Reviews

Irish Times writers review Marianne Faithfull at the Olympia Theatre, and Blowfish in The Ark, Sigur Rós at the Ambassador, Peter Schreier and András Schiff at the NCH and Soldiers of the Queen in Downpatrick

Marianne Faithfull

Olympia Theatre, Dublin

Review by Siobhán Long

times she has the beatific smile of an altar boy, at others the baleful scowl of a world-weary traveller. Marianne Faithfull has never succumbed to the slow death of predictability. Watching her cradle her audience in the palm of her hand was a lesson in the fine art of politics as much as it was a reflection of the considerable place she inhabits in the affections of a vast swathe of punters whose collective birth certificates span four decades.

Faithfull's stage persona is two parts cabaret to one part rock chick. Mannered gestures abound, pelvis thrusts forth with nonchalant abandon, and the inevitable cigarette casts a smoky haze across the lead guitarist's six string; but this is no feline coyness aimed at disarming her audience; it's a bareboned insistence on revealing the warts as well as the beauty spots - and how Marianne Faithfull possesses both in alarming quantities.

She's a woman who's reinvented herself in recent years, buoyed, no doubt, by a succession of song writing partners, all of whom are young, male, and thrive on a tendency to plant their tongues firmly in their cheeks when it comes to putting pen to paper. Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Beck. Faithfull doesn't waste her time swapping riffs with any old two-bit songster. And it shows.

The songs are as bitter, as sweet, as hardnosed and as lonesome as you'd expect from a woman who's seen and done it all a million times - and then gone and done it again. Kissing Time is suitably low down and dirty to make the hairs stand on the back of the neck of any self-respecting red-blooded male or female. Like Being Born is a suitably schizoid take on the niceties of true love (replete with Beck-inspired lyrical minimalism), and her cover of Will Oldham's divine A King At Night sits so comfortably inside her skin that you wonder whether they might share at least a few strands of DNA.

Of course the old favourites draw the crowd in most effectively. The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan sounded even more poignant and yet somehow disturbingly surreal in the hands of this ultimate rock survivor, while Broken English shocked with its contemporary resonances which even George Dubya would do well to wrestle with.

Agnes Bernelle insouciance crossed with Janice Joplin nonchalance. Somehow one suspects that Faithfull's itinerary will take her down even

eWebEditPro.event = {type:'dblclickelement', srcName:'urlbody'};onDblClickElementHandler(oelement)eWebEditPro.event = {type:'execcommand', srcName:'urlbody'};onExecCommandHandler(strcmdname, strtextdata, ldata)more wayward trails in the future than the ones she's already navigated - and judging by the hairpin bends she negotiated at the Olympia, it's bound to be an interesting ride.

Booking hotline: 01 817 3333, or see www.dublintheatrefestival.com

Blowfish

The Ark, Dublin

Review by Christine Madden

must be such a liberating form of drama. Where else could you chew gum jeeringly at the one person not quick enough to grab a piece, then blow bubbles with it, cover your face with it like a bird mask, and sneeze, letting it string around the side of your face like snot?

Barabbas return to the Ark with this latest production, written and directed by Veronica Coburn, which at first seemed like the Tellytubbies' version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The actors - Amy Conroy, Ruth Lehane, Niamh McGrath, Michael O'Reilly and Karen Scully - came onto an austere white set in white bulbous costumes, designed by Kathy Kavanagh, like a flock of misshapen turnips.

The bleached vista provided the perfect canvas for Paul Keogan's superb lighting effects which, combined with the occasional deus-ex-macchina intervention of Debra Salem's score, signalled changes in the lives and times of our five anti-heroes.

The play itself was hallucinogenic, the characters first appearing in the huddled angst of their protective group, unfurling to develop individuality, with its wants, desires, greeds and conflicts, the need for leadership and distinction, and the resettled togetherness - "we can fit" - at the end.

In manifesting their alter-egos - or alter-ids, for that matter - the troupe used the eloquence of their physical and facial language, punctuated by few words and fewer coherent sentences. It is a tribute to their combined teamwork, and the construction of the play as a surrealistic Bildungsroman of the schoolyard sandpit, that no one actor outshone the rest. Whether this was actually a play for children, however, is debatable.

My two young companions cautiously "liked it" and "thought it was funny", but didn't understand it - perhaps, at 10 and 12, they were too old for the very childish behaviour and world view of the characters.

For the very young and for adults, however, the play should resonate.

Peter Schreier (tenor), András Schiff (piano)

Review by Michael Dervan

Die schöne MüllerinSchubert

NCH, Dublin

Hungarian pianist András Schiff began his series of three concerts within the NCH/Irish Times celebrity series with a performance of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, in which he partnered the German tenor, Peter Schreier.

Schreier and Schiff are old partners in this repertoire - they recorded the song cycle together in the late 1980s - and Schreier's light-toned lyricism seems totally apt for the style of the music.

At the NCH, however, Schiff didn't seem to be entirely at one with the often delicately-expressed manner of the singing. It may sound surprising, but there were times when the piano-playing strayed beyond the range of independently-minded partnership and into an area better suited to soloistic display. There were moments when the spirit of the late Shura Cherkassky could almost have been flitting around, seeking out those strange perspectives and inner voices which he so loved to highlight, irrespective of their musical cogency.

Schiff's playing was, of course, at all times impeccably polished, although the music-making did become distracting in the face of the self-restraint of Schreier's delivery.

Schreier is now in his late 60s, but the voice, which is quite small, is miraculously well-preserved. Only some moments of climactic stress and a whitening of tone on high notes reminded one of the inescapable passing of the years.

His manner was easy and engaging, never over-dramatised.

The joys and sorrows of the young miller, and his ultimate, watery demise, were communicated with a sort of sober clarity that was particularly affecting, perhaps in part because of the very nature of its special reserve.

Soldiers of the Queen

Downpatrick

Review by Jane Coyle

IS a fact, frequently overlooked and disregarded, that a great many Irish Catholics played a vital role in the survival and defence of the British Empire. Among them were the ancestors of Downpatrick man Damian Smyth, whose family history forms the factual basis and emotional bedrock of this, his first play, at the Down Civic Arts Centre.

As a well-regarded poet, critic, editor and, since 1995, public affairs officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, words are the tools of Smyth's trade.

If they are occasionally overused in this passionate, cleverly-constructed play, it is with confidence, lyricism and a sharp ear for the speech patterns of both central characters - George Linton, an innocent young foot-soldier in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (Paraic Duignan), and an elderly Boer (Gordon Fulton), grief-stricken by the loss of his sons and the predatory intentions of the British upon his homeland.

Sheila Godbolt has designed a strikingly naturalistic set of arid rocks and boulders, rearing out of the dusty South African veldt beneath a dramatic, angry night sky.

Out of it peers the white face of the dying Linton and the bulky, bearded figure of the Boer, divided by the trenches of war, yet hidden from each other's sight.

During a brief pause in hostilities, called to bury the dead and remove the wounded, they strike up a unlikely liaison in which each learns some uncomfortable truths about the other's motivation and personal circumstances.

As the hours tick by, the hallucinating Linton is visited by ghosts and visions from past and future - his fiesty mother Bella (Roma Tomelty), his mischievous brother Harry, killed in action in India (Kevin Elliott), and his tormented great-nephew (Mark Claney), a republican volunteer in the early days of the Troubles.

It is for the latter that their greatest derision is reserved, for waging his war at home, bringing shame and sorrow to his own doorstep and blowing himself to bits in a botched bombing attempt.

Under Colin Carnegie's direction, there is little physical movement open to the two adversaries, while the three ghosts have their work cut out in negotiating the picturesque, but physically challenging set.

But this is an absorbing, atmospheric evening, underlining the tragedy of generations of young men, who left home in search of adventure in exotic places.

Too late, like Linton, they discovered the fool's gold of the Queen's shilling, dying in their thousands beneath foreign, far-off constellations, leaving sorrowing families to pick up the pieces and cherish the memories.

Sigur Rós

The Ambassador, Dublin

Peter Crawley

do you do for an encore? The question barely seems to trouble the avant-rock quartet Sigur Rós, as Iceland's unlikely heroes follow their sublime crossover album Ágætis Byrjun (better known by its cover art as "angel foetus") with the desultorily titled, ( ), more likely to be referred to as "the brackets" album.

Unconcerned with such pedantic industry conventions as song titles, Sigur Rós have only recently assigned names to their new material, although such descriptions as Njósnavélin (aka the nothing song) scarcely signal a compromise. That self-effacement, however, seems to be the band's strategy.

Comprising the bulk of Sigur Rós's two-night residency in The Ambassador, these new songs continue to plough the same furrow of the quartet's geographic concerns, where volcanic landscapes inform the music, while lyrics (in made-up Hopelandish) form aesthetic impressions rather than literal communication.

Writing his own rulebook, vocalist Jónsi Birgisson can lead his group, dexterously augmented by a four-person string section, into Vaka, a song of such musical and emotional intensity that any other band would spend all night building up to it.

Here, however, it's the first tune, and the stakes are never lowered.

One consequence is that the night feels like a set of encores; a concert of closing numbers where each conclusion lays a challenge - follow that.

Similarly unconventional are the methods used to extract such dense, keening sounds from their common instruments. Watching Birgisson beginning to saw the bridge of his electric Gibson with a cello bow is not a sight you see often. Listening to the ensuing chaos you quickly understand why.

But the increasingly frayed bow also elicits the transcendent movements of Svefn-g-englar, where warm resounding organ chords and icily shrill vocals entwine against the merest percussion to lull you into a world beyond words.