Reviews

Events reviewed by Irish Times writers include  A Piece of Monologue & Enough at the IMMA, Dublin, Cara Dillon at Vicar Street and A Serious Black Dress, at the Pavilion.

A Piece of Monologue & Enough, IMMA, Dublin

There's a story about the notoriously stringent film director, George Cukor, abandoning countless takes of Jack Lemmon during the movie It Should Happen to You, each time telling his hapless young actor, "A little less, Jack." Finally, Lemmon lost his cool: "If I do any less," he said, "I'll be doing nothing at all." "That's the idea Jack," the director replied.

Doing nothing is essential to the world of Samuel Beckett, in tracing the void with his words, and it's a feat for any actor to perform. In Walter Asmus's production of A Piece of Monologue, Conor Lovett may have mastered the ability to do nothing. A stark figure with white hair, a white nightgown and white socks, Lovett remains absolutely motionless, expressionless, and in complete service of the words. He is hypnotic.

"Birth was the death of him," it begins - perhaps the most grimly concise phrase in this, or any other, meditation on mortality. Throughout, Lovett's desolate cadence lures the audience through the gloom of the stage, into a night-time ritual, guided along with images of decline, hesitation and bleached emotions; the "funerals of . . . he all but said of loved ones". Only the performance space is a hindrance, the gallery echo of IMMA defusing the directness of the words, offering neither enough character nor bareness to either counteract or signify that all-important void.

The text is more active, however, its third-person narrative pivoting from leaden stage directions to the sudden flexibility of a camera angle: "Umbrellas round a grave. Seen from above." A fitting inclusion, then, to a festival which proves that Beckett's formal boundaries aren't so rigid, that his work's transposition seems to offer us more than its simple rendition.

There is something more human in Ally Ní Chiaráin's accompanying performance of Enough, itself a stage adaptation of a later prose piece. Almost shunted off the performance space by an enormous pew, at times Ní Chiaráin delivers her words from a book of psalms, tracing the biblical and carnal echoes within the piece.

Enough closes the space between desire and restraint, between the flesh and the mind, just as A Piece of Monologue shrinks the gap between birth and death. Watching these grim companions from Gare St Lazare Players you realise that this gap, otherwise known as life, is lessening; that we - like Beckett, Lemmon and Lovett - are all on that difficult little journey to nothing at all. - Peter Crawley

Today and Thursday at 1.10pm in chq, IFSC

Cara Dillon, Vicar Street, Dublin

What colour is the sky in Cara Dillon's world? It must surely be of a clearer hue than that which tents most other lives - because despite her relative youth, she's got an uncanny ability to cut right through the dust particles clouding many a young singer/songwriter's world view.

Dillon is a traditional singer who has brought her own water to the well, too. Her growing confidence as a songwriter is written all over her latest album, After The Morning, and there was no mistaking her crystalline voice from the opening strains of She Moved Through The Fair to the closing chords of her inventive reading of Green Grow The Laurels.

Despite Dillon's seeming vocal fragility on record, her voice is a carvernous thing that takes full possession of the room, from the moment she sidles on stage. With husband Sam Lakeman on keyboards and guitar, Dillon coasted through a set that swung from the self-penned Bold Jamie to the mournful October Wind, the latter a tribute to her late father and a reminder, she admits, of the healing power of music.

Lakeman and Dillon pay forensic attention to detail in the arrangements and it pays handsome dividends in the pipes, accordion, flute and low whistle contributions of James O'Grady and the sublime banjo and guitar of Neil MacColl. Dillon briefly lends fiddle and whistle too, with startling facility.

All the while, she tackles muscular subjects with the diplomacy of Annan and the gravitas of a Seeger, particularly in the politically-charged Tommy Sands cover, There Were Roses. Cara Dillon's voice in all of its three dimensions delivers much more than she ever promised in the studio. - Siobhán Long

A Serious Black Dress, Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

No other art form can explore relationships between the sexes like dance. Irish choreographer David Bolger proves this time and again in his work, and the implication is not lost on Swiss choreographer Cathy Sharp either, who brought her triple bill A Serious Black Dress on a short tour through Ireland. A gentleman commented to me after the performance that the men dancing with each other made him feel uncomfortable - this is when you know that choreography and its execution are hitting the mark.

The first piece, with tongue in cheek, was neither serious nor black, more a playful exploration of clothes and how they transform us. Sharp's piece blasted a stuffy evening's dîner with a series of scurrilous encounters of dancers with each other, and dancers with layers of dress and undress. An acrobatic hetero pas de deux centre stage was mirrored by a slow, excruciating and unsuccessful lesbian encounter to the side.

US dancer Robert Russell in black (female) evening dress, face obscured by a veil, impishly turned the concept of white wedding on its head; later, Belgian Vanessa Lopez explored all the possibilities of latex by transforming her clingy black frock, and herself, into a pupa, then an insect, then a gaping maw, then a sexy dress again.

The company wandered through the audience, and even I got nuzzled at one point by a (female) dancer. The piece ended abruptly as dancer Duncan Rownes stopped and announced, "Stop! Don't know about you, but I could do with a drink."

The short piece after the interval, Senhora Do Ó, functioned like a lemon sorbet between courses. A tight balletic pas de deux between Swiss dancer Simone Cavin and Rownes, both in loose tunics resembling hair shirts, was elegant and well executed. Yet, as the following This is the Man indicated, the company's strength lies in more playful, less "serious" work.

Choreographed by Downes, the piece exploited the expertise of Russell, whose seemingly effortless body manipulation in and out and around and through the deceptively simple set showed off his skill. Jean-Christophe Simon's set design actually became a member of the cast, joining Russell and female dancers Lopez, Cavin and Australian Alexandra Carey in an imaginative trompe l'oeil performance that pretended pity with the male object of the women's cat-and-mouse, rapacious interest.

The playfully cool aggression in some of the choreographed pairings would add verve to any contemporary ad for sporty cars or aftershave. Bodies worming about on the floor gave way to a tribal feel, as dance well synched to the thudding of drums cast the battle of the sexes in a primordial light.

The various elements of the evening not so much explored the meaning of 21st-century sexual definition as played about and revelled in them. And with the excellent contributions of Sharp's international ensemble, the audience can join them. - Christine Madden

McGonnell, Flux Quartet, National Gallery, Dublin

Celebrating Beckett's centenary in more than just the visual arts, the National Gallery brought together New York's Flux Quartet and Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell for a thoughtful concert that included three of the great writer's musical peers and acolytes.

Having started life as incidental music for a stage version of the poem Company, Philip Glass's concise String Quartet no 2 (1984) came closest to Beckett in a technical if not a spiritual sense. As a minimalist, Glass shares Beckett's predilection for litany-like repetition, though not for silence. Just as Beckett (unlike certain modern writers) held to conventions of language, all three items here (unlike many 20th-century works) held to conventions of musical notation. All were composed with notes and intervals - those building blocks that have been on permanent loan to the Western music tradition from mathematics, and that John Cage, in his more notorious works, shunned.

In his String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), they sounded weary and disenfranchised, as if crying out for relief by more concrete sounds. Unconnected, and distorted by oddly tuned instruments, melody and harmony here seemed to be taking their last gasps.

Not so in Morton Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet (1983), which alludes to neither melody nor harmony as such, and borrows its materials apparently from nowhere. This profoundly involving performance suggested the calm breathing of some docile, hibernating creature.

To describe its effect in words is to miss the point, however, since Feldman aimed at purging his work of anything with verbal explanations or associations.

The certainty that nothing was going to happen in this music was as overpowering, and as depressingly elating, as the certainty that Beckett's Godot will never appear.- Andrew Johnstone

RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Rophé NCH, Dublin

Chausson - Symphony in B flat. James MacMillan - The World's Ransoming. Poulenc - Stabat Mater

This adventurous programme from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra saw the return of French conductor Pascal Rophé, who made an auspicious Dublin debut at the RTÉ Living Music Festival last year. Here he gave a committed and characterful account of the sole symphony by Ernest Chausson, a work from 1890 which clearly shows the influence of his teacher, César Franck, as well as of the Wagnerism which swept through French musical circles in the late 19th century.

Deborah Clifford was the touching cor anglais soloist in James MacMillan's The World's Ransoming of 1996. This is the opening work of an Easter triptych and its extremes of consolation and violence, with moments approaching an angry railing, were communicated with vivid immediacy.

Poulenc wrote his Stabat Mater in 1950, in memory of a friend, the painter Christian Bérard. He regarded the piece highly, and is reported to have said that if he were to be remembered 50 years on, he hoped it would be for the Stabat Mater rather than his popular early piano pieces, Mouvements perpétuels. His wish has not been granted. The piano pieces are as popular as ever, and among his choral works with orchestra, the later Gloria has eclipsed the Stabat Mater.

The explanation may lie in some of the strange effects of mood within the Stabat Mater. The Eja Mater section is inexplicably jaunty for a text which runs, "Ah mother, fountain of love,/make me feel the force of your sorrow,/so that I may mourn with you."

Rophé conducted with passion and tenderness. The soprano soloist, Rebecca Ryan, sang with creamy-toned lyricism. And the members of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, though stretched at times, clearly relished the challenges of the new musical territory they were exploring. - Michael Dervan