Irish Times critics review The Playboy of the Western World in Galway, Other Voices in Dublin and Paint it White also in Dublin.
The Playboy of the Western World
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
In the two decades since she last directed Synge's Playboy, Garry Hynes has been steadily scraping away the vestiges of romanticism from stage depictions of rural Ireland. Her productions of work by Marina Carr, Martin MacDonagh and J.B. Keane have been characterised by a heightened, bleak intensity, leavened by black comedy. They have coincided with growing public awareness of our recent social history: of sexual and physical abuse, of various forms of repression and denial.
These recent explorations underpin her new production of the Playboy for Druid, and also throw a different light on it. Its calm pacing - from the quiet opening scene to the beautifully choreographed climax - gives it a stately grace; the turquoise sheen from the high beams and blotched walls of Francis O'Connor's set; Davy Cunningham's chiaroscuro lighting and the Victorian top hats and tails, straight out of 19th century Punch cartoons, create a half-remembered West of Ireland of the mind, or of dreams.
As the excellent cast follow Synge's cadences with ease, the mood is operatic: we await the familiar arias from Christy Mahon, and the duets between him and Pegeen Mike, as he grows in stature before our eyes.
With Cillian Murphy as an androgynous, naïve Christy, Aisling O'Sullivan the superbly witty, sexually confident Widow Quinn and Anne-Marie Duff playing a brittle Pegeen, this production highlights Synge's sensitivity to sexual ambiguity.
Whether, almost a century ago, those first Abbey audiences protested because the play was too real or not real enough is a question that this production provokes. In contrast to his successors such as J.B. Keane, Synge, as interpreted here, seems to be much more concerned with art than with life.
The seductive power of the imagination, the impetus to transform the raw materials of life into something else - these are what excite the characters. "A strange man is a marvel with his mighty talk," Pegeen says.
On to the blank canvas presented by the stranger she projects her hopes and fantasies. She creates Christy the warrior-poet and feels first let down and then disgusted by the crude facts, discovering "the great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed".
"We'll have peace now for our drinks," Pegeen's father says as Christy walks out for ever. Those who remain can now lapse into escapism and inertia, into comfortable storytelling by the fire, embellishing the tale of Christy's metamorphosis.
Both the potential and the danger of this imaginative impulse are brilliantly observed here.
• Continues at the Town Hall Theatre until February 21st; tours to Dublin, Mayo, the Aran Islands and Kerry until April 10th.
Helen Meany
Other Voices
Vicar Street, Dublin
The television series Other Voices, Songs from a Room 2 started on Tuesday evening on Network 2. In celebration and cognisance of that (with, perhaps, a hint of well-judged and subtly hyped media awareness, too) a selection of the bands that made it down to Dingle last December made themselves available for a pre-series bash on Monday night.
This, then, wasn't a gig proper; rather, it was a compact display of what talent Ireland currently has at its disposal. The second outing, also, focused on rock acts of varying hues - other noises, rants from a padded cell, part 666. To make matters somewhat more frustrating for the listener, the show was being recorded for RTÉ Radio One's Mystery Train programme, which meant elements of radio trickery elicited from the punters (and well handled by MC John Kelly) and between-act longueurs as one band sloped off after a few songs and another bounced on.
Headlined by the quite swish Jerry Fish & the Mudbug Club, the night raised some questions as to the worthiness of those music acts who some see fit to praise to the hilt. Both Simple Kid and The Jimmy Cake, for example, come across as acts that can't believe their luck that people actually like what they do, despite their apparent lack of anything approaching a memorable tune. While the former busks it (and just about gets away with it) the latter lather on layers of everything from Henry Cow to Metallica, resulting in rather derivative ego-driven, ensemble cacophony.
Overreaching and distinctly underwhelming is something that cannot be ascribed to both The Tyco Brahe and Turn, each of whom proved that ambition can equal excellence. The former has melody lines to light up the sky and the voice of Carol Keogh, which really should be patented, bottled and sold as a health supplement. Turn, meanwhile, displayed the kind of scuffed-at-the-edges, vigorous and flexible approach to their music that should make 2004 the year they break free.
• Other voices of Ireland - a mixture of eloquence and fluency, with a bit of babble in the background. Same as it ever was, then.
Tony Clayton-Lea
Paint it White
Bewley's Café Theatre
Something is taking its course within the opaque drama of Croatian writer Dubravko Mihanovic. Beneath the time-passing patter of two housepainters you detect an ocean of meaning, but an ice cap of metaphor keeps it teasingly out of reach.
In a room stripped bare for redecoration, an aging painter (Micheál Ó Gruagáin) and his young apprentice (Tom Murphy) stir their emulsions and exchange brushes as though preparing a religious ritual. Cosseted in philosophical certainties, the boss ruminates on the speed of north European footballers, the hygienic pitfalls of pub ashtrays and decides that if life deals you a poor hand, "we wait for the next shuffle".
His understandably disengaged protégé drifts through life, so inured to experience and expression that he can't recall whether or not he has had sex ("Probably," he ventures), occupied instead by the vision of a woman at a window who undresses, smiles and probably even signifies something.
It's all mildly absurd stuff, proving the untranslatable quality of East European humour while a Beckettian stasis to the stage seems so stringently apolitical you seek political resonance in every corner.
Written in a fractured republic after the gruesome fallout from Yugoslavia, Mihanovic and his characters must be painting over some very deep cracks.
Those cracks often turn to chasms. Tom Murphy's "boy" winces with bitter distaste, for instance, when forced to wear a paper hat folded from a newspaper's death page.
Laurence Foster's crisp, unhurried direction allows the subtext ample time to settle, but little disguises this radio-drama's discomfort with the stage.
When the spectacle simply amounts to watching wet paint applied, no wonder our characters spend so much time gazing out the window. For the audience, though, there is no release from the inscrutable allegories of a playwright uncertain of what to say and less sure of how to say it.
• Until March 5th.
Peter Crawley
