Arts Reviews

There is an air of mystery surrounding Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, but it has less to do with its full-on confrontation of the darkness and secrecy surrounding a woman's most private part, than with the bewildering fact that it has become a worldwide theatrical phenomenon. There is, apparently, a litany of famous names, just longing to join the cast in this coy, confiding piece. Winona Ryder and Kate Winslet have already been in the frame; more recently, Madonna has joined the queue.

Vagina Monologues

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

Blue Fish is a company of four relatively unknown but talented Belfast actresses, who joined forces specifically to perform this series of monologues in Northern Ireland. They attracted full houses for their two-night run and, if nothing else, have organised a useful showcase for their versatile, engaging performance skills. They sashay on stage and perch on high stools, sexily swathed in scarlet, before setting out to seduce the audience with their charm and fearlessness. As an ensemble performance, it works a treat.

As for the piece itself, it really is a bit of a yawn - a collection of experiences, reflections and silly musings by around 2,000 women of many nationalities, ages and backgrounds, whom the writer, somehow, persuaded to talk about this "Bermuda triangle" of the female anatomy. Some accounts are funny, simply because they are so downright daft; others record gut-wrenching episodes, reliving rape, sexual abuse, childbirth, exploitation and pornography - and one heartbreakingly poetic, real-life account, by a Bosnian woman, of her violation by enemy soldiers, which seems out of place in the beauty of its writing and the authentic horror of its content.

But all in all, the whole thing amounts to little and it is difficult to gauge its appeal, beyond its determination to wrap audiences in a sense of sisterhood and of shared, intimate experiences exchanged. Maybe each individual reaction is in itself telling, but from this corner, here's to a good book and choccie bar any day. - Jane Coyle

Lars-Anders Tomter (viola), NSO/Gerhard Markson
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Rise....Ian Wilson
Viola Concerto....Walton
Dawn & Siegfried's Rhine Journey....Wagner
Symphony No 3 (Rhenish)....Schumann
It's an interesting question, particularly in the context of Schumann's symphonies, where the dividing line is to be drawn between a musical difficulty that's a challenge and one that's actually a fault. The accusation is often made against Schumann, as it is against Chopin, that his handling of the orchestra was crude to the point of opacity. His grasp of orchestration, his detractors say, was inefficient almost to the point of incompetence.
It's a great excuse, this argument, for performances of Schumann's symphonies which are thick in tone and congealed in texture. It's not, however, an acceptable one. The only contradiction you need is provided by the small proportion of conductors who, literally, make light of the difficulties. Interestingly, the relevant insight into Schumann's orchestral writing seems to be as rare in period-instrument circles as it is among conductors of conventional orchestras.
Gerhard Markson doesn't have the lightest of touches in Schumann, nor does the National Symphony Orchestra have the sort of musically sharp-witted and incisively-toned horn section that Schumann needs, or the fluidity in adjusting balances between wind and strings that can be relied on to bring out the best in the composer's music.
But what Markson showed himself to have in the Rhenish Symphony on Friday is a sense of insistent brio that can cut through the more obfuscatory tendencies to which Schumann is often subjected.
It was a nice idea to contrast the different Rhine responses of Schumann and Wagner. But Wagner has not been and is not now one of this orchestra's strengths. Just as Mozart and Haydn are classical touchstones that mercilessly reveal orchestral shortcomings, so too, for this orchestra, is Wagner the Achilles' heel in the romantic repertoire.
Nothing in Friday's playing served to change that impression.
Oldham-born William Walton, whose centenary is being celebrated this year (he was born on March 29th, 1902), moved in the 1920s from the cheeky vernacular of Façade, with nonsense texts by Edith Sitwell, to the full-blown romanticism of his 1929 Viola Concerto.
Soloist Lars-Anders Tomter and the NSO gave full-voiced expression to the melancholy which dominates the work's sporadic eruption into driven angularity.
Ian Wilson's Rise, itself dropped from an NSO programme in January, replaced a promised new work, Mystic Nativity, by Philip Martin. Rise, Wilson's second orchestral piece, dates from 1994, and has the confident air of being by some latter-day Nordic Benjamin Britten, viewing minimalism out of the corner of his eye. Markson conducted it with sure-footed style. - Michael Dervan

The High Llamas & Jean-Pierre Muller Triskel
Arts Centre, Cork
While the collaboration between Belgian artist Jean-Pierre Muller and pop mavericks The High Llamas constitutes only one part of this exhibition, the result of the alliance is undoubtedly its highlight.
In terms of sheer volume, however, precedence should be given to Muller's solo works as his mish-mash of photomontage paintings fills the Triskel Arts Centre's gallery space.
Muller belongs to the Pop Art idiom characterised by Peter Blake's design for The Beatles' iconic 1960s Sgt. Pepper album sleeve. He includes numerous portraits, icons, statuary and, more generally, a predilection, shared with other Pop Artists, for using elements of collage and photo-screen processes.
Cumulatively, there is a uniformity to Muller's work which borders on the claustrophobic, as a relentless similarity of imagery and consistent use of brash colouring, hardly offers any opportunity to connect on either an emotional or conceptual level.
The Musical Painting collaboration with The High Llamas, however, works on a number of levels, with the interactive nature of the piece seeming to suit Muller's loud visual language.
Essentially, the piece is made up of a number of connected panels, some of which trigger sequences of music which the viewer can combine in any order.
The entire experience is an enjoyable one, with a sense of playfulness not seen in the Triskel Arts Centre since the Baschet Brothers exhibition.
The music is good as well, mixing elegant acoustic phrases, electro oddities and environmental samples from Waterloo Station.
This location is particularly apt as it is suggestive of the institutionalised 1960s psychedelic, inhabited by The Kinks.
With their idiosyncratic lounge stylings, The High Llamas are surely deserving of a Renaissance, particularly in light of the commercial explosion of the chillout phenomena. - Mark Ewart

Runs until April 28th. The High Llamas play Vicar Street, Dublin, on April 24th (booking at 01-4545533 )and The Savoy, Cork, on April 25th (booking at 021-4254280)
Conor Biggs (bass-baritone)/Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin (piano)
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Auf der Donau; Grenzen der Menschheit; Prometheus...Schubert
Dublin Spring (première)...James Wilson
Dublin spring is a setting of six early poems by Mícheál Ó Siadhail. These show such pleasure in language and metaphor that they don't need an extra layer of music; but Conor Biggs took the precaution of reading the texts aloud before singing them and, in truth, the music gave lustre to such an unpromising line as "Gainful as a hermit's centripetal thought."
The poems are quite excitable, as befits the subject, but they are also meditative and the music contrived to be the same; an elaborate piano part, played with relish by Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin, supported a more restrained vocal line which, however, took off melodically at certain key words.
There was much surface brilliance, to match phrases like "sunburst of laughter", but the underlying mood was sombre.
So, in the circumstances, it was wise to begin the recital with three of Schubert's most serious songs.
Mayrhofer's Auf der Donau makes the Danube into a symbol of age and death, Goethe's Grenzen der Menschheit emphasises the littleness of man and his Prometheus challenges the gods with a cry that seems to lose its nerve at the end.
To put these ideas across, Conor Biggs displayed remarkable resources of power and feeling; it was as if he was giving voice to his own thoughts.
Prometheus is the most dramatic of his songs, and it was sung with passion - it could have been a little opera, and the acoustic of the Hugh Lane Gallery gave a welcome bloom to the music.
It was Spring outside last Sunday, and inside the music was equally alive. - Douglas Sealy