Reviews

Irish Times writers review Loveplay at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Gemma Hayes at Vicar Street and Cooney, Hill at the NCH.

Loveplay

Samuel Beckett Theatre

Gerry Colgan

The TCD School of Drama (final year Bachelor in Acting Studies) is offering this play by Moira Buffini, one of the new group of English playwrights. It was first produced in 2001, and is really just a series of mostly comic sketches with a basic gimmick to string them together.

The location remains the same throughout, starting as a temple in ancient Britain that is moved through a number of functional changes, and ends up as a modern dating agency.

It accommodates episodes of sexual love seen from many angles, beginning with a Roman soldier trying for sex from a local wench. He proposes to pay with a coin; she wants a chicken, so the deal is off. This is followed by a fairly nasty rape scene, and then moves on a few centuries to a nunnery with lesbian complications among the reverend ladies.

Then it's Renaissance time, with a wacky playwright trying to direct his wife and a male actor through a love scene. The best items are the 18th-century spinster with sexual hungers lurking beneath a pseudo-scientific exterior, and the final sketch in the dating agency.

But if the play is less than memorable, it still serves the purpose of the young actors well enough. Each of the cast is given enough to say, and they deliver their lines with clarity and confidence. The variety in the script is matched with appropriate modulations of speech and attitude, and Sinead Cuthbert's costumes add verisimilitude. Caroline Storey's minimal set design allows the action to flow.

Director Annabelle Comyn steers her cast nicely between the ebb and flow of the script, most successfully when it elicits laughter, but also with a delicate touch in the emotional moments.

Runs to Feb 18 at 7.30pm

Gemma Hayes

Vicar Street, Dublin

Peter Crawley

At a time when so many Irish singer-songwriters trade on murmurous fragility, presenting their bruised hearts to you in careful whispers, Gemma Hayes doesn't look like an obvious rebel.

A strawberry-blonde in skin-tight jeans, so petite that she sometimes threatens to vanish behind her acoustic guitar, the singer-songwriter from Ballyporeen is in fact a breed apart. Artfully dismantling the shy and damaged pose of her lyrics with noisy rock and jagged hooks, Hayes's music is a constant escape from expectations.

"I don't understand you better than most," she warns a hapless suitor on tonight's opener Another For the Darkness. Consider yourself warned.

The Roads Don't Love You may be the title of her recent album and the refrain of her vigorous Happy Sad, but tonight the song's acceleration tells a different story. Even the stagnant relationship of Hanging Around comes with a sense of diminishing detail, like a vanishing point in the rear-view mirror. With Hayes, the future is a wide-open highway.

Between songs, Hayes is personable, coquettish and darkly witty. She makes frequent jokes about her jeans to rabid reactions (spending considerably less time introducing her excellent band), while palming off a recent Meteor Award (for Best Irish Female Singer) with a dry remark on tiny celebrities, or introducing Easy on the Eye as a romantic hymn to the power of stalking.

Leaping from a low growl to her girlish upper register, or matching a cautious strum to a jagged guitar riff, Hayes is at once feminine and one of the lads. It's an unapologetic and natural balance; one in which the distorted energy of Let a Good Thing Go sits as well as a strikingly confident a cappella rendition of Ae Fond Kiss. And few others could emerge from the thrash and feedback of Lucky One with Hayes's winning, mock-concern: "Is my hair all right?" Hayes has little reason to worry. It's an unfettered performance that leaves not a strand out of place.

Cooney, Hill

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Tartini/Kreisler - Devil's Trill Sonata. Beethoven - Sonata in E flat Op 12 No 3. Wieniawski - Polonaise Brillante Op 4. Ravel - Sonata. Garrett Sholdice - Mira Al Aqua. Chopin/Milstein - Nocturne in C sharp minor. Prokofiev - Sonata in D Op 94

Cork violinist Elizabeth Cooney, who gave this year's NCH Rising Star recital, is among the select band of Irish string players to have made her mark in an international violin competition. She took the second prize (as well as the audience and test piece prizes) at the International Violin Competition of Sion Valais in Switzerland in 2002. She currently teaches at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, is a member of the Sans Souci Piano Trio, and saw her first CD come out on Tzar Records last year.

Her NCH programme, given with her regular pianist, Daniel Hill, was designed to put her through her paces in a wide range of repertoire, from Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata à la Kreisler (though Hill did not use the standard piano part for Kreisler's arrangement) right up to a new work by the young Irish composer Garrett Sholdice.

Cooney produces a tone that is easy and fluid. The devilish trilling effects in the Tartini, both those devised by Tartini and those by Kreisler, held no fears for her, nor did the rapid flights of Beethoven's early Sonata in E flat, Op 12 No 3.

Wieniawski's Polonaise showed her delighting in technical fireworks, and she tapped enthusiastically into the same vein for the notorious moto perpetuo finale of the sonata by Ravel.

There were a few moments of strain, Kreisler's swooping octaves at the end of the Tartini, some passing infelicities of intonation, and a few glitches of memory. But the major limitations were not in the area of technique. Although they work together regularly, Cooney and Hill did not show the unity of musical mind and finger that you would expect from a true partnership. There was both too much politeness (not getting in each other's way, as it were), and too much latitude (ensemble that was not quite spot-on) in their playing.

The two were heard at their best in Sholdice's specially-commissioned Mira Al Agua, which moves from gutsy low-range violin energy (almost as if emulating a guitar with a fuzz box) to a high-lying calm, with a range of other, matching, transformations along the way. And Nathan Milstein's arrangement of an early Chopin Nocturne showed a style of lyrical violin tone with a range of inflection and also a successful moulding of line and mood that stood head and shoulders above the rest of the evening.

Elizabeth Cooney tours to Ennis (Feb 21), Airfield House, Dublin (Feb 23), and Mallow (Feb 24), with Isabelle O'Connell (piano).