Review

Hollander, Shostakovich - Cork Midsummer Festival:

Audiences may have become accustomed to the idea of a play within a play, but a house within a house is a relatively new idea and it is not long before the 14 members of the public allowed to walk through Hammergrin's production of Hollander(at 8 North Mall) realise that nothing in this production is as it seems, least of all the doors. Written by John McCarthy, Ciaran O Conaill and Sara-Jane Power, the piece brings to a kind of life the former proprietor of a mansion decaying even as the play unfolds.

Henry William Hollander, of Cork’s North Mall, has two obsessions: the disappearance of his wife, who may or may not have been accidentally entombed in the cellar; and the coincidence of this event with the great “Battle of the Starlings”, which darkened the skies over Cork city in 1621.

Chronology is not much respected in this script; instead, history is engaged in a series of arbitrary references that make a kind of sense in a scenario in which fireplaces move or hang upside down, chandeliers glow from the floor and visitors to the highly decorated chapel are blindfolded.

Confidently directed by Sara-Jane Power, and with John McCarthy both pathetic and terrifying as the distracted Hollander, the production gleefully reimagines the 18th-century house in which it is located, thanks to designer Ronan Fitzgibbon with obvious apologies to the Irish Georgian Society.

A different kind of distraction is the theme of Shostakovichat Cork School of Music. The frenzies of cultural terrorism under Stalin animate this portrait of the Russian composer, written and performed by Jack Healy in a Theatre Makers production for the festival.

Healy presents the musician in the clutches of an intense personal crisis resulting from the regime's denunciation of his 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. There were to be further denunciations, public humiliations and apologies before Shostakovich was restored to legitimacy and recognition, and Healy, while not taking the story quite as far as that strange restitution process, does acknowledge the lingering sense of equivocation which clouded Shostakovich's international reputation after the death of Stalin.

Cormac O’Connor’s sound design is a reminder that music has its own ethics, but O’Connor’s choices as a director are compromised by the dimensions of the Curtis Auditorium and by his decision to allow a lot of the action to take place where at least half the audience are unable to see it without great discomfort. It must be allowed, however, that like the seeking spotlights of Kath Geraghty’s lighting design and like a little too much of the script itself, this may have a metaphorical purpose.

Hollanderruns until June 27; Shostakovichruns until tomorrow; Cork Midsummer Festival continues until June 28; corkmidsummer.com