Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review the highlights of the arts scene

The Hairy Ape

Cork Midsummer Festival: Old Southern Fruit Warehouse

In the early passages of this Corcadorca promenade production of Eugene O'Neill's polemic against the class system, it is imperative to question whether the movement of 400 people at some speed through dark and unfamiliar spaces isn't unpleasant or dangerous or both. In the later passages, by which time this question becomes irrelevant, the issue is whether or not the site overwhelms the play, making the spectacle more important than the script. The answer in that case is that yes, accommodating the play to the place means a kind of dismembering, a shuddering sequence of events followed as if by a mob.

It's not that the crowd, or the cast, lose the plot, as the story's separate components are established apart from one another and the textual coherence is fragmented. But the other argument, probably the Corcadorca argument, is that on the contrary these divisions in fact emphasise the different aspects of the very struggle - the conflict of class injustice and the collisions of wealth and toil, beauty and servitude, plenty and want - which O'Neill himself was determined to define.

This is a young man's play, fuelled by O'Neill's experiences at sea and by his awareness of the often inchoate passions of men who know only labour and beer but desire much more. The playwright made his intentions clear in his text: these men are creatures, almost Neanderthal, their living quarters like cages in which they can only crouch, their station at the furnaces of the stokehole in a great ship close to an inferno.

Yet they are also fitfully capable of thought, are aware of their lot and acutely attuned to slight, insult and condescension. For one of them, quite deliberately posed as Rodin's thinker, his reasoning develops only as an obsession, a rancour set against the burgeoning union movement exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World.

Peter Gowan, Frank O'Sullivan, Hector Harkness and Katy Davis lead the cast in carrying this simple enough message - and O'Neill was nothing if not a messenger - with conviction; Joan Hickson's costumes are perfectly in tune with a time which the playwright described pessimistically as "the modern" and Mel Mercier and Stevie Jones as composer and sound designer respectively need only to be more aware of the reverberant and not always adequate acoustics.

However, it is the collaboration amounting almost to complicity between set and lighting designer Paul Keogan and director Pat Kiernan which, in the end, makes an epic of this angry play. The expanses of the warehouse and its riverside location allow, or inspire, visual effects of compelling likelihood; these are not merely attempts at verisimilitude but approaches to the truth, to the actuality which mixes marvels with misery, and compose in the end a tribute to Corcadorca's own intellectual as well as theatrical vision.

Until July 5.  - MARY LELAND

Byrne, RTÉ NSO/Maloney

NCH, Dublin

Rising Irish soprano Celine Byrne, whose success (inter alia) at last year's Maria Callas Grand Prix in Athens is fast propelling her to wide recognition, captivated her audience with four short numbers from opera and operetta. This wasn't just due to her effortless carrying power, which was more than equal to an unyielding orchestral accompaniment, or to her delectable tone, which has the dark hue and rich consistency of a mature mezzo. It was due also to her exceptional faculty of combining those enviable qualities with a natural, unaffected delivery.

Interpretively, there was room to develop artifice without any risk to vocal charm - a little more tension and release in Dvorák's Song to the Moon, more parody in Lehár's Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß, and more emancipation in Lerner Loewe's I could have danced all night. With Puccini's O mio babbino caro, however, it was hard to imagine that the sense of innocent pleading could be captured with finer emotional precision. Conductor Gavin Maloney secured bright and busy playing from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in firm-footed jaunts through Dvorák's Carnival Overture and Johann Strauss's Emperor Waltz.

But it was Jaspar's Solo - the fifth of six slices from Charles Mackerras's Sullivan ballet Pineapple Poll - that most notably presented Maloney with the kind of measured, dramatic build-up that he administers with such aplomb. - ANDREW JOHNSTONE