Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events

The Cuchulain Cycle, National Library of Ireland

It is hardly saying much that the plays of WB Yeats are today more read than watched. This is not what he would have wished for The Cuchulain Cycle; four experimental pieces that chart a legend through poetry, dance, music and masks.

"Everyone here is as convinced as I am," Yeats reflected on the evolving cycle, "that I have discovered a new form by this combination of dance, speech and music." So grandiloquent a claim ignored a more prosaic reality, however: whatever "here" he was referring to, it wasn't the theatre. The Abbey's repertoire had already settled into theatrical realism, and beyond a coterie in aristocratic drawing rooms, few were interested in this new form.

Time has not endeared the symbolist theatre of Yeats's experimentations to the stage any further, nor found the dramatic kinship between the courtly aesthetic of Japanese Noh theatre and the rough tales of Irish heroic myth.

With the plays now such strangers to performance, Dublin Lyric Players production of The Cuchulain Cycle - chronicling the legend from At The Hawk's Well and On Baile's Strand, through The Only Jealousy of Emer and The Death of Cuchulain - doesn't suffer from a nontheatrical staging.

Committed as it is to the austere strangeness of Yeats's imagination, the fault of the production is really the fault of the texts: for all their lyricism and meditative qualities, the plays are essentially dramatically inert. Dutifully featured as part of the National Library's comprehensive exhibition of Yeats's works, the production is understandably (though cripplingly) faithful to the author's demands for humble stagecraft and the sovereignty of words.

Unwilling to approach with a firmer contemporary sensibility, director Conor O'Malley makes it difficult to view the plays as anything more than theatrical curios, or, worse still, rough work for the poems. This makes it entirely possible to listen to the verse, delivered here in unison choruses or stentorian bellows, and detect the echoes of Yeats's later works, or to trace the souring of his nationalist mood from the first play to the last. But the sense of a drama "close to pure music" or the physical potential within these "plays for dancers" remains inaccessible.

Yeats was no stranger to impossible ideals, of course, and, try as we might, it's hard to leave the library without returning his theatre to the shelf. Peter Crawley

Michael Holohan, NCH, Dublin

Composer Michael Holohan strongly identifies with two very dissimilar musical realms: Irish tradition and French modernism. It's a quirky fusion of the national with the cosmopolitan. The ideas are primarily impressions rather than arguments, and resemble the hewn and sculpted rather than the intricately woven.

Aisling Drury Byrne (cello) and Thérèse Fahy (piano) represented Holohan's favourite composer Debussy with the Cello Sonata (1915), and Messiaen with Louange à l'éternité de Jésus (1942). The latter's influence was clear in Fahy's adroit performances of two piano solos evoking Ireland's ancient past, Monaincha (2003) and Carving the High Cross: Monasterboice (specially composed for this concert).

Holohan's tribute to Seamus Ennis, An Fear as Fingal (2003, a set that blurs the usual distinction between airs and dances) and the traditional tunes May Morning Dew and Sporting Nell were opportunities to enjoy the chanter and regulator playing of piper Mick O'Brien.

Bronze-age horns (made and played by paleomusicologist Simon O'Dwyer) joined forces with pipes, flute, violin, cello, guitar and percussion for Holohan's The Dream of Aengus (1997) and his new arrangement of Ár nAthair (2001). Confidently pitting their fresh solo voices against this curious hybrid of céilí band and chamber ensemble were sopranos Anna Devin and Niamh Browne. Mezzo soprano Melanie O'Reilly and flautist Susan Doyle focused attention with Holohan's sparse setting (2001) of Paul Durcan's Portrait of the Artist. Settings of Susan Connolly's Dowth and John F Deane's Winter in Meath (both 1997) proved well matched to the abilities of Drogheda's redagh Singers who, directed by Patricia Hegarty, sang them from memory.

Yet it was Beckett's poetry - recited by Barry McGovern and sung with much advocacy by Devin - that had inspired Holohan's most impressive achievement, One Fine Day (2006). Andrew Johnstone

Out of Harm's Way, Project Arts Centre

In a panicked society herded into the ambiguous security of enclosed spaces, are we really safe anywhere? Here CoisCéim choreographer David Bolger questions our knee-jerk response to physical and psychological threats.

One of two works in CoisCéim's Threads season, this opens to alarms and the pandemonium of fear and ignorance as the dancers speed across a dark stage with electric torches. One by one they trickle into their supposedly safe haven - a room completely covered with stuffy 1950s flower-patterned wallpaper, brilliantly conceived by designer Monica Frawley - a place perhaps as claustrophobic and smothering as the terror that drove them there. The brutal choreography of hostility and violence, however, soon softens to suggestive physicality - Bolger can't resist his favourite theme of sexual politics.

Stuck in their safe haven, the dancers abandon their hard, aggressive moves for sexual interaction with each other - and, bizarrely, the movable and mutable furniture. The sexually voracious character of dancer Marco Volta might even go into the Guinness Book of Records for the longest sustained orgasm in couplings with a series of domestic items and home furnishings. He, as well as the other dancers - Muirne Bloomer, Mike Carberry, Jen Fleenor, Robert Jackson, Thomas Maucher, Mónica Muñoz Marín and Emma O'Kane - outdid themselves in sensitive and versatile performance. Yet the threat of potential danger, in the form of Carberry as a sinister Pierrot-like figure, shadowed the proceedings and gave a thriller-style atmosphere to what felt otherwise like a desperate party.

The piece excelled in its choreographic interpretation of a society held hostage by panic, and the agitated aggression and craving for security it engenders. The production would, however, have benefited from more of this atmosphere infusing the social and sexual interaction and drawing a more direct relationship between them. As for choreography and execution, it is a worthy follow-on to CoisCéim's last piece, Knots, and represents one of Bolger's finest works. Christine Madden

Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Smock Alley, Temple Bar

The Just in General Theatre Company, founded last year by graduates of the Gaiety School of Acting, has had successful productions in Germany and Edinburgh. They open their Dublin account with a classic Neil Simon comedy, in a production that augurs well for the future.

Barney is a 47-year-old owner of a fish restaurant who, after many years of married fidelity, seeks to have a belated shot at sexual adventure. His first target is Elaine, a hard-drinking wife who lives in the shadow of a tough husband and has had numerous escapades. Strike one. Next comes Michelle, an unsuccessful, accident- prone nightclub singer. Strike two. Finally Jennet, best friend of Barney's wife, arrives suffering from melancholia and man-hatred. Strike three, and back to domesticity.

This is not among the very best of the author's plays, but it is charged with comic energy and acting opportunities. Liam Bruen's Barney is a gem, a hilarious portrait of a decent goofball in trouble. Sandra Jones, Mairead Crowley and Jen Hultzer give crisp interpretations as the women, all under Caroline Coffey's direction. Good fun. Gerry Colgan