Reviews

A look at the world of the arts

Hang-Gliding

Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

Two short plays by Welsh writers, under the joint title of Hang-Gliding, are enjoying a short run at the Pavilion this week. It is a pity that audiences are unlikely to share the pleasure.

Crossing the Bar comes first, a surreal drama about a young remand prisoner who attempts to commit suicide. Somewhere between life and death, he encounters a medieval nun who accompanies him on his journey. Trapped in a place called Dread, they must find a way to survive, with a mysterious prison guard in charge. The nun disappears, and the prisoner eventually recovers.

The play by Lucy Gough was first seen 12 years ago, and has hardly improved since then. Time to let go, one would think.

Then there is a new play by Antony Pickthall, The Stunning Flight of Archibald Bone, a story of a charlatan inventor from the Industrial Revolution. In a comic fantasy, he seeks money from capitalists to back his nutty ideas and fund his lifestyle. Meantime, women find him attractive and vice versa. He plans to redeem himself by taking flight on home-made wings, but just as he is about to soar, it all comes tumbling down. The play is little more than a farce laced with weak comedy.

There are a few pieces of furniture cobbled together to make an occasional set of sorts, with the audience seated at both sides of the stage. Both plays are directed by Ciaran Taylor, and played by some well-known Irish actors. In the new play, John A Murphy plays the melodramatic lead with gusto, a waste of his talent. Susannah De Wrixon, Karl Quinn, Carl Kennedy, Aoife O'Donnell and others romp about as if they believe in what they are doing. Wish I could.

Ends tomorrow

Gerry Colgan

Moonlight Mickeys

Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin

"What is it with you and the pictures?" The question, asked of Big Mickey Murphy by his older brother, confusingly named Small Mickey Murphy, in Colin Thornton's breezily amusing civil-war era caper, has never much troubled Calipo Theatre Company.

Opening with the soft whir of a film projector and incorporating not so much a narrative as a steady cascade of classic film clips, it is the work of a director who has never had hesitations about bringing the moving image to the stage.

In other hands multimedia can seem like a distracting gimmick, but boasting a technique refined through years of trial and relatively little error, Darren Thornton's lunchtime production strikes an effortless balance.

It's a smooth approach mirrored by performers Colin O'Donoghue and Peter Daly who happily display their Mickeys - Big and Small respectively - among a panoply of silly caricatures with still sillier names.

Narrating from beyond the grave, O'Donoghue tells of how he "nearly made it to Yonkers" before being gunned down in a Dundalk train station in the arms of his sweetheart (a fun, silent cameo from Janet Moran). Who shot him? The mystery unfurls over a week, daftly measured out between Republican garrisons, the siblings' joint spell in prison, Small Mickey's crudely simple escape and Big Mickey's entertainingly baroque break-out plan.

Originally staged in Dundalk Gaol, the play apparently sent Colin Thornton riffling through the prison's archives. Little of his research seems to have made it into the script intact, however; unless civil war rhetoric really did extend to phrases like, "for a bamboozle this big I'll need a couple of hoodwinks".

The hoodwinks in question, going by names such as Scrounger, Slippery or Jini Joe Johnson, might be better summed up as "speech impediment", "hard of hearing" and "crotch-grabber" - character notes which hardly present Daly and O'Donoghue with a Stanislavskian challenge. Still, there is something winning about their energetic leaps between characters and something more charming about a play so content to wear its flimsiness on its sleeve.

In Calipo's last production, Wunderkind, a character was dispirited to have constructed something merely "entertaining". That, however, is the summit of Moonlight Mickeys' ambitions. Never freighted by the leaden realities of history or politics, it chooses instead the light escape of a matinee fantasy, something that its arch hokum, cinematic fillips and skilful pace achieve with knowing, admirable ease.

Until Dec 9

Peter Crawley

Lang, Czech PO/Belohlávek

NCH, Dublin

Dvorák - Symphonic Variations. Rachmaninov - Paganini Rhapsody. Dvorák - Symphony No 8

The young Chinese pianist Lang Lang is one of those performers who seems to love the whole business of engaging with his public. For this appearance with the Czech Philharmonic at the National Concert Hall, he came prepared with a special encore. Impressed with the honour of being included in the hall's 25th anniversary season, he explained, he would play a nocturne by John Field.

In fact he played the nocturne by Field, the one in B flat that has eclipsed all others in popularity. He played it with an almost nonchalant grace, creating the effect of stylishly casual summer wear, creases and all, rather than the more familiar style of strictly formal evening wear. Although the finish was impeccable, the novelty of the musical outcome was less than fully convincing.

Novelty is a key element of Lang's interpretative approach. He's one of those musicians who gives a very strong sense of playing as he pleases, and of having an array of technical resources that can effortlessly take him where he wants to go.

He doesn't often want to go where particular pieces of music have mostly been heard to go in the past, and his performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was full of surprises, especially in the way he so often chose to blend in with the orchestra rather than stand out against it.

The Czech Philharmonic, playing under its one-time music director Jirí Belohlávek, was altogether more central in its musical approach. Its playing throughout the evening had that sense of unexceptionable rightness which is so easy to take for granted.

Everything was in its place, shapely and in proportion. Nothing was misrepresented, the composer was king. And two dancing encores, by Smetana and Dvorák, seemed only to leave the audience wishing for more.

Michael Dervan