Reviews

Fintan O'Toole went along to the Project to see the political satire Caught Red Handed. Ray Comiskey reviews the Geri Allen Trio at Liberty Hall, while Douglas Sealy spent an evening in the company of the Vogler String Quartet at the RDS.

Caught Red Handed, Project, Dublin

Political satire is hard to write. The big difficulty is getting the politics and the satire to work together. The satiric impulse is wild, anarchic, essentially subversive of all ideologies. The political impulse is serious, coherent, essentially committed to a set of values. One energy is destructive, the other constructive.

This is why good political satire is so rare in the theatre. It is why the Italian Marxist Dario Fo deserved his Noble Prize for the way he strikes the balance in plays like Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay.

Tim Loane directed Can't Pay, Won't Pay a decade ago for Tinderbox, the dynamic Belfast company he co-founded in 1988. He has gone on to bigger things with his Channel 4 drama series Teachers, but Caught Red Handed, which premièred in Belfast last February, shows that he is still a Fo man.

The play, directed as well as written by Loane, is very much in the Fo tradition of trying to balance scabrous farce with serious political intent. It is also, however, strikingly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's satire on Hitler, The Great Dictator, both in its basic plot and in its ultimate awkwardness.

As in Chaplin's movie, the central device is that of the innocent little man who happens to look exactly like the evil leader and who ends up taking his place. As with The Great Dictator, too, a hugely entertaining and often very effective satire becomes problematic when it tries to switch into a serious political mode.

Caught Red Handed is set in 2005, a future whose fantastic nature is underlined by the fact that Hillary Clinton is president of the US, Michael Portillo is the British prime minister and Gerry Kelly is chief constable of the PSNI. In this political never-never land, a referendum on a United Ireland is being held in Northern Ireland.

If the setting is thus deliberately implausible, the target is real and immediate. Caught Red Handed is an all but explicit attack on the DUP. The bellowing leader of the Alternative Unionist Party, unleashing chaos with his demagogic bigotry, is a version of Ian Paisley.

The group around him - his gormless son, a god-bothering bible puncher, a hard man with devious paramilitary connections and a smooth-talking PR guru - is barely less identifiable.

The play, moreover, is about as offensive to DUP sensibilities as it could be. Loane relies on pretty basic humour - toilet jokes, penis jokes, the sexual starvation of the leader's deceptively prim wife - but in the context of a full-frontal assault on puritanism, all of this has a genuinely Rabelaisian energy.

When the leader dies of a heart-attack brought on by chronic constipation, Pat, a Catholic bachelor farmer and the leader's spitting image, is hired to stand in as the figurehead for a Ulster Workers Council-type assault on the peace process.

All of this is carried off superbly well. As the leader and Pat, Dan Gordon combines manic energy and considerable subtlety in a tour-de-force of physical and verbal clowning. Once you get used to the exaggerated, grotesque style of the rest of the cast, the production gathers a terrific momentum.

Until, that is, it is time to get serious. Loane is admirably unwilling to tear the DUP apart without suggesting what kind of alternative future there might be for a Protestant political identity. This demands a huge shift of gear, however. Purely grotesque caricatures have to become human characters. We have to believe that figures of fun can become figures of genuine transformation.

The transition doesn't really work, and what should be serious appears, in contrast to the vivid farce that has gone before, merely earnest. Yet the courage of the attempt is itself both moving and politically significant. In these times, there is a far greater value in Loane's expression of faith in the best values of Protestant culture than in the mere ability to tie up a play in a neat conclusion. Fintan O'Toole

Caught Red Handed runs until Saturday

Geri Allen Trio, Liberty Hall

Sunday night's concert, the second in the ESB autumn jazz series, brought the accomplished American pianist, Geri Allen, to Dublin for the first time. It wasn't her first performance in Ireland; audiences at the Guinness Jazz Festival have heard her in a trio with bassist Buster Williams.

This time the bassist was Mats Ingvarsson (a replacement for the advertised Robert Hurst), who - with drummer Mark Johnson - completed the trio. Perhaps it was this change which upset the balance of a first set more notable for a mechanical, careful rather than adventurous, performance. Occasional moments of slight uncertainty also suggested this was a group which wasn't quite on top of things together.

This is all the more remarkable, not only because Allen is a gifted musician, blessed with prodigious technique and enormous harmonic resource, but also because bass and drums were cast in a strictly supporting role. This was piano with rhythmic accompaniment, not the more complex three-way improvised dialogue favoured by such trios as those of Brad Mehldau, Esbjorn Svensson, Ethan Iverson or Jason Moran, for example. The problems should, therefore, have been simpler to resolve. At any rate, it was all curiously uninvolving. The second set was marginally better. Allen opened solo, with an attractive, multi-layered examination of Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life that showed off her plangently expressive touch and her feel for the nooks and crannies of the composer's distinctive signature of line and texture. A number of originals, unidentified and based, as were those in the first set, mainly on simple repeated figures, rather than any long form writing, suggested that at this point her main interests were rhythmic and harmonic, rather than linear - a pity, since it was clear she could also pursue linear improvisation with panache and invention if she wished.

The trio, however, showed a greater sense of involvement and looseness as the set progressed. Without reaching any great heights, they brought a charming Mary Lou Williams original, Mary's Waltz, and Allen's own A Gathering to life in a way that seemed out of reach earlier. Ray Comiskey

Vogler String Quartet, RDS

String Quartet in G,Op 54 No 1 ...............................Haydn

String Quartet in C minor, No 8................................Shostakovich

String Quartet in G, D.887........................................Schubert

The Vogler's performance of Haydn's Op. 54 No 1, combined radiant good humour with sturdy common sense, an aristocratic elegance with an earthly power, and got the mixture exactly right.

Shostakovich's Quartet No 8 inhabits quite a different world and with its obsessive motto theme, based on the composer's initials DSCH, it is a bitter personal statement. Menacing and macarbe by turns - the motto imperceptibly becomes the Dies Irae for a moment - the Vogler played with searing intensity and yet managed to impart an austere wistfulness to brief passages of nostalgia or perhaps of regret. The five linked movements formed an Odyssey of woe which was a most moving experience to listen to.

Schubert's final String Quartet is in its way an obsessive, with its repeated sets of chords which do not so much punctuate the music as become the violent irregular beating of its heart. The Vogler well conveyed the mood of almost despair which prevails most of the time, but did not neglect to sing, especially in that magical passage where the urgency of the Scherzo transforms into the celestial calm of the Trio.

This concert made Schubert and Shostakovich seem closer than one had thought. Douglas Sealy