A "fascinating attempt to achieve the impossible" is among today's reviews.
Mimic
Galway Arts Festival Bank of Ireland Theatre
Written and performed by Raymond Scannell, this one-man show is a fascinating attempt to achieve the impossible. Focusing on Julian Neary, a washed-up Irish comedian who specialises in impersonations, Mimictries to find an original way of saying that there's no such thing as originality: everything is an imitation of something else, states Neary, who then demands that his audience treat this idea as if it's exciting and new.
Despite this apparent paradox, the show is surprisingly compelling. Scannell is seated at a piano for most of the play, delivering his character's story directly to the audience, while accompanying it with a live score. This allows him to create an interesting interplay between his vocal and musical performances.
We're presented with impersonations of Columbo, Margaret Thatcher, and Jimmy Stewart - and we hear snatches of familiar songs: the theme from Hill Street Blues, some Mozart, and The Smiths' Girlfriend in a Coma. Music also reveals aspects of Neary's personality that can't be represented verbally: as the character's life becomes more disjointed, so does the music.
The contrast between script and score is often interesting, but it also creates a problem: Scannell is immobilised from the neck down for most of the play. He uses facial expressions and voice to keep things lively, and director Tom Creed's lighting provides moments of visual stimulation. And the audience generally seems engaged, particularly by Scannell's description of his hero's upbringing. Nostalgic without being sentimental, that part of the play draws on 1980s pop culture and Wuthering Heightsto present the increasingly intense relationship between Neary and his adopted sister.
But the audience's attention obviously wavers in the play's final quarter, when Scannell takes us to a futuristic Ireland, which has fallen apart because it lost its sense of tradition. There's an intriguing parallel here between mimicry and heritage: both are presented as necessary re-enactments of scenes from our collective memory. That movement from the personal to the political deepens the play's consideration of originality and imitation. But it comes too late in the action - and happens too abruptly - to be fully persuasive.
At the Galway Arts Festival until Thurs. At the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Aug 10-11.
PATRICK LONERGAN
Stallerhof
The Granary, Cork
Stallerhof is a challenging play for both production company and audience. Here the mournfully-named Tragic Eyes Theatre Company has collaborated with The Granary Theatre for the Irish premiere of Franz Xavier Kroetz's The Farmyard.
Kroetz is a writer whose austere style carries the weight of honed perceptions, applied in this case to the circumstances, attitudes and responses of a family of small farmers on impoverished land. The design by Ruairí McKernan encapsulates the theme: a picture of rural deprivation in which the people are as dry and hard-wearing as their environment.
But in this presentation, directed by Lyndel Dowd, there seems no context from which place or people have grown, there is no atmosphere beyond these conditions.
Perhaps the point is that these events could happen in any rustic community, especially if, as is indicated here, life moves according to unyielding religious precepts. Again, perhaps this is another objective of Kroetz's work: precepts upheld by a rigid society can be as obstinate as known truths, as detrimental to content as they may be to wrong-doing. A farm-worker rapes a teenager, whose unloving and unlucky parents consider her mentally deficient. Two kinds of loneliness unite the girl and the labourer, but her pregnancy leads to his banishment and in her case to an attempted abortion. In such a rough-edged play, it is a pity that that particular event is not given more likelihood but perhaps the preparation, as signifying the intent, is all.
The supposition can't annul the feeling that the piece is too much for the company; it may be that Katharina Hehn's translation is lame, or that Kroetz's reputation is inflated, but the vital failure here is one of authority.
Bare-boned as it is, the dialogue has its moments of contradictory tenderness, of glimpses of what might be otherwise, but it is left to the lighting from Adam McElderry and sound design from Ciarán Ó Conaill and Lyndel Dowd to catch these fleeting emanations.
While Pauline McGlinchy and Róisín O'Donovan invest some emotion in their respective roles as mother and daughter, both Frank Prendergast and Cormac Costello seem to remain at a distance from their characters, as if they didn't really like them.
Which is disappointing, given the usual quality of the work these actors can produce, but quite understandable.
Until July 26
MARY LELAND
Tuite, RTÉ NSO/Pearce
NCH, Dublin
Sibelius Finlandia; Grieg Piano Concerto; Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5.
There was a full house for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall. The programme combined three of the most popular, tuneful and stirring works of the orchestral repertoire, and offered an effective foil to the gray, unsummery weather outside.
Colman Pearce conducted the programme as an ambitious romantic, ardent and full-blooded. He likes the sound of heavy brass under pressure, and both Sibelius's Finlandiaand Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony gave him plenty of scope in this regard.
The all-guns-blazing approach did have some self-limiting aspects. Pearce forewent a lot in the way of dynamic contrast by neglecting the lower end of the scale in favour of the upper.
And his particular style of eagerness found him often trying to cram rather too much into the foreground of the musical picture, which resulted in a sort of clutter, where instrumental lines jostled for attention rather than found a viable balance.
It's an approach which can carry a high emotional charge, particularly in the work of a composer like Tchaikovsky, who rarely stinted when it came to winding up the tension.
And Friday's audience responded enthusiastically to the thrills and spills manner.
Peter Tuite, the soloist in Grieg's Piano Concerto, is a musician of a different cast. He's a player who likes to take his time, to make musical points in a reflective manner, almost as if he's turning over his options as he goes along, before selecting the next particular nuance or deciding on the shape of an upcoming rubato.
Tuite's is an unusual take on this particular concerto, which is the work of a man in his mid-20s, a composer with a remarkable, free, lyrical vein. Tuite at times impeded the flow, as if he felt the need to restore decorum to a piece which at times gushes with such ease.
Whether you agreed with the style or not, the communication of his intentions was carried off with a firmness, conviction and technical savoir-faire that certainly commanded respect.
MICHAEL DERVAN
Irish Youth Choir/ Beardsell
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
Greg Beardsell, the new artistic director of the Irish Youth Choir, presents himself as a cheery chap. He introduced himself to the audience at Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, even mustered a comprehensible if strangely mangled cúpla focail (he's from Harrogate), and spoke about most of the musical items before he conducted them.
He comported himself with such a bouncy air that one could have been forgiven for wondering about his qualifications to take charge of the first half of a programme called Darkness to Light.
In truth, of course, there was nothing to worry about. Beardsell may look of a generation with most of his singers (whose ages range from 17 to 29), but his handling of the choir (and massaging of the audience) showed signs of an experienced hand.
The programme ranged from Byrd ( Ave verum corpus) and Tallis ( Salvator mundi) up to Knut Nystedt ( Immortal Bach), Patrick Larley ( Lake Isle of Innisfree), Jonathan Dove ( In beauty may I walk) and Eric Whitacre ( Sleep).
Beardsell's approach, with its concentration on the easy-listening end of new music, was not just warm-hearted, but also at all times solicitous of nicely-resonant and finely-balanced choral tone.
As with most Irish choirs, the higher voices in the IYC significantly outnumber the lower. But Beardsell's sharp ear and careful control ensured that the men could more than hold their own, apart from a few moments of tenor strain in high-lying passages.
Beardsell was highly impressive in the spatially dispersed dismembering of a Bach chorale by Knut Nystedt, whose Immortal Bach uses a kind of freeze-frame technique, with leaching between frames, as if from the seeping of water-colour paints.
And his handling of Moses Hogan's arrangement of The Battle of Jerichowas a tour-de-force which brought the audience to its feet.
The concert was also noteworthy for introducing Thomas Kehoe, the IYC's new conductor in training, who secured an atmospheric timelessness in the Enya-tinged glows of Eric Whitacre's Sleep.
MICHAEL DERVAN
