Kilkenny Arts Festival reviews

Irish Times writers review the latest events from the Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Ex Cathedra/Skidmore. St Canice's Cathedral

By any standards, the English choir Ex Cathedra is disciplined. The opening concerts of the Kilkenny Arts Festival included some extraordinarily authoritative singing.

The first concert, entitled Venetian Vespers, was devoted to music by composers who worked at St Mark's, Venice, in the 16th and 17th centuries. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Grandi, Rovetta, Cavalli and, of course, Monteverdi helped give that cathedral the reputation of offering the most sumptuous worship in Europe.

One element of that sumptuousness was missing. Apart from a strong continuo group of organ and theorbo, there were no instruments; whereas the use of instruments - various combinations of strings, wind and brass that might double the voices or be separate from them - was one of the things on which visitors to Venice commented enthusiastically.

Nevertheless, this concert delivered what it promised. The programme was impeccably devised by Ex Cathedra's conductor, Jeffrey Skidmore, to reflect the pattern of Vespers.

Appropriate plainchants were placed between choral items, and the contrasts between the ethereal beauties of the single line and the sensuality of polyphony were as striking as the polyphony itself.

So this concert was not just about massive sound. The move from Rovetta's beautiful Salve Regina (1635) for four solo voices to the plainchant antiphon Tota pulchra es was scarcely less impressive than the reverse impact made by the move from the plainchant Ave maris stella to the density of Monteverdi's Cantate Domino (1620).

Confidence of vocal delivery was complemented by seamless progression from one item to the next. Members of the choir moved around the platform and the building with quiet, choreographed purpose. Like the high ceremonial of St Mark's, this was theatre as well as music.

The second concert included two pieces by John Joubert (b. 1927), with whom Ex Cathedra has a close relationship via commissions and many performances.

The rich antiqueness of the well-known O Lorde, the maker of al thing made a solemnly impressive start; and the cycle of Hardy poems South of the Line, scored for choir, soloists, two pianos (Ross Williams and Robert Bridge) and percussion (BackBeat Percussion Quartet) was delivered with an impressive range of vocal colour and with a clarity that made the most of this music's very English, slightly suppressed intensity.

One of the most striking aspects of both concerts was the way in which soloists were drawn from the members of the choir. One got the impression that almost any of the 33 professional singers could take such a role. Even so, the singing of bass Giles Underwood in Orff's Carmina Burana requires special mention for its vivid, unsubtle portrayal of unctuousness, swagger and fear.

Performing Carmina Burana in the version for two pianos and percussion produces an effect remarkably different from the more familiar version with full orchestra.

Paradoxically, the smaller group makes this forceful music even more forceful, especially when performed as tightly as on this occasion.

In this familiar music, Ex Cathedra was even more commanding than in Friday's concert, and produced some startling contrasts of colour. Balance between choir and instruments was perfect, Jeffrey Skidmore's direction brimmed with rhythmic energy, and ensemble was razor-sharp.

It was a major lapse of organisation that no translations were provided for the Latin texts.

Yet this scarcely affected the concert's impact, for the music of Carmina Burana completely overwhelms its words.

That primacy of music, added to the force of this performance and the audience's justifiably enthusiastic response, demonstrated that this work, which Orff wrote in 1935-6 in Germany, is a frighteningly efficient rabble-rouser. - Martin Adams

The Old Tune & Night, Watergate Theatre

The Old Tune is a play where nothing happens, once. In Samuel Beckett's translation of Robert Pinget's La Manivelle, two men, Mr Cream and Mr Gorman, convene at a nondescript roadside location where they converse, argue, reminisce and, most memorably, attempt to find a light for their cigarettes that never arrives. It might have been titled Waiting for Zippo.

It is not hard to understand what Beckett saw in his friend and colleague's work, a teasingly placeless vehicle for comic patter that hints at the futility of it all. It is harder, however, to understand what we are supposed to see in Pinget's work - now receiving its Irish premiere 46 years after its creation - other than its kinship with Beckett's dramatic ideas.

Something more than a translation, The Old Tune has been relocated to Ireland and its language melted into an almost parodic Irish idiom, closer to O'Casey than Synge. "The young pop off and the auld hang on," is Paul Bennett's remark on mortality.

That slow sigh of fatalism, mixed with the rude interruption of traffic and several mithered reflections on Black Shag tobacco, De Dion Bouton motorcars, or Gertie, "a great bit of skirt", reaches beyond the teasingly elusive context into a more universal time-passing prattle. Beckett conveys it all with an aloof, gently mocking tone: just as music periodically cranks up and splutters out through Pat Kiernan's production - elegantly designed by Paul Keogan and warmly performed by Bennett and Des Braiden - humanity's concerns and the fracture of memory repeat and falter like a broken record.

Braiden and Bennett return for another short Pinget play, Night, in which Keogan's adventurous design and lyrical use of multimedia allows us to see Al and Ben in bed together, as though viewed from above. This companion piece, from 1971, suggests that Pinget bridged the prickly edges of modernism with the flippant self-awareness of postmodernism.

As the dying embers of its lovers' relationship cede to a lengthy recitation from Don Quixote, the play offers its own stifling self-critique: "Everything has already been said a long time before us." Kiernan at least tries to say it in a new way, but as attractive as his presentation is, it is hard to make the material ring out with any more significance than a theatrical curio. Pinget has already lowered his voice. - Peter Crawley

Until Aug 20

Tintype, The Parade Tower

A rough and effective method of photography, the tintype made street photography possible; giving rise, by degrees, to photojournalism. The process was flawed, however - tintypes reversed the image in a slight betrayal of what they represented. In the actor and film-maker Frankie McCafferty's extraordinary new play, a monologue buttressed with multimedia, it seems that, once again, the image cannot be trusted.

Alone in his hotel room, a photographer suffers an existential crisis and phones the security desk. He doesn't feel secure, he says. In a flash, he is standing at a check-in desk in an airport, now unable to answer questions about his identity. In another jump cut he is snapping wedding photos; then, just as suddenly, images of global conflict: African militias grinning for the camera, a veiled woman holding a Kalashnikov.

This sense of narrative, temporal and spatial fracture is enforced by Paul Keogan's subtle design, where sepia images flare and flicker behind McCafferty, then yield to contemporary images in constant flux. Avoiding the hazards of multimedia, the images here assist rather than overwhelm the performer, while McCafferty remains in tight control of his elliptical speech and its disjointed progression. His movements and expression form a picture of nervy focus.

Some years in development, McCafferty's first play is intriguingly stripped down in form and content. As his photographer struggles with notions of the subjective view and the object, all reality becomes mediated through a lens, and his life is forever out of shot. "I'm not seeing the whole picture," he says, "just what the lens sees."

This remove becomes more unsettling as he describes a warzone, where chaos can only be understood as a composition, his camera trapping every horror but his mind unable to process it. It is that uncertainty that makes Tintype so strangely compelling and surprisingly moving. Under Jackie Doyle's direction, McCafferty evokes a world where objectivity, conviction and innocence have collapsed; the thousand words of every picture have exploded and scattered into frenetic, abstruse poetry.

That this challenging work should prove so lingering, so hypnotic, says a lot about our image-fixated, politically anxious age. Life, McCafferty suggests, cannot be captured by a lens. Our cameras offer us no security. - Peter Crawley

Ends tonight (Tuesday)

• The Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until Sunday.

• See www.kilkennyarts.ie