Arts Reviews

Irish playwrights seem to be going through something of a neo-classical phase at the moment.

Taste
Andrews Lane, Dublin

Sebastian Barry's Hinterland was a kind of Macbeth. Marina Carr's Ariel is a version of the Greek plays about Iphigenia and Electra. Now Taste, David Parnell's new play for his own Guna Nua company, gives us another Irish Macbeth.

The trouble with translating classic epics into modern Ireland is that it is hard to fit heroic stories into an unheroic world. If you let rip with the full sweep of an epic in an Irish bourgeois living room, you risk bathos. If you cut it down to fit the little universe of upwardly mobile Ireland, you end up with something patently reductive.

Taste is accomplished and enjoyable, but it is definitely in this last category. It is, figuratively speaking, a production of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Spun around in Parnell's washing machine, Macbeth emerges as a hopelessly shrunken story.

The reduction begins with the cast, which is cut to two. Peter Hanly's Declan is Macbeth as an ambitious Dublin solicitor, already, in his mid-30s, a senior partner in a prestigious firm. His kingdom is the beautiful old house that used to belong to the senior partner he has metaphorically slain, using character assassination rather than a dagger. His throne is an office overlooking Stephen's Green.

Lady Macbeth is his wife of eight years, Karen Ardiff's Susan, whose desertion as a child has left her with a ferociously amoral hunger for the security she expects to come with wealth. The witches are three oul' wans Declan meets on the bus. The frustrated desire to control posterity that haunts Macbeth's triumph is represented by a mysterious child who appears in the back garden and disappears in what we know will turn out to be sinister circumstances.

All of this is laid out with wit and dexterity in Parnell's text. He has a confident sense of dramatic structure and uses a mixture of monologue and dialogue to switch elegantly back and forth in time. Under Paul Meade's crisp direction and against Sinead O'Hanlon's subtly classical set, Hanly and Ardiff create vivid and eloquent performances.

All of this makes the piece consistently engaging, but it does not make it convincing. The basic problem is that Parnell is not sure whether he is writing a contemporary tragedy or a mock-heroic satire on the demented materialism of the new Ireland.

On the one hand, the disintegration of Susan and Declan's marriage is no laughing matter, and the prevailing mood is sombre. On the other, the whole notion of Macbeth as a solicitor seems to invite mockery. There is a thread of contemporary social comment, summed up in Declan's realisation that Susan is bereft of "any awareness of moral or civic responsibility", which seems to demand a satiric response.

The production and the acting are deft enough to keep these balls in the air for quite a while, but the uncertainty can't continue forever if the play is to acquire a dramatic shape. Ultimately, Parnell opts for tragedy, with the play lurching towards the revelation of a horrific event. Because it is unprepared, however, this feels more like an ending than a conclusion, a hasty last-minute attempt to give the play a moral gravity that it has not earned.

The play ends with a furtive burial, and it might have been better to bury Macbeth as well. Classical models are a great jumping-off for contemporary playwrights, but the most successful ones usually manage to kick over the traces and consign the initial influences to the deep structure of the finished text. Most drama still begins in the long shadow of Shakespeare and the Greeks, but the real trick will always be in the emergence from the shadows. - Fintan O'Toole

Runs until November 16th. Booking: 01-6795720
The Simulacra Stories

Pavilion Theatre,

Dún Laoghaire

Apparently it was David Bowie who coined the phrase that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The latter might seem an oxymoron but Joanne Leighton's work The Simulacra Stories for Dance Theatre of Ireland sets out to tackle it head on. Performed in the round on a white dance floor subtly taped into squares she sets up her task of drawing on architectural processes; in particular the work of Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. Dancer Styliani Lamprinou walks on stage and asks an audience member to time her for six minutes as she introduces dance phrases and orientations. Rather like a Richard Rodgers building where the service ducts are on the outside of the building, the choreographer here introduces the nuts and bolts of the construction of her choreography and sets up the premise that function is revealed through form.

A quartet then introduces Leighton's own hybrid movement vocabulary, with bodies constantly changing direction and flailing limbs always somehow centred by some internal gyroscopic force. The additive processes in Peter Crosbie's music gently push the evolving movement patterns as quartet becomes sextet and Trevor Ahearn's lighting provides constantly changing settings.

The dancers present the material in an honest and open manner, engaging in eye contact with members of the audience, sitting down in the front rows of seats and eschewing overtly mannered performances. French pair Marie Françoise Garcia and Edouard Pelleray are particularly outstanding, their bodies providing the perfect conduit for the dance, the movement energised but always seamless and flowing.

The work itself is almost brilliant. The choreographer's conceptual virtuosity is let down, ironically in a work about architecture, by proportions. For me, some material felt left in rather than put in, and a long duet towards the end felt overly long and unbalanced the formal rhythm. These are small quibbles because cracks in the choreography were papered over by the dancing, and although it set out in search of a cerebral solution it was the primacy of the body, with its symbolism and resonances, that shone through.- Michael Seaver

RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet
NCH, Dublin

String Quartet No. 22 in B flat, K 589 .................................Mozart

String Quartet No.5...............................................Bartok

String Quartet No. 12 in F. Op. 96 .......................................Dvorak

When the members of the Vanbrugh Quartet had taken their places in the NCH John Field Room, the house lights were abruptly switched off and only the players and their stands remained illuminated as in a peep show or on a television screen. This completely destroyed the feeling of intimacy, of a shared experience, proper to a chamber music recital; but fortunately the Vanbrugh was in top form and the music did not suffer from the partial apotheosis of the ensemble.

Mozart's K589, one of the "Prussian" Quartets with prominent cello parts, was brimful of good humour, its beautiful tunes being presented with a lightness of touch that allowed them to be exquisitely moving without the least preciosity. The clean outlines and the balanced sound resulted in a wholly satisfactory performance.

Bartok's Quartet No. 5 attempts to disguise its romanticism under an abrasive fierceness of manner.

The Vanbrugh gave full value to both of these aspects, and with a precision of detail that lit up the texture without delaying the onward surge of the music. The progress seemed so natural they might have been playing by heart, but their accuracy in no way minimised the excitement of a performance that was taut from start to finish.

The Vanbrugh brought to Dvorak's Quartet in F, The American, the qualities that made the Mozart so pleasing and for once I did not feel that the American was too sweet and too long. I could even have accepted another movement. - Douglas Sealy