Galway Arts Festival Reviews

Irish Times writers sample the best of the Galway Arts Festival.

My Name is Rachel Corrie

Black Box Theatre

Lying in her bedroom, fussily assembling her thoughts, her pictures, her memories - in short, her identity - Rachel Corrie predicts a muted, insignificant conclusion to her life story. If we are looking for logic and sequence, she warns us, we had better look elsewhere. Her life will not have "the crescendo of suspense up to a good shocker of an ending". These words - painstakingly assembled from Corrie's journals and e-mails by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner - are dreadfully poignant. We know precisely how her story will end: in a fatal standoff in Gaza, in 2003, when the 23-year-old American activist stepped between a Palestinian home and an Israeli bulldozer.

That knowledge threatens to recast Corrie, an individual who felt "scattered and deviant and too loud" into a political icon, laden with the logic and sequence of a narrative. Anxious to strike a balance between Corrie the symbol and Corrie the person, the scrupulously objective efforts of Rickman and Viner inevitably lead them to docu-drama.

In essence then, Rachel Corrie has become an unwitting playwright; her correspondences, her obsessive lists and her careful Gaza reportage all signs of an aspiring writer still finding her voice.

This provides Josephine Taylor, in her first professional role, with a tremendous challenge and one she rises to superbly; translating Corrie's fluctuating writing persona into a consistent stage creation. Under Rickman's direction, Taylor finds a constant thread of idealism while allowing us access to the development of a political consciousness. Against the pockmarked walls, the mounds of rubble and mangled steel of Hildegard Bechtler's set, underscored by the steady menace of Emma Laxton's sound design, Corrie struggles continually to understand "the reality of the situation". And, through her, so do we.

It may cause a shiver of discomfort that the everyday tragedies of the Middle East can only be brought home to us by the sacrifice of someone who - sardonically, but truthfully - claims "international white-person privilege". But while Corrie understands that the world does not revolve around her, the world of the play most certainly does.

This may explain why Taylor ultimately leaves the stage and the performance concludes with a video of the real Corrie, aged 10. It's a powerful gesture, met with a standing ovation, but one that abandons the transformative potential of theatre. We are asked to applaud a life rather than to engage with a performance, stunned once more by the shocker of its ending.

Until July 30

Peter Crawley

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McNabney/ConTempo String Quartet

Augustinian Church, Middle St

Haydn - Quartet in D Op 20 No 4. Mozart - Quintet in E flat K614. Beethoven - Quintet in C Op 29.

The ConTempo String Quartet has found a new venue for its festival within a festival in Galway. I caught up with the second of the concerts at the Augustinian Church in Middle Street.

Acoustically, this newly-renovated church is a vast improvement on the swimmy St Nicholas Collegiate Church. The drawback lies elsewhere. For some inexplicable reason, instead of having the listeners facing the musicians, the chairs were placed so that members of the audience faced each other across an empty space, with the quartet a 90-degree angle away.

Never mind. Musically, the concert started in fine style, the fourth of Haydn's Op 20 quartets delivered with a light touch, the vibrato often sparing. The expressive impact was achieved without any sense of massiveness in the sound, and the overall effect was of potency without pressure. The finale was the epitome of high spirits.

Not a word was said about the change of quintet by Mozart, from the advertised one in D, K593, to the one in E flat, K614, for which the quartet was joined by Canadian viola-player, Douglas McNabney. Here the music-making was a lot less stylistically settled than in the Haydn. There was a tendency for things to sound cluttered rather than rich, as if all the complications of having an extra line had not yet been fully worked out.

Beethoven's writing for string quintet has never rivalled the popularity of his works for string quartet, not that there's really that much for listeners to choose from. There's just one substantial original work, the early Quintet in C, Op. 29. By its slow expressive second movement, the ConTempos had once again found their form. In their view of the piece, however, it's the finale which holds the greatest interest, with its adoption of a quasi-orchestral in style, pre-echoing the rich sonorities of Mendelssohn's Octet. Here, in the ConTempo's typical fashion, risks were taken, and unusual rewards achieved.

Michael Dervan