Greener

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

EVERYTHING HAPPENS in the first scene of Fiona Looney’s new play, but it is better defined by its second, in which absolutely nothing does.

Unbeknown to his wife Nóirín (Pauline McLynn), Frank (Lorcan Cranitch) has won the Lotto, and although it is split three ways, the winnings are enough to take care of college fees, new dishwashers and possible house extensions. Confiding in their friendly neighbours Jean (Deirdre O’Kane) and Colm (Declan Conlon), Frank elects not to tell his wife, but to surprise her. How or even why is not a matter that troubles Looney unduly, for this, it transpires, is a play heaving with deception.

In the second scene, Nóirín calls over to Jean for tea and chat.

That’s it. They cheerily trash talk their neighbours (“I can’t work out if it’s Botox or if she’s genuinely that surprised”), slag off OK! magazine celebrities (On a tattooed David Beckham: “I wouldn’t know whether to ride him or read him”), and recycle old jokes like those so shamelessly that director Jimmy Fay moves them to the lip of the stage like a music-hall double act. Dramatically inert and not especially funny, the scene is nonetheless fascinating, selling female camaraderie and the pleasure of a good natter right back to its target market.

Greener, however, which is essentially two hours of Sunday magazine pabulum disguised as a play, can’t quite reconcile its cosy badinage with its story, whose darker plot twist (you’ll see it coming) doesn’t so much test the bonds of friendship as flunk them outright. It feels as though Looney has courted the bleak implications of lives unfulfilled, unconscionable betrayal and societal disconnection (internet searches and text messages, poking out of Joe Vanek’s “split screen” domestic set, play more than a supporting role) and forced them into a vehicle that can’t contain them.

The reason this results in a confused tone and weirdly betrayed sympathies might be summed up in Nóirín’s defiant apologia, delivered directly to the audience: “This is about me,” McLynn tells us, which we already suspected. “I finally have a chance to be happy.” You have to take her word for it. When characters such as Conlon’s Colm and O’Kane’s Jean are so thinly drawn, there’s little evidence to support her and what ought to be a tart conflict seems perfunctory, an act of telling, not showing. Lorcan Cranitch does better with a neat line in fatherly obliviousness, admirably serving the play’s zeitgeisty gags: “The more qualifications you have the further you’ll be able to emigrate,” he tells his son Davey (Ryan Andrews).

Like that line, the play aims for the bittersweet but turns instinctively towards the sour, as though Looney, who began this trilogy with 2005’s Dandelions and 2009’s October and writes with a columnist’s topicality, must submit to the nation’s darkening of mood.

It may be called Greener, but it seems much blacker.

Runs until May 26th

– Michael Dungan – Michael Dungan

Hadelich, RTÉ NSO/Harth-Bedoya

NCH, Dublin

Carlos Zamora – Sikuris

Brahms – Violin Concerto

Dvorak – Symphony No 8

When Augustin Hadelich won first prize at the 2006 Violin Competition of Indianapolis, he also hoovered up awards for best romantic concerto, best classical concerto, best sonata by Beethoven, best sonata not by Beethoven, best Bach, best commissioned work, best encore, and best Paganini.

The talent required for so comprehensive a victory was front and centre throughout his performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Technically assured, brimming with confidence and bravura, he also produced a singing tone that ranged from sweetness to emphatic assertion according to what the music needed.

There was also an unmistakeable sense of end-orientation: in the first movement towards the virtuosic cadenza, and in the slow second towards the fast third. As a result, whatever it is that’s meant by talk of depth in Brahms was some way down the list of priorities from execution. He was able to focus more completely on this aspect of his playing in an encore, the famous 24th Caprice by Paganini, one of the most showily challenging pieces ever written for solo violin. He dispatched it with joyous ease, especially the variation with pizzicato, and appeared even more fully in his element here than in the Brahms.

He was graciously partnered in the concerto by Peruvian conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who opened the concert with Sikuris, a short, cinematic but not really memorable colour piece by Carlos Zamora, who was born in Chile in 1968 (think Maurice Jarre meets El salon Mexico).

Harth-Bedoya came entirely into his own in Dvorak’s great Eighth Symphony, scaling its peaks and valleys, unleashing all its excitement, nostalgia, and earthiness, and stewarding all the sharp contrasts of colour that feature in the composer’s mature approach to orchestration. Although unlikely to ever achieve the popular status of its successor, the New World Symphony, Dvorak Eight has all the ingredients (except a nickname) to rival it nonetheless, especially in a fully animated and full-bodied performance like this one.

John Feeley, guitar

Kevin Barry Room, NCH, Dublin

Bach/Feeley – Cello Suites 4, 1, 3

There were two ghosts at this concert and they were looking over the shoulder of Ireland’s leading guitarist, John Feeley, where they have probably been hovering intermittently over the past number of years.

During that time they will have been keeping an eye on him as he painstakingly wrote down his transcriptions for guitar of Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. On this occasion, Feeley was opening the ninth Guitar Festival of Ireland with a solo recital in which he presented three of the six in his newly published set. The ghosts were those of Bach and of Pablo Casals, the great Catalan cellist responsible for retrieving Bach’s lost masterpieces from obscurity and bringing them to an eager world audience, notably with his recordings in the 1930s.

Plenty of guitar transcriptions already exist, yet the lesser challenge for Feeley’s transcriptions is to please guitarists and guitar audiences. The really daunting task is to satisfy the wider audience – including the two ghosts – who know and love the originals. The English cellist Steven Isserlis describes them as “mysteries” in an effort to convey something of the unique aura in which they are perceived by both players and listeners.

Feeley goes a long way to preserving this aura. While he doesn’t attempt matching the extent to which Bach is committed to the single line in the cello, instead liberally supplementing the melodic line with extra notes that make plain Bach’s often implied harmony, he nonetheless maintains the original’s spirit of unaccompanied, single-instrument miracle.

Uncharacteristically for him there were small mishaps scattered throughout the performance. But these hardly detracted from playing whose prevailing sensitivity and expressivity were so constant and genuine and deep. In particular, the sequence of movements from sarabande through two minuets in the Suite No 1 was so beautiful that it surely laid a couple of ghosts to rest.