Reviews

Irish Times writers review Goldfish in the Sun at Everyman Palace, Cork and McAndrew, RTÉ CO/Wagner at the NCH in Dublin

Goldfish in the Sun at the Everyman Palace, Cork

There are moments during the performance of Goldfish in the Sun when it seems as if one is watching scenes from Shakespeare encased in a pantomime. Then there are moments when the thought occurs: why didn't director Pat Talbot bite the bullet and adapt Donal Giltinan's faded play as a musical? With John Spillane and his cohorts to hand it might have been possible, and possibly a better idea. Instead, as a bullet that wasn't bitten, this reading misses its target, simply because the target itself - an audience knowing enough to relish the mispronunciation of words such as "Clopet" for example - has changed since 1954. The play was written when the Carl Clopet touring company was an annual highlight of the Cork stage; now its own theatricality seems borrowed, a little too high-pitched for what is actually going on, as if life in Cork in the 1950s was lived at an emotionally frantic pace. At the same time, Giltinan's way with suspense was simply to ignore it, so that the plot outline is quickly readable. And recognisable: there is a little too much O'Casey overshadowing both characters and events.

This makes the play interesting as a period piece, and it was as a period piece that it was affectionately received on this revival. With threads of melody woven around a tenement house in Joybell Court, strategically adjacent to the river Lee and with Pat Murray's set giving an iconic view of Shandon steeple, the play never breaks into its own song except for the opening and closing choruses. The tenants of the house have their comings in and their goings out - it's a very busy place - with some of the developments over-stretched, despite the work put in by Ray Scannell to reduce the elasticity employed by Giltinan, whose first play this was, after all.

A sailor returns, a mother turns thief, a daughter is ready to abandon herself to the lure of a high life elsewhere, a son absconds, yet within this crowded structure encounters and dialogues emerge to reveal a gifted sensitivity at work. And when the cast gets down - with some relief, I imagine - to these questioning interludes, they find both truth and beauty in the writing and in their own performances. These scenes, like delicate paintings in a florid frame, have the flow of authenticity and are a reminder also of the creative honesty, and naivety, of the writer. They occur in the glow of Paul Denby's layered lighting, and they explain the commitment of a diligent company that - led by Hugh Moynihan, Mon Murphy, Pauline O'Driscoll and blind piper Ciaran Ruby - provides an exhilarating and nostalgic entertainment. Runs until Aug 26 Mary Leland

McAndrew, RTÉ CO/Wagner at the NCH, Dublin

Borodin - In the Steppes of Central Asia. Saint-Saëns - The Swan. Charpentier - Depuis le jour. Respighi - Ancient Airs and Dances (exc). Verdi - Ah, fors' e lui . . . Sempre libera. Mozart - La clemenza di Tito Overture

Time was the RTÉ Concert Orchestra's best-known and most marketable attribute was versatility: opera one night, Abba another, a Haydn series, something postmodern and startling at the RTÉ Living Music Festival. An admiring guest conductor declared that they could perform nearly anything on sight.

Yet the label "versatile" grates on some players, perhaps owing to its suggestion of jack of all trades, master of none.

Well, masterly would be a good word to describe how outgoing principal conductor Laurent Wagner steers his orchestra from one period or genre to another. Within the narrow confines of this hour-long lunchtime concert, he drew out fat and sumptuous playing for Borodin's seductive, ethnically rich depiction of a caravan crossing the desert, and then a leaner, more formal sound - yet one straining with an explosive energy on standby - for the fanfare and excitement of Mozart's overture to the last of his operas, La clemenza di Tito.

In between, Wagner was nimble and sure-footed in the delicate balancing act between early 17th-century originals and early 20th-century instrumentation in three dances from the first suite (1917) of Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances.

His sensitivity in accompaniment was exemplified in The Swan - with cellist David James - from Saint-Saëns's The Carnival of the Animals, and in two operatic extracts with soprano Fiona McAndrew.

The second of these featured the sequence of evolving emotion that concludes Act I of La traviata as Violetta contemplates the new man in her life and wonders whether she can abandon her career as a courtesan for him. It was the clear audience favourite, with McAndrew - the absence of printed programmes depriving her of a biography and of texts and translations - persuasively inhabiting the role and soaring with ease amid the high-register notes Verdi wrote for his consumptive heroine. Michael Dungan