Irish Timeswriters review Splendourat the Project, Vive Laat Draíocht and Berezovsky, UO/Tortelier at the NCH.
Splendour, Project, Dublin
Somewhere in the home of a fictitious east-European dictator is an entirely black painting, concealing a rebellious political message, which cost the artist his life. Elsewhere, in the programme note for this production, is a subversive nimbus of a poem first published in a Romanian journal during Ceausescu's reign, which cost the artist her job.
And here, opening in an unbearably privileged country on the day of its democratic election, comes a play about art and politics, as challenging as it is rewarding, which will cost its artists very little in comparison and earn them nothing but respect.
Abi Morgan's stimulating play is certainly complex, jostling its four characters between cagey dialogues and uncensored inner monologues (which, in RAW's production, prompt Dennis Clohessy and Paddy Hanlon to create one of the most intricate sound designs ever heard). In the meantime, Morgan's play fractures the chronology of a single evening, then pieces it back together like a shattered vase.
The situation is at once straightforward and psychologically fathomless: a strident British photojournalist (Amanda Douge) arrives to a dictator's palace with a duplicitous, light-fingered interpreter (Mary Murray) in tow. There they meet the dictator's primly guarded wife (Ingrid Craigie) and her bedraggled, secretly pleading friend (Jane Brennan). And as they wait the rumble of violent revolution approaches.
Nobody in this room is without agenda, everyone has something to conceal and divulge, and though the play is at first disorienting, director Rachel West and her exceptional cast soon establish the rules of engagement and stealthily unravel their characters.
Performing political theatre in the round may now seem like a cliche, but it suits a production where truth varies according to perspective. "Twenty-five years is a long time to despise your best friend," says Brennan, who beautifully underplays the most compelling story, while even Craigie's icily composed Thatcher clone with an Imelda Marcos shoe collection is not without humanity.
Murray may facilitate most of the play's comedy (treating kleptomania as little more than jolly insurrection) but she tightens like a fist when her character's background bubbles to the surface.
If Douge's bolshie photographer is the most problematic role - viewing, deploring and profiting from the suffering of others - it is largely because that is also the position of the audience. Such is the knotty conundrum of the play, which, for all its undoubted political passion, opts not to name the benighted country it depicts. (It could as easily be called Armenian Splendour or Romanian Splendour.) Even in a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking production, that brings an odd, sinking consequence. Compared to the dangerous subversion of political art in totalitarian regimes, here we can enjoy political art as an aesthetically accomplished, challenging night out. We don't know we're born. - Peter Crawley
Runs until June 9
Vive La, Draíocht, Blanchardstown
The play opens with five masked mummers telling a story, and they soon take on numerous roles themselves to flesh it out. It is a rather clunky beginning, but soon the group gets into its stride to enact a historical drama of tyranny, love and betrayal.
The year is 1798, national rebellion is rife, and the air in the tiny village of the Naul is thick with melodrama. A Dublin deserter from the British army is caught, and threatened with torture and death, unless he acts as a spy against the United Irishmen rebels. He pretends to be a Frenchman on the run from the Brits, and wins the confidence of the villagers. But he falls in love with a local woman, befriends her son and joins the underground rebels. It ends in tears and tragedy.
If that all sounds somewhat like Boucicault, it's because the comparison is unavoidable. The plot is hokum rather than history, and it is written by Donal O'Kelly in a kind of doggerel that makes one chuckle at its unrestrained assault on rhyming. That's good, because the real core of the work is simple entertainment, the kind of farce that takes itself solemnly.
This means that the actors - Donal O'Kelly, Trevor Knight, Ciaran Kenny, Sorcha Fox and Sinead Murphy - can dispense with subtlety as they deliver their over-the-top lines. Director Raymond Keane, a noted exponent of mime and related techniques, turns a stage equipped with a few step-ladders into a multiplicity of locations and facilities. They clearly have fun on stage, in a very theatrical production, and the laughs are infectious.
This is the play's first outing, and it clearly drags towards the ending; some pruning, perhaps? - Gerry Colgan
Ends Sat, then tours extensively
Berezovsky, UO/Tortelier, NCH, Dublin
Elgar - Cockaigne Overture. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 3. Mussorgsky/Ravel - Pictures at an Exhibition
Boris Berezovsky's playing with the Ulster Orchestra was that of an economical pianist. He was economical of physical movement, yet there was no shortage of variety or power in his playing. And he was economical in matters of interpretation, too, as if he had chosen to apply a kind of Occam's razor to find the fullest of musical expression with the simplest, most pared-back means.
He might seem an odd match, then, for Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, a piece high in technical challenges, which features one of the most daunting cadenzas in the piano repertoire. Yet, with Yan Pascal Tortelier a sympathetic partner, the match seemed perfect.
Berezovsky dispensed with the cheap showmanship of struggle, the David at the keyboard pitted against the Goliath of the orchestra, the 10 fingers of two hands chasing more notes than seems humanly possible to control.
Instead, he showed a rare gift for delivering difficult streams of notes with effortless lucidity, and his absolute-seeming mastery of calm enabled him to accept and indulge the music's often bypassed invitations to introspection.
His control of fine detail was quite simply astonishing. His pacing was so sure that the climaxes were unerringly spine-tingling. The soft-spokenness of so much of the playing meant that the fireworks, when they came, were all the more dazzling.
Tortelier and his players adapted to the Berezovsky style, whether he was emulating the world of chamber music, or storming fearlessly through passages of heavy chords.
It was a performance calculated to thrill the connoisseur as well as bring the house down. It did both.
Tortelier found the sweetness and cheekiness in Elgar's perky overture, Cockaigne (In London Town), but the strength of the Ulster Orchestra brass section frequently overpowered the strings.
The Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, like the piano original, is often turned into the wrong kind of exhibition, a vehicle for orchestral display, pure and simple.
Tortelier avoided all the temptations of virtuoso platforming, and shunned the cliches that can make performances of this work an endurance test rather than a pleasure.
Tortelier managed to make everything sound newly minted. The only other Dublin performance I can recall to match it in sensitivity is the last one he gave here, with the BBC Philharmonic in 1999. - Michael Dervan
