Reviews

In the first moments of the Gate's production of Tennessee Williams's The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a horrifying possibility arises. It seems that the marvellous Lia Williams is about to give a bad performance.

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Gate Theatre

By Fintan O'Toole

As she enters the main square of a small Mississippi town shortly before the first World War, she seems extraordinarily gauche. She runs through an exaggerated version of all the Southern Belle clichés: over-excited gestures, over-the-top flirtatiousness, outlandish emotionalism. If such a thing as a camped-up version of Blanche DuBois can be imagined, this is it.

Yet within another few minutes, you realise that this is a brave and brilliant piece of acting. In playing the pastor's unsuitable daughter Alma, Williams is taking on a huge challenge. All acting, however understated, is an act of exaggeration. To act a Southern Belle is to exaggerate an overstatement. To act a Southern Belle so febrile that she stands out even among that self-dramatising sisterhood is to blow up a magnification of an enlargement.

Williams's solution is extraordinarily intelligent. She gives us in the first few minutes the full-frontal version of Alma's ostentation. It becomes established in our minds so that when other characters - her father or the mother of the young doctor she adores - refer to it, we have it in our mind's eye. But thereafter she tones it down very considerably, so that it is neither irritating nor a barrier to the broad flow of compassion that the other Williams directs towards Alma.

This matters enormously because, to an unusual degree, Alma is the play. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale is a reworked version of Summer and Smoke. First staged in 1947, it was envisaged by Williams as the third part of a trilogy of plays "which embodied a single theme, or legend, of the delicate, haunted girl . . . the over-sensitive misfit in a world that spins with blind fury". There is, though, an obvious reason why it is performed much less often than the other two parts of that trio, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. For while Laura in Menagerie is matched with her equally memorable mother, Amanda, and Blanche in A Streetcar has to contend with the large personalities of Stanley and Stella, here Alma is the only fully-formed character.

This remains evident even in Dominic Cooke's beautifully paced and well-cast production. There are fine performances from John Kavanagh as Alma's father, from Susan Fitzgerald as her deranged mother, from Risteárd Cooper as the object of her love and from Barbara Brennan as the blowsy mother determined to keep her prince from the clutches of such a strange, unstable woman. But they are essentially cameos.

It must be tempting for a contemporary director to fill in these roles and to make the play less like a 19th-century star vehicle. There is certainly scope for making Brennan's role more sympathetic and less of a creepy Jocasta to her son's Oedipus. It might also make sense for Cooper to be allowed a slightly more flamboyant, sexier presence.

Yet on balance it is probably right to treat this as a short story rather than a novel, a small-scale but by no means narrow study of one woman's struggle to become a living human being rather than the kitsch stone angel that dominates the stage.

Alma's story does have a mythic dimension. She is a bedraggled moth trying to emerge from the sticky chrysalis of Southern Belle mannerisms. And unlike Laura and Blanche she is no mere delicate victim of a cruel world. She embraces that world in all its cruelty and failure, choosing to accept the demands of her body and her sexuality rather than remain imprisoned in a cocoon of ludicrous illusions. She achieves a kind of victory.

This is not, for Williams as a gay man struggling to accept his homosexuality, an abstract story. Lia Williams, moreover, is fully capable of making it vivid, immediate and dramatic. She creates a remarkable fusion of mercurial expression and steely dignity, of panic and courage. Her Alma seems all the braver for the terrors that haunt her, all the nobler for the weight of humiliation she bears on her slender frame.

It is a splendid performance, deeply moving because it does not ask for sympathy. We end up not weeping for Alma, but regarding her with quiet awe, as a woman who has made choices, even if they mean preferring honest failure over Blanche's retreat into illusion. In giving her struggle such power, Lia Williams banishes the ghost of Blanche DuBois.

Runs until April 26th

Throwing Muses

The Ambassador, Dublin

Edward Power

It is an uncomfortable but undeniable truth that great art is often born of suffering. Throwing Muses' frontwoman Kristin Hersh wrote her most affecting and enduring songs as an angst-ridden 20-something, but since making peace with her demons the New Englander has become a peripheral and much less interesting presence.

News that Hersh was putting her patchy solo career on hold to reform Throwing Muses, purveyors of a fraught indie-rock, artlessly parodied by the likes of Alanis Morissette, evoked mixed sentiments. Was she in turmoil again? Or had she reconciled emotional stability and creative relevance?

This performance left us little wiser. It opened promisingly, with Hersh, backed by drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bernard Georges, plunging into Furious, a distortion-drenched standout from 1992's Red Heaven, the last consistently compelling Muses record.

Hersh is one of those rare musicians capable of flitting between bombast and intimacy in the flutter of an eyelash. As her fingers danced over her guitar, coaxing forth vast slabs of noise, it sounded as though three guitarists were on stage instead of one.

Things went askew when Hersh touted cuts from the Muses' eponymous new album, a project over-endowed with ponderous riffs and quasi-distorted vocals. The line dividing inspiration and indulgence is subtly drawn and Throwing Muses too often strays across it. By the time an umpteenth quasi-metal workout rolled by, even Hersh's enthusiasm seemed to pall.

A foray into the Muses' back catalogue restored her swagger. Two Step, arguably the best moment from 1991's The Real Ramona, offered a chilling articulation of despair and self-loathing.

Tellingly, Hersh encored with a track from solo début Hips and Makers. For all its feistiness, this concert suggested she regards Throwing Muses as a closed chapter in her career. Sometimes, you just can't go back.

Chloe Hanslip, Roderick Chadwick

Law Society, Dublin

Douglas Sealy

Sonata in D minor, Op 108 - Brahms. Adagio in E, KV 261 - Mozart. Sonata for violin and piano; Tzigane - Ravel. Carmen Fantasy - Waxman

The power and passion of Chloe Hanslip's Brahms had to be heard to be believed. Her violin recital, with Roderick Chadwick (piano), on Saturday, was a stunning display of virtuosity. It felt as if the composer had been persuaded to reveal more of himself than he had intended and found himself being swept away on the tide of his inspiration. The performance presented him as the Romantic par excellence, but I wonder would he have approved of such a wide vibrato as Hanslip favoured on occasion.

Happily, the duo adopted a cooler approach to Mozart's Adagio than to Brahms's Sonata, but for all that it had a tinge of late 19th-century Romanticism.

Ravel's Sonata and Tzigane showed the players in more playful mood, obviously enjoying the original twists and turns of these colourful pieces, but never losing the intensity that marked the whole evening.

Waxman's Carmen Fantasy is a piece that encourages showing off, and one could not fail to be impressed by the pyrotechnics of this performance, even if the music was over-ripe. Stylistically, the works breathed a decadent air, which was all the more astonishing for the fact that Hanslip is only 16 years old. She has, however, been playing the violin since the age of two, which may help to account for her maturity of vision.