Reviews

Reviewed: The Desert Lullaby, Ulster Orchestra, Shirley Valentine and Tin Hat Trio

The Desert Lullaby Friarsgate Theatre, Kilmallock

The fragile structure of Jennifer Johnston's play The Desert Lullaby is given substance by the performances of Geraldine Plunkett and Eileen Colgan, although to say so is a reminder that nothing less could have been expected from these players.

In a Galloglass production, which has toured the country from Roscommon to Wexford, the story emerges in unwieldy flash-backs heralded by the soliloquies of Plunkett, a gentry survivor of incest, unmarried motherhood and incarceration in a mental hospital.

Her monstrous mother, a war-widow of a kind familiar to Johnston's readers, still dominates Flora's memories, shared to some degree by Colgan's old family retainer Nellie.

This layering of incident and recall, allowing a tantalising but undeveloped suggestion in the presence of the young Nellie, gives the play some weight.

Both actresses manage the presentation of their thoughts with beautiful verbal balance and although Caroline FitzGerald's direction is applied with a casual hand they bring their own sense of rhythm to a script which excavates the plot from a catafalque of prose.

Distancing the events through the use of narrative also banishes dramatic tension and the impact of small details - as in the dull clinking of champagne glasses which should have rung true - are ignored.

Suspicions of coincidence piled upon unlikelihood are not lulled by simply being told that this or that happened and the retrospective action which might have enlightened us is hindered by Sabine Dargent's incoherent setting.

All the same, Johnston is very well-served by this intelligent cast, among whom Aileen Mythen as young Nellie shines like a beacon, warning of another play altogether.

Opening at the Everyman Palace, Cork tonight. Tel 021 4501673 - Mary Leland

Ulster Orchestra

Rumon Gamba

Ulster Hall, Belfast

The Washington Post - Sousa

Adagio for Strings - Barber

I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair - Rodgers

Can't help lovin' dat man - Kern

So in love - Porter

Three Places in New England -

Cello Concerto - Dvorák

It's fifty years since the New York City Opera admitted Kern's Showboat to its repertory, but until recently the idea of the Ulster Orchestra performing songs from musicals in one of its subscription concerts would have seemed unlikely.

The question is not whether this music is at home in the cultured environment of a classical concert, but whether the performers are at home in the style.

Mary Carewe certainly is; it was the effect of hearing her voice through loudspeakers, when everything else in the concert was "acoustic", that was jarring, not the performances or the repertory.

Most of the styles ever used by American composers, colloquial, modernist, romantic, and so on, are to be found in the music of Ives, often simultaneously.

The most elusive of the Three Places, the first, came over very clearly under Gamba, but General Puttnam's Camp lacked the verve shown in the Sousa march.

American music certainly doesn't lack variety, and nobody, listening to Gamba's noble interpretation of the Barber Adagio, could accuse it of lacking depth.

Li Wei, who gave us the original version of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto last year, returned for the Dvorák Concerto, which as a product of his American years fits the theme of the evening.

His light tone was always agreeable, there was plenty of agility, and plenty of feeling in individual passages, but the interpretation as a whole doesn't yet add up.

Gamba's direction was likewise sympathetic, but one missed a firm grasp of where the music was going. - Dermot Gault

Shirley Valentine Andrews Lane Theatre

The story of Willy Russell's play is well known. Shirley, whose surname was Valentine until Joe Bradshaw came along to change it, is a 42-year old housewife for whom life has lost meaning.

Her two self-centred children have grown up and gone, and Joe has long deteriorated into a despotic wage-earner, insensitive and bossy husband.

Then neighbour Jane, a pseudo-feminist, decides to take Shirley on a two-week holiday to a Greek island.

She can't go, of course, but somehow does, and finds in the leisurely Mediterranean life a tolerance and freedom she has never known.

Joe rants on the phone and attempts a flying visit to retrieve his chattel, but Shirley is gone for good, working in a bar and independent.

The Liverpool-born author has a flair for depicting oppressed women with independent minds, other examples being Educating Rita and Blood Brothers.

He is intellectually and emotionally involved with the working class and their idea of freedom, a philosophical approach that gives bite and veracity to his writing. This long (almost 150 minutes with an interval) monologue is beautifully written, with never a dull moment.

It is well known that an actor who establishes himself or herself as the star of a TV soap often has great difficulty in resuming a stage career.

The required shifts of identity can be subverted by audiences who immediately attach the familiar TV persona to the characters they inhabit, and there goes the suspension of disbelief.

Mary McEvoy, who was virtually a national icon on the small screen, has been making valiant efforts in the last few years to suppress that image, with only moderate success until now.

This could be the performance to do the trick.

She is directed by Michael Scott with sensitivity and style.

This production runs to April 10th. - Gerry Colgan

Tin Hat Trio Whelan's, Dublin

They may not make it easy for themselves, but for five years the Tin Hat Trio have flouted definition, leaving a trail of enthusiastic, word-searching music reviewers in their wake.

At a push, such taxonomists will consider the fringes of jazz, chamber music, eastern European cabaret or tango, to settle, definitively, on the term "unclassifiable".

Liberating as this must be for the San Francisco-based trio, whose interests commute between contemporary America and old Europe, bluegrass saloons and klezmer cafés, it must also make their records hard to find.

Unperturbed, the modest showing for their Dublin debut found an accessible and dextrous musical melting pot.

This, the last gig where plumes of cigarette smoke could legally curl through Whelan's, provided guitarist Mark Orton, violinist Carla Kihlstedt and accordionist Rob Burger with an oddly appropriate workplace.

Flaring up with a sinuous mix of Latinate rhythms, Gallic accordion and Gypsy violin, the syncopated mix soon smouldered into graceful string themes and whispered vamps from the bellows.

Invariably, they either eased to a slow-burning finish or numbers were quickly stubbed out.

Any group whose conservative self-assessment entails "music for the shotgun wedding of Astor Piazzolla and Django Reinhardt with Charles Ives as the flower girl" is not shy of a challenge.

But in such capable hands, the easy fusion of Argentinian tango, Gypsy jazz and the American avant-garde seemed almost logical - the convincing answer to an unasked question.

What's more, the trio exploit this musicianship to deliver fluid, improvised solos without forsaking the warm comforts of tonality and melody.

The rasping steel guitar of Big Top (where Kihlstedt's nervy violin seems to keep pace with a Hitchcock film), or the country mosey of Bill ensure that for all the problems of articulation and description, these are tunes you can hum. As with the trio, such beguiling secrets really shouldn't be classified. - Peter Crawley