Reviews

A look at what's happening in the arts by Irish Timesjournalists.

Dancing at Lughnasa

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Jane Coyle

There are no words, only a great, overwhelming rush of emotion, at the end of Mick Gordon's searing revival of Dancing at Lughnasa. With loving attention to Brian Friel's flawless text by a perfectly cast ensemble, the production plumbs the deepest, darkest depths of the Mundy sisters' domestic confinement in Ballybeg, while reaching far beyond to suck out the frustrated hopes, needs and desires of women all over Ireland.

For the narrator, Michael, archly played by Sean Sloan, this golden summer of 1936 was and would be like no other. As man and boy, navigating shifting time scales and the tricksy nature of memory, he recalls the fleeting appearances of his smooth-talking father Gerry Evans (played with a thin veneer of slimy charm by Rhydian Jones), the fractured equilibrium of the family circle, caused by the arrival of his grand-uncle Jack, a missionary priest who went native in Africa and has come home to die (Gerard McSorley in an engaging mixture of mischief and pathos), and the disintegration of the precarious existences of his mother Chris (Laura Donnelly) and her four spirited sisters, Kate (Geraldine Fitzgerald), Maggie (Patricia Gannon), Agnes (Aislin McGuckin) and Rose (Máiréad McKinley).

Ferdia Murphy's bewitching little round of a set divides between grassy fields, replete with all kinds of human possibilities, and the claustrophobia of the island-shaped kitchen, where Maggie's loud humour, Kate's tight-lipped moralising, Chris's romantic dreaming, Agnes's buttoned-up good manners and Rose's sly knowingness explode into an absolutely spine-tingling catharsis in the famous dance scene. And, even when order is restored, their thoughts remain drawn to the pagan spectre of the celebration of the harvest feast of Lughnasa, beckoning seductively from the forbidden territory of the back hills.

Ian Scott's misty, mellow lighting and Deborah Maguire's breathily pent-up choreography combine sensuously, chiming perfectly in the final moments, as Michael's half-remembered summer idyll burns its imprint into our collective imagination.

Runs until July 7.

Wexford Festival Opera Short Works

Dun Mhuire Theatre

Michael Dungan

Bizet/Brook - La Tragédie de Carmen

Of the 30-odd Wexford matinee presentations that I have seen, the current chamber-opera version of Carmen is among the very best, if not the best.

Above and beyond all its many and considerable qualities, it's genuinely moving. Not merely sentimental or emotionally manipulative, but actually moving in a way that was rare all those years ago in the fondly remembered basement nightclub (The Barn) of Whites Hotel and so far in the Dun Mhuire Theatre.

It's moving because director and cast make us experience the characters as fellow humans, just slightly larger than life. In this the production follows the lead of maverick director Peter Brook, whose 1981 chamber version, we are told, is "preoccupied with the psychological and emotional heart of the piece rather than the showy and comic aspects".

Director Andrew Steggall is faithful to this attitude in his 1950s setting. Carmen - unusually radiating inner rather than vivacious strength - practically croons her famous habanera into a nightclub microphone.

Similarly, the bullfighter Escamillo sings his Toreador, en garde! while quietly sipping a drink at the bar.

If truth be told, Steggall's French film noir-influenced staging was worrying at first. It opens at the end, with Don José slowly washing the blood from his hands before staring out at the audience as a taped voice speaks his inner thoughts in brooding French. It almost seemed liked parody, perhaps taking itself too seriously.

But it wins you over. Everything fits, nothing intrudes or sticks out: the noise of a passing train, lots of cigarettes, Kevin Treacy's atmospheric lighting with many spot-lit moments.

Yael Loewenstein choreographs the best fight I've ever seen in opera, a brutal, slow-motion shadow-cast scene, while the unsuspecting Carmen sings sweetly about love.

The excellent cast is led by Swedish mezzo Lina Markeby, something of a baroque specialist who adapts perfectly to this most unusual Carmen. Steggall repeatedly highlights the muscular masculinity of his male antagonists: rich-voiced American bass and Wexford newcomer Michael Redding in the role of bullfighter as prize athlete, and Canadian tenor David Curry, unfailingly impressive in several matinee roles at Wexford, as Don José, soldier. Here is masculine beauty veiling the masculine ugliness of such rivalries.

Unusually but crucially, this Short Works' Carmen was accompanied by chamber ensemble rather than piano. Conductor Gavin Carr drew strong but inward playing to match the spirit of the production.

Red Light Winter

Mill Theatre, Dundrum

Peter Crawley

Red Light Winter, based on a true story - its author's true story, apparently - is a play that asks us to take it at face value. On no account should you take it at face value.

Indeed, to accept Adam Rapp's implausible love triangle as a narrative with few symbolic intentions is to enter into a ridiculous, grimy fantasy. During one backpacking trip to Amsterdam - the European capital of indiscretion, as any frat boy knows - Davis, an implausibly over-confident, sexually rapacious boor, procures the services of Christina, an implausibly beautiful and implausibly French hooker, for his friend Matt, an implausibly neurotic, sexually dormant nerd, who is, plausibly, a struggling playwright.

With plot developments that could have spun straight from Matt's overheated laptop, the nerd falls in love with the hooker, who falls in love with the boor, who remains in love with himself. The second act is slightly less believable.

What we have here, one hopes, is a play not about unrequited love but about the mind of a writer. (Any other interpretation is frankly embarrassing.) It is hard to see Stuart Roche's Davis and Dermot Magennis's Matt, for instance, as anything other than a dramatic device: a male double-act in the split-personality tradition of True West's brothers or even Waiting For Godot's tramps.

It's also hard to see Olga Wehrly's Christina as anything other than a chauvinist construct - a hooker with a heart of gold, who is "generally quiet", who falls in love with a client, who acts as both confessor and saviour to another, who is asked to change her character as often as her clothing, who is ultimately punished and inevitably destroyed.

That Wehrly, who commits utterly to the part, steals the show in the role of a cipher is almost miraculous; like someone winning a grand prix in a go-kart. Magennis does a fine job passing off lines which would, like, make the writers of Dawson's Creek totally blush: "I have miraculously managed to remain ophthalmologically unchallenged," he says, by which he means he doesn't wear glasses. Roche has enormous fun as Davis and is generally as much fun to watch.

And, in all, it's a committed production of an almost suffocatingly self-involved play: by act two, Matt, surrounded by a gallery of his male writer idols, is even writing a play about the play, while events seem to bend to his command.

David Horan's direction, though unnecessarily faithful to the airless, naturalistic demands of Rapp's script, allows enough surreal moments to soften the play's edges: a red dress, in particular, elicits an audience guffaw on its reappearance.

If we can discern some seriousness in the project, Rapp, like the professional misanthrope Neil LaBute, may be trying to expose uncomfortable truths about male desire and male duality. (His interest in women is similarly less nuanced.) But however creditable a job PurpleHeart Theatre Company does with the production, those irreconcilable extremes in Matt and Davis are just too parodic to engage the nerd and boor that reside in the heart of every man.

Runs until June 23

Walking the Road

Axis, Dublin

Peter Crawley

In the concluding couplets of Soliloquy, a poem as introspective as it is battle-hardened, Francis Ledwidge paused during the first World War to pen his own conundrum: "A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart,/Is greater than a poet's art./And greater than a poet's fame/A little grave that has no name."

Not long after, Ledwidge would have both: a poet's legacy and a soldier's grave, but no fitting tribute. A supercilious inscription added to the graveyard register in Ypres said it all: "Ledwidge was a poet who wrote mostly about Ireland and fairies." A nationalist objector to the war who performed an ideological volte-face and joined the fray, the brief narrative of Francis Ledwidge is not easily parsed. Now, 90 years after his death, Dermot Bolger tries to find a form to commemorate him.

Bolger's play courses with a more discrete poetry, taking much of the licence that poetry affords to present Ledwidge (Colin O'Donoghue) as a figure both timeless and placeless, an Irishman in a British uniform in Belgium, narrating his tale from "no man's land", suspended in eternity.

If Bolger wonders how Ledwidge could witness the ravages of war at such close range - where the only thing still growing is the stubble on a dead man's chin - yet still inscribe a vivid pastoralism into his verses, he too has a tendency to realise and romanticise his subject. So it is that we move with spectral logic from the corpses of Flanders to children's play in Ledwidge's Slane home. Or from the steely resolve of walking 40 miles through the night from Rathfarnham to present his first poem to his mother, to the sense of emasculation that such poetry would bring.

"I was frustrated with words," Bolger has Ledwidge say, a line that summons as much disillusionment with poetry as it does with political slogans. It is a suitably equivocal way of presenting Ledwidge's still-contested political reversal (in Bolger's play he is equally motivated by a clear head and a dishevelled heart), but Ray Yeats's production can seem similarly frustrated.

Marie Tierney's design, a small perimeter of incidental props, seems hemmed in by constantly changing locations. So do Conleth White's lights, which alter every few seconds, pursuing the play's tumbling progression. That this forces O'Donoghue and Kelly Hickey (who struggles to play various characters) into a largely declamatory performance style - alleviated in a couple of physicalised moments that Yeats pries free from the text - suggests that Bolger has written not a stage play, but a radio drama, or, more specifically, a play for voices. To present it as such would have been no cop-out. If anything, that is a true poet's memorial.

Runs until tomorrow at Axis, then tours to Civic Theatre, Tallaght, July 12-14 and Solstice Art Centre, Navan, July 27-28

Opera 2005

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

Michael Dervan

Lehár - The Merry Widow

Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow is a sweet concoction. Life in the Pontevedrialegation in Paris is one long party. Infidelity - there's a lot of it about - seems even easier to deal with than, say, a hangover. And it's a simple world, too. Love, sweet love, will always win through in the end.

The piece, now over a century old, was first heard in 1905, and contains some of the 20th-century's best-known tunes. Audiences love it when it's well done, and like it even when it's not. Guillermo Silva-Marin's production for Opera 2005 offers a bit of both. The best is the widow herself, Cork soprano Mary Hegarty holding centre-stage, as she should, with a charm that's both personal and musical, and a voice that's mostly true and clear.

The orchestra is reduced to an ensemble of less than a dozen players. Conductor Kevin Mallon studiously avoids any sense of over-compensation. He handles the music with a light touch, and brings an unforced clarity to the playing. Inevitably, perhaps, he misses out in sheer presence at key moments, and he doesn't always show supportive flexibility in responding to the intentions of the singers.

Lisa Zagone's set designs follow the lines of simple suggestiveness, her costumes run to evening dress for the men, and there are colourful changes for the women. But Silva-Marin ensures that the men get to do a high-kicking chorus line, and the revue style is reinforced by topical references to Cork Airport and the nurses' dispute.

With casting drawn from Opera 2005's young artists training programme, there was no one else on stage to match Hegarty's style and sheer savoir-faire. David Keelan's diplomatically bumbling Zeta came closest, and Panos Tsikos's free-spirited Danilo and PJ Hurley's stiffly-acted Camille both had good musical moments. The other roles varied hugely in achievement and comfort level. The audience was kept in a good mood, up for every gag and quip, and interrupted number after number with appreciative applause.

Runs until Sunday

Ash

Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin

Davin O'Dwyer

It might be one of those predictably unpredictable Irish summers so far, but seeing Ash play sets this good is enough to provoke a long-lasting summery state of mind in anyone.

The Downpatrick group have been out of the public eye since touring 2004's Meltdown album, losing guitarist Charlotte Hatherley in the meantime, but becoming once again a tight power-pop trio seems to have done them the world of good.

The set mixed new songs from their forthcoming album Twilight of the Innocents with plenty of tracks from their full-length debut 1977, and even some gems from Trailer, released in 1994 when the band had barely learned how to play their instruments and lead singer Tim Wheeler's voice had just broken.

Ash burst forth in a time when all bands had logos that could be easily stencilled on schoolbags, and the audience was thick with people who grew up as the band did, whose teenage summers were soundtracked by songs such as Goldfinger and Kung Fu. Such bonds are rare and cherished, but Ash succeed by being so much more than a nostalgia act - Wheeler and bassist Mark Hamilton still wear their hair in their eyes, and drummer Rick McMurray is still the master of goofy charm, but the band have aged credibly.

Crucially, while their new material doesn't have quite the youthful urgency that marked their earliest work, songs such as You Can't Have It All, Polaris and particularly the Depeche Mode-flavoured In Hell indicate Twilight of the Innocents is an album worthy of eager anticipation.

Wheeler's voice is still a blunt instrument, a roar from high in the throat, but it perfectly suits the sheer energy of their material. Ash certainly lack the knowing sophistication that is obligatory for most new bands, replacing it with sincere enthusiasm and exceptional tunes.

When they play A Life Less Ordinary, Oh Yeah and Girl From Mars in succession, you have to acknowledge their back catalogue is filled with hits of sinewy punk-pop genius that are impossible not to love.

Sometimes it's easy to forget life's simple pleasures, and Ash are definitely one of those - it's great to have them back.