Reviews

Irish Times writers review a selection of events in the arts world.

Hysteria, Project Arts Centre, Dublin

With a meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali, a tone that swings between psychological realism, blustering farce and nightmarish surrealism, and themes stretching from neurosis and the holocaust to art and the unconscious, Terry Johnson's Hysteria isn't as simple as it sounds.

Nothing if not ambitious, B*Spoke Theatre Company finally present the Irish premiere of this heady brew of high concept and low comedy, and do it some - if not complete - justice.

Nearing the end of his controversial life, Dr Sigmund Freud (Darragh Kelly), shuffling around his study in London, receives a night-time visit from a mysterious woman. Half-naked, completely saturated, and brandishing a cutthroat razor, Alison McKenna's Jessica is rushed into therapy without an appointment.

With each new arrival, the play gathers a hysterical momentum: Here comes physician and intellectual sparring partner Abraham Yahuda (John Olohan) and Freud's secrets are bundled into the closet. Now the wonderful entrance of Dali (Rory Keenan) and the doctor's lies become more desperately tangled.

The stage almost blushes. Farce, however, is almost as scientific and revealing as psychoanalysis.

As the tone pivots, director Loveday Ingram tends to apply the brakes for serious ideas then hit the accelerator for comedy. Soon you can almost hear the gears of Johnson's play begin to grind.

If the elegant concept but flimsy construction of Sabine Dargent's set - the temperamental doors are a real problem - suggest that a production of Hysteria require greater resources, it also seems these roles were just too tempting to pass up.

Alison McKenna (who has played Jessica for Ingram before) honours her character's complexity while managing to avoid its shrillness. Kelly, as the hunched and alert Viennese shrink, handles gravitas as smoothly as double takes and seems far more sympathetic to Freud than Johnson's rather condemning play.

Oddly, though, in the end the stage belongs to Dali. It's almost impossible to overplay this thin streak of absurdity and Keenan doesn't hold back. His Dali is at once charismatic and buffoonish, a delirious combination of Zorro and Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

Benefiting hugely from this wild flair, the production itself feels closer to a Dali sketch than a finished canvas; full of ideas and promise, but lacking the fastidious details. Nonetheless, despite its rough edges, there's nothing around quite like Hysteria, an intriguing concoction of silly fun and dark seriousness. It is, in short, quite a mind game. Runs until June 3rd, with a "pay what you can" performance tonight. Peter Crawley

Siirala, RTÉ NSO/Markson NCH, Dublin

Mozart - Don Giovanni Overture. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 3. Shostakovich - Symphony No 10.

After he won the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition in 2003 Antti Siirala went on to even greater things by taking the top prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition.

He's been back to Ireland on numerous occasions since that double triumph. But the way things are scheduled between the AXA Competition and RTÉ, his first return concerto performance with the RTÉ NSO had to wait until last Friday. It was timed to fall in the middle of this year's competition, with the 2006 crop of young hopefuls and the jury that is still sitting in judgment on them in the audience.

More than once it's turned out that the victor's carefully choreographed return has been more of a damp squib than an occasion for renewed celebration and admiration. But there were no such issues with Siirala, who was his carefully composed, musically magisterial self in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.

When the Finn is on form, as he was on Friday, he presents an almost ideal balance of pianistic savoir faire and sound musical judgement. His approach to the Beethoven was straight and to the point, the tone nicely burnished, the first movement tautly delineated, the cadenza impressively upping the temperature, the central Largo at once still and full of movement, the finale sharply etched.

Sadly, Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ NSO, who had opened the concert with an unwieldy account of Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture, were also seriously off colour in the concerto.

Things changed for Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony after the interval, to the point where the orchestra sounded like a different ensemble, grasping the atmospheric gloom of the brooding opening Moderato right from the start, and dealing as successfully with the thorns of the biting Allegro which follows.

Shostakovich's Tenth, begun shortly after the death of Stalin in 1953, is a work written in an epic style. Built into its grand scale and often stark sound world is an emotionalism which can easily become overblown given the sometimes tawdry nature of the musical material the composer chose to work with.

It is rare for a performance to circumvent fully the feeling that Shostakovich rather too often allowed himself to repeat points already made effectively. On this occasion Markson's careful pacing had a sure-footedness that eased many of the problems. Michael Dervan