Reviews

Irish Times critics give their verdicts.

Many Happy Returns, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Hugh Leonard once remarked sardonically that himself and Bernard Farrell are the only talented playwrights in Ireland - all the rest are geniuses. Behind this witty quip is an odd truth. The kind of well-made comedy of middle-class manners that is par for the course in most western countries occupies a marginal position in Irish theatre.

Our mainstream tends to be strange, angular and highly philosophical. And this leaves Bernard Farrell - whose 19th stage play, Many Happy Returns, has just opened at the Gate - in a somewhat awkward spot. He has become the semi-official purveyor of boulevard comedy to a theatrical culture that doesn't take the provision of light entertainment very seriously.

This is the context in which it is possible for a theatre like the Gate, which has such high standards, to stage a work as awful as Many Happy Returns. Without the feeling that the combination of Christmas and comedy sanctions the abandonment of a sense of excellence, it is hard to imagine any other reason for this show. What we get is the theatrical equivalent of what happens in the realm of music at this time of year.

Christmas means it's okay to pump endless streams of musical sludge into the environment. It also, apparently, means that it's okay to allow a fine playwright and some skilled performers to show sides of themselves that are better kept for the ritual embarrassments of the office party.

The problem, to be clear, has little to do with art. Many Happy Returns has no more pretensions to the condition of art than a plastic reindeer on an artificial Christmas tree. And that's fair enough. But pure fun demands almost as much work and almost as high a level of skill as art does.

Easy writing, as Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote, makes damned hard reading, and easy playwrighting makes damned hard sitting. The back-of-the-envelope recipe for Many Happy Returns - a dash of family crisis, a ladle full of titillation, a cup of warmed-up Feydeau farce and three spoonfuls of sentimentality - makes a dog's dinner.

The play is set in the living room of a farmhouse on the outskirts of Dublin, home to the grumpy 60-something Matty Kelly (Bill Golding), his daughter Irene (Lynn Cahill) and her husband Arthur (Stephen Brennan).

We get the general picture in the first few minutes. Matty's wife Gladys, tired of his meanness, has left him to travel the world with a Danish archaeologist. Arthur, who has set himself up as a motivational guru, has lost his teaching job because he nearly drowned a pupil he was "motivating" to swim. Irene is hoping that the visit of one of Arthur's former protégés, Declan, now a supermarket mogul in New Zealand, will offer them a lifeline.

Of course, Declan turns out to be an egomaniacal monster, who arrives with his stupid but gorgeous wife in tow. Of course, the plans that Irene has made to impress them - a session in a borrowed hot tub, Arthur arriving down the chimney dressed as Santa - turn to farce. Of course, Gladys turns up, unexpectedly but predictably, at the right moment to get the wrong impression. Of course, everything ends on a warm note of Christmas cheer. And while all of this is unremarkable, it is executed with a truly remarkable lack of deftness, wit or theatrical invention.

The most painful aspect of the play is its dependence on a kind of sexual prurience that went out with the last of the Carry On movies. All the double entendres that Sid James and Barbara Windsor rejected - "do it to me"; "grab whatever you like" - are summoned up from naughty postcard hell.

Declan's wife (Kathryn Sumner) is called Mandy, so naturally Stephen Brennan's tongue-tied Arthur ends up inadvertently calling her Randy. Sumner is called upon in Alan Stanford's subtle production to flash her knickers, to bend over while she puts a present under the tree, and to thrust her breasts in Brennan's face while he does his Cosmo Smallpiece impersonations. There is much play on the supposedly hilarious notion that Declan might be gay. The dramatic highlight of the evening consists of Brennan dropping his towel and displaying his behind to the audience.

There are, of course, people who find all this the funniest thing since the cat got stuck in the washing machine. Anyone whose idea of fun includes a smattering of ingenuity, cleverness or surprise will find the whole thing as happy and high-powered as a broken set of fairy lights.

Runs until late January

Fintan O'Toole

(Like) Silver, Project, Dublin

At one point in the middle of Irish Modern Dance Theatre's new work, (Like) Silver, all the dancers pull and prod at choreographer and artistic director John Scott.

As he lies straight and motionless on the floor - except for his vocal chords, as he sings in his rich voice - almost an effigy of himself, the other dancers dispassionately yet gently worry and tease him, some tickling his feet, eliciting both his and our inevitable giggles. You might regard this as a metaphor for how Scott affects his audience.

This is Scott's first work after his monumental piece It Is Better To, a co-production with Thomas Lehmen, which seems to mark a milestone in his oeuvre.

Although it lacks the former's cohesive sense of purpose and binding theme, (Like) Silver exhibits Scott's redoubled sense of fun and obvious delight in movement, human interaction and the manipulation of environment.

The piece begins with Project's Space Upstairs stripped bare and scattered with black plastic chairs in random composition across a black and white floor. The dancers move in and around seated audience members and each other as if all were DNA strands in a primal ocean - anything can happen, and does.

After the audience is politely invited to shift to the edge of the space, the dancers engage more fully with their sparse surroundings and each other. With lists of instructions in capital letters written on large sheets of white paper tacked to the wall like prompts (harking back to Scott's last work), the dancers go about their paradoxically impersonal yet indulgent interactions.

A hallmark of Scott's choreography seems to be his uncanny ability to create duets or group work that seem like solos connecting inadvertently - a comment on the often fortuitous indifference of fate.

The dancers also interact with the floor, also providing some witty moves. At one point, dancers rip holes into the black floor covering as though into the fabric of the universe and burrow beneath it to warp space.

Three dancers join themselves up with two pairs of trousers like links in a chain, and the entire company walks up and skips backwards across the length of the room while emitting different pitched sounds; you get the sense of an enormous, abstract musical instrument.

There are also some moments of superb acrobatic precision, notably by Merce Cunningham veteran Derry Swan and James Hosty. All the dancers, however, distinguish themselves - and often smirk with enjoyment - throughout the duration of this entertaining piece.

Continues at Project until Saturday, with a final performance at Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray on December 8th

Christine Madden

David Adams, Peter Barley, David Lee, David Leigh (organ)

Trinity College Chapel

The Pipeworks series of Bach's complete organ music ended in style here. In a characteristically inspired touch, a series that has set high standards of playing (and in which Mark Duley's programming has proved a triumph of the imagination) ended with some of the compositions that Bach wrote in response to his encounters with Italian music - a key influence on so much of the composer's later works.

Eight organists have contributed to the 16 one-hour programmes. The four in this final concert were Peter Barley and the three Davids - Adams, Lee and Leigh who, if they were a firm of solicitors as good as they are organists, would be millionaires.

They played not one of the chorale-based works around which all the programmes thus far have been centred. However, because Bach's Italian encounter lies at the heart of his later music, each work carrried an impression of music we had already heard.

Listening to Peter Barley play the beautiful, fluid counterpoint of the Canzona in D minor BWV588, based on a theme by Fresobaldi, was a reminder of some of Bach's most sophisticated fugal-style chorale preludes. The fearless energy that David Leigh showed in the Sonata No 6 in G BWV530 highlighted Bach the virtuoso organist.

That same connection was even more emphasised in David Adams's invigorating, almost reckless account of Bach's arrangement of Vivaldi's Concerto in A minor RV522.

David Lee played the Fugue in C minor on a theme of Legrenzi BWV574, an impressive yet formulaic piece that shows that Bach's peerless contrapuntal skill was hard-won. The programme was framed by the two movements of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV538 (Dorian).

David Leigh's majestic pacing and awareness of design raised a not-so-ridiculous thought - if I had to take just one Bach fugue and leave all the rest, if performed to this standard, this could very well be it.

For details of the next Dublin International Organ Festival, due to begin in June 2005, visit www.pipeworksfestival.com. Tel: 01-6337392

Martin Adams