Reviews

Reviews:Access All Beckett season: Texts for Nothing, Masonic Lodge, CorkEnough, The Other Place, Cork

by Mary Leland

Determined to find venues unfamiliar to the public for their "Access All Beckett" programme in Cork until April 16th, Gare St Lazare Players Ireland outran their aspirations in the choice of the Masonic Lodge for the performance of Texts for Nothing.

Here the location itself is the performance, or would be, were it not that Conor Lovett's monologue is delivered with such detachment that its very ironies echo like a commentary on the meeting room.

Marvellously dramatic with black-panelled walls draped with heraldry and embossed with insignia and armorial bearings, the room, nonetheless, succumbs first to the shaft of light through which Lovett passes to the Master's pedimented seat and then to the confiding, conversational style in which texts III, VIII and XII are given. But it is ownership, rather than mastery, that Lovett exudes; these memorised readings, in performances directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, dwell on the contradictions of thought, on matters stopping and starting, leaving and departing, or places of high depression, the adjacent extremes of human experience.

Unforced because there is no need to project, the sardonic implications of self-referral are touched lightly, but very accurately.

Again it is externals that seem most striking in Enough at The Other Place: here Allie Ní Chiaráin's high, Elizabethan forehead seems to signal a physical as well as an intellectual distance, although this 15-minute reverie is actually about a physical relationship.

Or maybe not all that physical. Or maybe not as physical as it might have been.

It is some achievement to work such a little fragment into a performance, but Ní Chiaráin makes it her own as she stands on a white box within touching distance of her audience in an upstairs bar.

On the clean side of drab, the venue matches the text rather than competing with Beckett's crafted soliloquy on a pairing which is never a partnership.

Enough continues until Saturday 16th

Ulster Orchestra, Vernon Handley/Jason Lai, Ulster Hall, Belfast

by Dermot Gault

Stanford - Irish Rhapsody No 4 Korngold - Violin Concerto.

Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.

Vaughan Williams - Symphony No 4.

While it is always good to welcome Vernon Handley back to Belfast, it is particularly good to see him active again, albeit walking with the aid of sticks, following a recent car accident in Germany. Under the circumstances, it was understandable that he should have relinquished the Korngold concerto to the young British-born Chinese conductor Jason Lai. Korngold used to be disapproved of for all the wrong reasons; his music is tonal, tuneful, enjoyable and lushly scored.

Worse still, this 1945 concerto re-uses material originally composed for films. Unfortunately, there is something superficial about this music; still, David Grimal seemed to enjoy the elegant, capricious solo part, and gave us a substantial encore in the form of Ysaye's Ballade.

Handley's part of the programme found him on home territory, and in the Britten and Vaughan Williams he was at his most incisive and dramatic.

As a young man Britten made fun of the thick, brassy scoring of the Vaughan Williams, but the orchestration fits this tough, intense work, whose dissonances shocked its first listeners in 1935.

Very different from the golden sounds of Stanford's Fourth Irish Rhapsody, cryptically subtitled "The Fisherman of Lough Neagh and what he saw", it was probably the most convincing and attractive piece by this composer we have heard.

It appears from David Byers's informative programme note that this piece, which dates from 1913, is Stanford's reaction to the Home Rule crisis, though knowing this does not necessarily add to one's enjoyment of the music.