phenomenon; Gertrude Stein treated as effervescent rhythmic patter by John Cage in an excerpt from his Living Room Music; and part of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, given what you might call a post-1960s choral treatment by Roger Marsh.
I heard the concert in what must be the smallest venue the choir has yet performed in, Airfield House, which is genuinely domestic in scale.
At one extreme, this meant that there was a lack of resonant support for the voices in David Lang's Again, one of the evening's most recent but also most conventional-sounding pieces; at the other, the confined space brought an awesome climactic force to Tarik O'Regan's The Spring, a gloriously rich setting of the opening of the 12th-century Irish narrative Acallam na Senórach.
The Cage was reduced to just four voices, with microphones, and the Marsh to six, giving individual choir members a chance to shine. Marsh's Joyce setting was given a rare outing with genuine Irish accents. Christina Whyte's negotiation of Marsh's tumbling, head-over-heels treatment of the text was a real tour-de-force.
The evening also included The Peace Pipe, Hillier's adaptation of Estonian composer Veljo Tormis's Bridge of Songto part of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, an adaptation made (with Tormis's approval) to recreate for English-speakers the direct narrative impact the piece has for Estonians.
The programme was completed by Alphabet, one of the late György Ligeti's entertaining Nonsense Songs, and Paul Patterson's engagingly but entirely silly Time Piece.
Hillier and his singers rose to the extraordinary array of challenges they faced with all their customary vocal and musical élan. MICHAEL DERVAN
