Reviews

Irish Times writers review Tosca at the Bishop's Palace, Waterford,  Last Call at Mountjoy Prison and NCC/Spicer at the  National Gallery, Dublin

Tosca

Christ Church Cathedral, Theatre Royal, Bishop's Palace, Waterford

Michael Dervan

It's more than 10 years since Puccini's Tosca was treated to a kind of ultimate production. A TV spectacular offered a Tosca relayed live from Rome, using the actual locations specified by the libretto, the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle, the Farnese Palace, and Castel Sant' Angelo.

The new Tosca presented on Thursday and Friday by Waterford's Theatre Royal and Spraoi, takes a leaf out of the authentic location book, by offering the first act in the city's Christ Church Cathedral, the second in "Scarpia's improvised headquarters" in the Theatre Royal, and taking the third outdoors, between the cathedral and the Bishop's Palace, where the singers and instrumental ensemble were amplified.

Michael Hunt's production, designed by Mike Leahy and Dermot Quinn, was one that conceived Tosca as street theatre. Scarpia arrived with a bevy of grimy, gun-toting guards, who menaced the audience, and herded them from location to location as if handling a group of prisoners.

I was lucky to be seated near the front of the cathedral, close to the scene of the action, where the flight of Peter Grant's escaped Angelotti promised great things - every word was clear (the work was sung in English), the voice strong and commanding.

But the arrival of Martin Higgins's Sacristan threw us straight into a world of strong vocal projection and almost total verbal obscurity. The hot and cold effect affected more than the singing and persisted throughout the evening.

Constance Novis's Tosca and David Curry's Cavaradossi made an attractive pair of young lovers, but Curry didn't quite manage to get right on to the pitch of all his high notes, and Novis's killing of Scarpia was so totally over the top it resulted in ripples of laughter.

Mario Solimene's Scarpia had tough-man baddie written all over him, from the state of his leather great coat, to his domineering stance, and even his dalliance with a whore before his Act II encounter with Tosca.

A sense of menace is, of course, as much about what's not expressed as what is. Solimene presented the forcefulness of a henchman on the ascent rather than the security of an evil-doer who's living out the full achievement of his ambitions.

Tosca is one of the most sheerly spectacular of Puccini's scores, but there was little of its spine-tingling excitement left in the reduction conducted by Duncan Robertson, whose shaky control delivered only the palest of reminders of what the music actually sounds like.

Strangely, for a production taking so much trouble with regard to location, the great church procession of Act I was shirked, a wise decision, perhaps, given the none-too-confident choral singing of Madrigallery.

Yet, warts and all, hot or cold, this production achieved what seemed to be its main goals, to take opera out of the opera house, to engage its audience, and to make a splash by being different.

Last Call

Mountjoy Prison, Dublin

Sara Keating

The genial wardens of Mountjoy Prison conduct a pre-show ritual drawn from the prison's history before Ciaran Creagh's new play, Last Call. On the tour of Mountjoy's hang house, which executed its last prisoner in the 1950s, the uniformed guide introduces the ghosts of the 146 prisoners who died there in the 100 years after the prison opened in 1850.

In the small prison museum, grim and grizzly artefacts, such as a noose used in an execution and the autographs of four prisoners condemned for murder, tell a chilling tale of criminal history. On the way to the prison's auditorium, the wardens point out the D Wing and the D Wall immortalised in Brendan Behan's prison drama, The Quare Fellow, quoting lyrics from the play's anthem, The Auld Triangle, which remind us of the real history that sowed the seeds of Last Call .

Last Call is a fictional play set in the 1950s, two years after The Quare Fellow opened at the Pike Theatre. The personal history of the author is intimately connected to the prison's history: his grandfather, Patrick, and his father, Timothy, both served as prison officers at Mountjoy. Timothy Creagh was one of the wardens assigned to attend to Michael Manning the night before his execution. Creagh's presence was specifically requested by Manning, who would become the last man to swing from the gallows in Ireland.

While in Behan's play "the quare fellow" never materialises on stage, in Last Call the condemned man, Barty Maguire, is the centre of the action. The legacy of the institutions of the early Irish Free State, the morality of the death penalty, and individual responsibility for criminal wrongdoing all come into question as Barty desperately tries to delay his inevitable fate.

Jim Roche plays the unbalanced murderer, who is willing to manipulate potential allies and even murder again in order to save himself from death for a few more days. Patrick McGrath and John Anthony Murphy play the good-cop/ bad-cop roles under the astute direction of John Delaney.

The on-stage plot is worked out with as much subtlety as an EastEnders Christmas special, but as the real prison wardens usher the audience out into the freedom of the city, the drama of the evening ends on a more satisfying note.

NCC/Spicer

National Gallery, Dublin

Andrew Johnstone

The second concert in the National Chamber Choir's Eros and Thanatos series took a 20th-century British angle on the themes of love and death.

At the helm was leading English choral specialist Paul Spicer, a conductor and composer whose connoisseurship of his native repertory is notable. For this, his NCC debut, his choices fell on composers who might be said to have rocked the cradle, rather than the boat, of the British choral tradition.

Spicer's readings were free of mannerisms, and by avoiding exaggerated articulations and extreme tempos he kept the texture smooth and the temperature moderate. By upholding a roughly constant pace throughout Hubert Parry's valedictory motet Lord, Let Me Know Mine End, he brought continuity and connectedness to the highly sectionalised music, but underplayed its strong yet carefully calculated contrasts of mood.

With the Requiem by Herbert Howells came idiosyncratically atmospheric sounds that seemed to owe their inspiration more to the roaming of fingers over a keyboard than to the stimulation of a particular text or motif.

In contrast, Kenneth Leighton's What Love of This Is Thine? was more constructively contrapuntal, and Elgar's part-songs The Shower, The Fountain and Love's Tempest clothed the words in intriguing and madrigal-like garb.

There was a certain freshness, too, in the chromatic polyphony of Arnold Bax's This Worldes Joie. It was here that the tenors' characteristically heroic contributions were at their most apposite.

Though the men's voices tended to err on the side of robustness against considerable refinement in the soprano line, the balance was helped by a well-developed tone from the altos. Generally, the singers seemed comfortable with the music and with Spicer's easy-going direction of it.

But this wasn't a programme to push the NCC to the limits of its technical capacity or stylistic intrepidity.