Reviews: Belinda McKeon reviews Far Away at the Project Dublin and Michael Dervan reviews the West Cork Chamber Music Festival at Bantry House, Co Cork
Far Away
Four years ago, in a note to the script of Far Away, Caryl Churchill expressed some anxiety about the working out of her play's central scene, in which a procession of condemned prisoners stagger their way towards execution, clad in an array of spectacular hats. How many prisoners should there be, she wondered: five was too few, 20 better than 12; should there be 100?
In a compelling production that marries the bleakest of themes - war without end - with surprising, often unnerving laughs, Bedrock's Jimmy Fay overcomes Churchill's logistical worries with a vista of terror and cruelty that fills the stage and creeps into the mind. Fay presents 17 prisoners, wretched onstage in the fantastic creations of Arran Murphy and Jeni Roddy, but by mingling their silhouettes on a rear screen he renders them infinite, overwhelming and utterly anonymous.
Combined with the sparsity of her language, the depersonalised world of Churchill's vision poses a challenge to director and cast alike; to have portrayed her three main characters with such compassion, complexity and wit is impressive. The opening scene, between the teenage Joan (Laura Murphy) and her aunt, Jane Brennan's guarded Harper, exhibits a wonderful dynamic of care and caution, of dependence and distrust. Both actors strike the right tone with their characters; Murphy's pale teenager reveals the horror she has seen at a perfect, sickening pace, and Brennan's Harper carries awful knowledge in her eyes, in her shoulders, but wills her face to give nothing away.
In the hat factory where the adult Joan works on the creations that the doomed prisoners will wear, her love for her colleague Todd, played with refreshing humour by Barry Ward, is as touching as her indifference to the fate of those who wear her hats is chilling. But then she does not see the prisoners; we do, and they are entertainment for us, too.
There is didacticism in Churchill's tactic, and at times Fay's use of the screen, combined with a hard roar of music, comes close to amplifying that tendency; while some of his material works superbly, other elements risk guiding the audience towards a position on war and, more seriously, locating the warfare in certain eras and cultures, which seems too limiting for a vision of this breadth. But, ultimately, the play's ring of truth conveys the reality that horror and injustice, until presented to our own eyes, shocking us out of the safety of jokes, will spread undeterred.
Runs until July 10th
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
The Altenberg Trio's midday concert on Wednesday got better the closer it came to our own time. The group's kid-gloves treatment of Mozart's Piano Trio in G, K564, conveyed the lightness of this most easy-going of works but not the carefree nature of its outer movements.
The teenage Debussy's Trio in G minor contains but a few ghostly pre-images of the mature composer. Leaving those aside, it is very much an apprentice work, and even the sophistication and care lavished on it by the Altenbergs couldn't mask the fact that its sole lifeline is its association with the name of Debussy.
The Altenberg's treatment of the Swiss composer Frank Martin's Trio On Irish Folk Tunes was in its own way a revelation. Their strictness and literalness made Martin's non- developmental approach from the 1920s sound like the work of some latter-day minimalist, as fresh at times as if it the music had been written yesterday.
The festival's major extravagance takes place each year on a Wednesday at St Brendan's church. This year's programme opened with Saint-Saëns's frivolous, often zany Septet. The scoring - trumpet (Mark O'Keeffe), string quartet (the Callino Quartet), double bass (Hans Roelofsen) and piano (Andrea Rebaudengo) - tells a lot, and the composer's high spirits the rest.
The evening's major offering was James MacMillan's 1997 Raising Sparks, a setting of poems by Michael Symmons Roberts. Roberts was moved to write them through an encounter with the ideas of Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730-97), in whose work he found striking connections with the current notoriety of Chernobyl. MacMillan responds with vivid word painting and illustrative instrumental brush strokes. A more incisive soloist than the Italian mezzo Cristina Zavalloni would be hard to imagine.
Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings is a work currently out of reach in Bantry, but Wednesday's closing concert offered the next best thing, Rudolph Leopold's realisation of Strauss's original conception for just seven strings: the Leipzig String Quartet with Hartmut Rohde (viola), Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello) and Hans Roelofsen (double bass).
The message is, I think, that we should be grateful for the intervention that caused Strauss to enlarge the ensemble. The scarcely relieved density of the seven players working so hard so much of the time creates a texture not unlike some sort of synthesized string organ: a thing of wonder in itself but not half as wonderful as the Metamorphosen we know and love.
