Irish Times critics review Five Kinds of Silence in Andrew's Lane, Calico and Banciu, Manut with the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet.
Five Kinds of Silence, Andrew's Lane, Dublin
The isolation of families, the helplessness of children, the self-perpetuating cycle of emotional, physical and sexual abuse - these are the bleak zones entered by the English playwright, Shelagh Stephenson. Director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh and Calypso Productions follow Stolen Child, which tackled the abuse of children in industrial schools, with this anatomisation of one man's tyranny over his domestic kingdom.
Working backwards from the murder of Billy (Garrett Keogh) by his two adult daughters, the play presents his emotional formation in a series of highly wrought monologues. Superbly performed by Keogh, they have a disturbing intensity and menace, heightened by Eamon Fox's lighting. We see the roots of Billy's aggression in his childhood in the north of England, scarred by violence and alcoholism. Interwoven with his soliloquies are episodes from the aftermath of the shooting - his daughters' and wife's interviews with police, lawyers and psychiatrists, which illustrate the effects of years of abuse.
Unable to find words to describe what happened to them, the sisters (Una Kavanagh and Mary Murray) are baffled by the psychological probing, the constant questions about how they feel. "We come from a different world," they say. They can't blame their mother (Bernadette McKenna), who was equally terrorised and incapable of protecting them. Her own childhood experience of extreme neglect and abuse had not equipped her well: as a girl she had cut her arms with a bread knife, identifying with Christ's suffering. "He must have seen me coming," she says, remembering her first meeting with Billy.
All of this is acutely observed. But, serious and shocking though the subject is, the play remains unsatisfying as drama. The daughters are not fully embodied characters: while we see that they are women whose spirits have been crushed and emotional development arrested, they seem too undifferentiated, both by the script and the direction, which has them huddled together, jumping, shaking and screaming in response to Billy's every move, in a way that at times is, unfortunately, almost comical.
Because the shooting comes at the beginning, there is no dramatic journey; we are presented with a series of illustrations and explorations of the subject of abuse, which, while supplying food for thought, does not engage the emotions. - Helen Meany
Calico, Duke of York Theatre, London
The English playwright Michael Hastings has a gift of empathy. In Calico [which opened at the Duke of York's theatre in London on Wednesday night] he breathes convincing life into the Irish Joyces - as James, Nora and their son Giorgio face the terrible crisis of his sister Lucia's developing madness.
Hastings does just as well with two catalytic interlopers in the family's Paris apartment in the year of 1928 - Giorgio's plain-speaking New York married lover Helen Fleischman; and, more crucially, Silent Sam, the young Beckett, acolyte of James and loved obsessionally from their first meeting by Lucia. When Beckett comes to work as Joyce's secretary, unpaid ("I'd no intention of offering you anything less," says James), they bat portmanteau phrases back and forth, or essay a little flamenco. Meanwhile Sam's mentor daily draws the coverlet of Finnegan's Wake over his head and ignores the quivering tension around him.
Nora valiantly tries to hold the ailing family together, but Lucia alarms her: "I've no idea what you'll do next, but whatever it is I'll ignore it," says Nora, who is also worried about the effect of Giorgio's hectic American liaison on his singing career.
Lucia begins to creep out and stay out all night, appears in Sam's apartment unannounced, shouts obscenities as she rolls on the floor - sometimes on polite social occasions. She speaks with the embarrassing honesty of someone without inhibitions: revealing that she used to "pull Giorgio's mickey" in their younger years.
Her lifeline - almost literally - is Sam. He is "in her dream" and he plays along with her fantasy of their marriage. He calls her "Mrs Beckett", they talk about the birth of their imaginary child and she is touchingly grateful to him for this. As her madness increases and the asylum looms, her father roundly declares: "There's nothing at all wrong with you that we can't cope with at home." The final scene, in a terrifying institution, destroys that hope.
This witty, touching and above all intelligent play is likely to be welcomed by Joyceans for its generalised truth, but may leave some scope for enjoyable nit-picking over accuracy. It is given a sharp, visually exciting production by Edward Hall - taking full advantage of Francis O'Connor's magnificent art nouveau apartment set.
There's a breathtaking performance from Romola Garai as Lucia. Full of coltish awkwardness and grace, her legs seems to have a life of their own and her whole body-language breathes an edgy sensuality. Imelda Staunton has some of the best lines ("I don't know whether I'm whistlin' or fartin'") and makes the most of them. Jamie Beamish (Giorgio) does a slightly naive niceness very well indeed; and Dermot Crowley, who seems a bit weighty for the usually slender James, movingly reveals little flashes of tenderness towards his beloved daughter. And the young English actor Daniel Weyman played the silent, tortured kindness of Sam with great sensitivity. His final line, as Lucia lies tethered in her hospital bed, stays in the mind: "I only knew how to say nothing." - Bernard Adams
Banciu, Mantu, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, City Hall, Waterford
Mozart - Quartet in E flat K428.
Stanford - Quartet No 2.
Dvorák - String Sextet in A Op 48.
The large musical output of Dublin-born Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) is not much celebrated in musical life in Ireland. His Anglican church music is still heard, as are some other choral pieces, a few songs and an occasional piece for organ. From time to time one of his six Irish rhapsodies or his Third Symphony, the Irish, may be called into service in an orchestral programme with a national theme. But apart from that opportunities to hear his larger works are pretty rare, and more likely to be found in north of the Border.
In Dublin the major exceptions that stand out have been in 1988 (when the Ulster Orchestra offered the Seventh Symphony and Colman Pearce conducted the 1905 Serenade for nonet) and 1994 (when the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and NSO gave the 1896 Requiem a concert airing in connection with a Marco Polo recording).
Stanford, who was appointed professor of music at Cambridge at the age of 35, and professor of composition at London's new Royal College of Music six years later, taught a generation of British composers. But, in spite of his position as a mover and shaker in British musical life, not least in the advocacy of Brahms, the man whose Irish rhapsodies had been espoused by conductors of the eminence of Hans Richter and Willem Mengelberg lived long enough to find his work sidelined. He had difficulty finding a publisher for many of his later works, and his operas quickly disappeared.
The RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet has now taken up Stanford's cause, and in Waterford on Tuesday opened a tour which will take his Second String Quartet of 1891 to five Irish venues. George Bernard Shaw, no friend of the friends of Brahms, referred to this work with some surprise as "a very good Quartet in A minor by Professor Villiers Stanford", and, musically, its academic credentials are impeccable.
The contrapuntal writing of the first movement is a bit too neatly fitted and lacking in tension in the manner of Mendelssohn. But everything works smoothly, as throughout the piece, and in the Vanbrugh's account of the finale there was a sense of inner vitality, of genuine expressive urging, that set this movement apart.
The performances of Mozart's Quartet in E flat, K428, and Dvorák's String Sextet (given with Andreea Banciu, and Adrian Mantu, the viola-player and cellist of theGalway ConTempo Quartet) were on the heavy side. The Vanbrugh's are extremely fond of a rich-textured finish, in the pursuit of which they frequently elide composers' carefully calculated distinctions of dynamic. This may be a fault picked up from performing in acoustically under-nourished venues. In the agreeably open-sounding City Hall in Waterford the effect quickly became wearing. - Michael Dervan
