Irish Times writers review James X at Liberty Hall, Placebo Sunrise at the SFX, It is better to at the Project, Rush at the Project, Rodan at the SFX, NCC/Antunes at the National Gallery and Leonard, Collins, ICO/McGegan at the NCH in Dublin.
Theatre Festival
James X
Liberty Hall
Fintan O'Toole
Since we got a national theatre a century ago, there have been hundreds of plays about the nation and none about the State. Gerard Mannix Flynn's searing James X makes up for that neglect. It is a journey through the State and its institutions: the schools, the courts, the health boards, the industrial schools, the psychiatric hospitals, the prisons. It is at one level an extremely personal story - the account of one child's encounters with the Irish public realm from the early 1960s to the very recent past. But its point is not at all personal. It is about us collectively, the things done in our name by the bodies that are supposed to represent us. It is our secret history offered to us to pour over and consume, to acknowledge and own.
As such, it is an event that goes far beyond good and bad and becomes simply necessary. We need this play and in giving it to us, Flynn has performed an act of astonishing generosity.
That a work can be at once a ferocious indictment and a generous gift may seem odd but James X is undoubtedly both. With the play itself - originally produced at the Project last year - now situated in the context of Flynn's multimedia exhibition Safe House, Safe Place, on three levels of Liberty Hall (admission is free this weekend from noon to 6 p.m.), we are given a place of safety, a secure space in which to come to terms with the fact that torture and slavery now have to be accommodated within our collective self-image.
The performance now unfolds against an extraordinarily effective photographic backdrop of the inside of the Four Courts in Dublin, making it even more clearly a drama of the State. Equally, the pack of primary documents that was available at the original performance, drawn from Mannix Flynn's own State file with names altered to protect the innocent and the guilty, is now part of the exhibition, giving the audience more of an opportunity to absorb its contents.
The story they tell is not really about the boy who is the subject of all the official reports. James X is the torch that illuminates the institutions and gives form to the official mentality, and Flynn is right to use him as a buffer between himself and us. The rawness and ferocity of the story need to be controlled and shaped, so that Flynn, calm and composed, can be all the more devastating.
The other reason is that the point of the performance is that the file does not, in fact, belong to Flynn. It belongs to us, to our history, our culture. It is, both literally and metaphorically, the property of the State. What Flynn wants to give us is a record not of his sufferings but of our collective cruelties. Instead of indulging in a cathartic feast of vicarious sorrows, we are forced to take possession of a catalogue of crimes carried out in our name.
At an aesthetic level, the combined effect of the file, the performance and the exhibition is not simply a story but a reflection on the nature of the stories we tell ourselves. There is the official story of the documents - a bad boy who is officially recorded as "a problem" at the age of three. There is the "grandiose" story that James X tells us in which he responds to loneliness and brutality with a mix of terrible pain and swaggering defiance.
And then, devastatingly, there is the moment when Flynn steps forward and reads a statement in unadorned language of what was really done to him.
In one of the reports compiled for the Juvenile Courts when James X was 13 and recently out of Letterfrack Industrial School, it is noted that "he takes a bath during the night and remains in the bath for hours and that he is always terrified." He has overcome his terror and filled us a bath in which, if we soak ourselves for a while, we can begin to wash away our collective shame.
Fringe Festival
Placebo Sunrise
SFX, Dublin
Donald Clark
"Do you know what this means?"
"Yes. We may have absolutely no idea what we are dealing with here." This snatch of opaque dialogue from Garvey and Superpant$, the confused heroes of the latest outbreak of situationist burlesque from the National Theatre of the United States of America, gives some sense of the divine mayhem that this exceptional company - American, but no organ of the state - unleashes on the SFX throughout Placebo Sunrise.
Crashing in and out of doors along a corridor which seems to stretch half-way to Dundalk, the brilliant cast croons, swoons and high-kicks its way through a disconcerting drama, each of whose individual scenes buzzes with tension, even if no two fit together in any sensible fashion. Maintaining this level of chaos requires rigorous powers of organisation, but the folks from NTUSA, so funny they cease to seem avant-garde, somehow contrive to give the impression that they are making it up as they go along. Superb stuff.
Runs until October 3rd
It is better to
Project
Michael Seaver
It is better to believe red stars rather than black words. It is better to not have preconceptions about dance. (It is better to not have preconceptions about reviews.) It is better to see the performance for yourself. It is better to know that performers are just like us. It is better to be curious as to their favourite sexual positions. It is better to be prepared to laugh. It is better to enjoy being challenged through them masturbating. It is better to not know what will happen next. It is better to understand the performers by how they kiss rather than how they dance. It is better to disagree with some statements. It is better to not laugh at the politically incorrect jokes. It is better to see how this work is about you. It is better to think long and hard afterwards. It is better to conclude that art and life are the same thing.
Runs until Sunday.
Rush
Project
Michael Seaver
The short separate scenes in This Torsion Dance's looping four-minute video are like separate memories trying to piece together a story. Although ostensibly about escapees on a journey of discovery, what reads most through the images is a fractured relationship between the two characters - Niamh Condron and JJ Formento. Dressed in black and muddy brown, their bodies struggle together on hard bare earth or are running in different directions.
Any moments of tenderness occur with her topless in a wedding dress and him bottomless in a white shirt: images of warped idealism. Shot, like so many dance films, in deserted buildings and gardens, Denise Woods' cinematography has a narrow tonal range, heightening the sense of memory.
With the sound of the dancers filtered out, Denis Clohessy's music completes this detachment, although everyday sounds from the Project Bar drown out some of his subtleties.
Runs Until October 9th
Rodan
SFX
Helen Meany
It could be a radio station, a bomb testing laboratory, an atoll or a spaceship. It's a metaphor, of course, but for what, precisely? Radiohole theatre company from the US presents four characters who are unable to find an irony-free moment as they deliver various kinds of high-energy parodies of just about everything: political campaigns, the Sixties, artistic projects, the Beat movement, post-structuralist theory, television presenters, rock musicians, advertising, stand-up comedy. Everything and nothing.
The script is a barrage of smart, archly knowing, one-liners. These terrific performers lock the audience into eye-contact, before sitting in our midst, or kissing people in the front row. They'd be a lot more engaging, though, if it were possible to care about anything they are talking about.
Runs until Saturday.
NCC/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin
Martin Adams
Josquin - Mille regrets. Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer. Plusiers regretz. Petite Camusette. Daniel-Lesur - Le cantique des cantiques. Schumann - Romanzen und Balladen Op 67. Doppelchörige Gesange Op 141 (exc). Elaine Agnew -Bread. Brahms - Sieben Lieder Op 62.
The National Chamber Choir's autumn tour is going to places most tours do not reach. It features an excellent programme that includes a rarity worth hearing. Last year the NCC made a strong impression with excerpts from Le cantique des cantiques by the 20th-century French composer Daniel-Lesur. Now they are doing all seven songs.
This is music highly charged yet expressively precise, formidably difficult to sing yet idiomatic: an opulent ear-feast that is written with intellectual rigour. In this first concert of the tour the NCC and its conductor Celso Antunes delivered this fascinating piece with verve. Even though a little more finesse was needed sometimes, the singing was always vivid.
So was everything else, even though in four early-16th-century songs by Josquin, the richly spun lines and fruity tone were evidently influenced by romantic concepts of renaissance music.
That typifies one of the strengths of the NCC's singing since Antunes started working with them. Each work is defined in style, and even if the result is debatable it is persuasive because it is defined. For example, the style of Brahms owes much to that of Schumann, and the two men knew one another. Nevertheless, the NCC sang part-songs by these composers in completely different ways. The Schumann was paced like spoken recitation - very text-driven.
Brahms's Sieben Lieder Op. 62, which range from the jolly to the languorous, were shaped by large melodic caresses.
The tour's programme includes a new work by Elaine Agnew, Bread - an RTÉ Lyric FM commission from her and poet Pat Boran. The music is a witty and efficient setting of verses that use everyday language and international names for bread, to celebrate that which is common to many cultures. It's a neat piece.
Tours to: Camus, Galway on Tuesday; Inis Mór Wednesday; Inis Óirr Thursday; Carlingford on Sunday October 10th; Enniskillen 12th; Clones 13th; Belfast 14th. For details telephone (01) 7005665 or visit www.nationalchamberchoir.dcu.ie
Leonard, Collins, ICO/McGegan
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dungan
Corelli - Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 4 Purcell - The Married Beau
John Kinsella - Symphony No 9 Mendelssohn - Concerto for violin and piano
Sunday's concert by the Irish Chamber Orchestra opened with Baroque music that brimmed with the wit, energy and detailing typical of director Nicholas McGegan. Period-style bite and phrasing from modern strings gave great vitality to a suite of incidental music by Purcell and to the fourth of Corelli's influential Op. 6 Concerti Grossi, the trio of concertino soloists sparked by the leader Nicola Sweeney in exuberant form.
The opening Scherzo Impetuoso of John Kinsella's new strings-only Symphony No. 9 introduces the Jesu meine Freude chorale melody which is interwoven through the work, and then settles into a rhythmic drive. The second movement is a beautiful, relaxed dialogue between deep strings in unison and the upper strings in rich, sorrowful harmonies. When the chorale finally emerges in Bach's four-part setting in the third movement, it is like a priceless pearl, Kinsella bravely setting it against a gentle ostinato.
Small in scale and orchestration, this is an expressively direct, appealing symphony that wears lightly the great distance travelled by its author in his previous eight.
The 1823 Concerto for Violin and Piano is one of Mendelssohn's forgotten youthful works unearthed in the Berlin State Library after the second World War. It doesn't sound like mere precocious juvenilia, nor did the players treat it as such.
McGegan may have exuded more than a hint of fun in the opening's stormy d minor melodrama, but soloist Catherine Leonard (violin) and Finghin Collins (piano) threw themselves upon Mendelssohn's thrilling but merciless passagework (he wrote it for himself and his violin teacher).
The romantic air of the slow second movement - much of it like the intimate conversation of chamber music for the two soloists - brought dramatic contrast and almost palpable relief. Then Collins kicked off the wild, gypsy finale at a torrid pace, as though issuing a sporting challenge to Leonard and McGegan, both of whom were equal to it and accepted, the latter with what looked like sheer mad merriment.
