Today Irish Times reviewers heap praise on the performances of the James Taylor Trio, Dave Couse and Edwin Collins and the art of Patrick Graham. Brendan O'Carroll's new stage play and impressive ensemble acting in Belfast also come in for honourable mention.
John Taylor Trio
John Field Room, Dublin
The final concert in the highly successful Jazz Architects-Improvised Music Company's year-long piano-trio series saw Britain's John Taylor bring a trio to the NCH's John Field Room on Sunday. As one of the finest pianists anywhere in jazz, he was a fitting choice to end the series. With him were the gifted Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, heard with pianist Bobo Stenson in the inaugural concert of the series, and a young British drummer, Martin France.
A relatively unexceptional first set yielded some good moments, notably on Taylor's own Between Moons, with superbly expressive bass and lovely piano solos, and a gorgeous ballad, Au Contraire, full of the lyric beauty that epitomises one of the characteristics of Taylor's playing.
Other elements, including his broad harmonic palette, exquisite touch and sheer sense of adventure, were evident on Steve Swallow's funky Up Too Late, but the impression persisted that this was not a working trio and that the musicians were feeling their way into the material and the mechanics of group interaction.
Coming back for a vastly improved second set, Taylor confirmed that this was the first time they had worked as a trio. Perhaps this was why the set was dominated by slower material, allowing the group more time to interact, but there was a greater sense of focus and togetherness about the results. Two wonderfully oblique approaches to a couple of standards, How Deep Is The Ocean and Everything I Love, revealed both pianist and bassist at their most expansively inventive, while Jormin's ballad Rowan was a compelling example of their capacity for musical dialogue.
There were further savoury instances of the art of the ballad, including Taylor's The Bowl Song and a beautiful Liten Visa Til Karen, written by a veteran Swedish trumpeter for his granddaughter. By then the trio had reached a degree of rapport that allowed them to groove to some effect on the final uptempo piece, Kenny Wheeler's ironically titled Everybody Else's Song But My Own. The series's eight concerts were remarkable examples of enlightened and informed sponsorship, a credit to all concerned.
Ray Comiskey
Dave Couse & Edwyn Collins
The Village, Dublin
In a bizarre allusion to boxing, this show was billed as Couse v Collins - not a line-up to quicken the pulse in the same way as, say, Britney Spears v Metallica. It was nevertheless a captivating collaboration between two of the most perceptive and underrated songwriters of recent decades. The pair also happen to be firm friends, of course, with erstwhile Orange Juice front man Collins for many years producing A-House, Couse's former band.
First on stage was Collins, delivering a meaty greatest-hits set with a zeal that belied his veteran status. Nobody has a voice quite so evocative of the 1980s as the coruscating Scot. You may detect traces of Lloyd Cole and Elvis Costello, but Collins's lyrical insights are uniquely his own. Better still was his sparkling between-song banter; a career in stand-up beckons should his muse ever skip town.
A dozen numbers in and it was time to bid Collins adieu as Couse stepped up to the plate. His opener, Call Me Blue, was a nod to A-House's early glory days, Familiar Feeling a celebration of the Dubliner's rebirth as a solo artist. Only an attempt to reclaim the unlikely World Cup anthem Here Come The Good Times stuttered. Mick McCarthy's ghost seemed to swirl about the venue. Even Couse looked a little spooked.
With impressive timing, Collins returned to banish the chill, bounding from the wings wearing a grin so ferocious you felt a stab of sympathy for his facial muscles. What followed was unabashed nostalgia: Collins sang lead vocals on A-House's Endless Art; Couse repaid the compliment during Collins' s A Girl Like You. As the backing band worked themselves to a frenzy, the audience gave the only appropriate response: a great collective swoon.
Ed Power
Mrs Brown Rides Again
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
At the start, an unmistakable voice is heard saying "one-two, one-two, testicles, one-two" and advising on ejaculation in case of emergency. It is, of course, the inimitable Brendan Carroll hitting his stride even before his new production, the third in the Mrs Brown series, has started.
Not too many years ago, his play would have been roundly condemned for its content, to describe which words such as obscene, vile, profane and disgusting would have been thrown around like snuff at a wake.
Happily, such misuse of language is now generally obsolete, and the mot juste, vulgarity, would be employed instead. That is what the author-director-actor is very good at, and the appropriate reaction to his work is a matter of taste, not morals.
What is on offer is less a play than a series of comedy sketches with the eponymous widow hogging or dominating the stage, as you will.
Bodily functions, genitalia, dialogue sustained by a cataract of basic Anglo-Saxon usages, absurdly exaggerated gay mannerisms and risqué exchanges are the stuff of her material, put across by its creator and his cast with energy. They pander to the audience to an extent that sacrifices all pretence at credibility. This performance is strictly for laughs.
And around me people were erupting with laughter during, for instance, a prolonged sketch in which Agnes is having fun with a condom, using it as a glove and commenting on its uses.
Similar saucy stuff keeps the party going until the ending looms near, at which point our hostess shifts gear into a bathetic, you-gotta-love-her dying fall.
You don't actually gotta. Carroll's style and talents are widely known and understood, and those who enjoy them should make haste to the theatre. Those who don't, and I must acknowledge that I am of their number, should not.
The don't-knows might perhaps phone a friend.
Runs until December 6th
Gerry Colgan
The Hollow Crown
Grand Opera House, Belfast
When John Barton joined the RSC, in 1960, as an associate director responsible for verse speaking, he could not have foreseen that his anthology of words and music about "the fall and foibles of the kings and queens of England" would become the company's party piece. Its poetry, speeches, letters and ballads make enormous demands on its performers; the traditional line-up of three men and one woman - Susannah Yorke, Richard Johnson, Clive Francis and the incomparable Donald Sinden - here conforms perfectly to those demands.
The evening makes sprightly progress, via Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Malory and others, through the reigns of the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Hanoverians and the Victorians. In a stark modern set that hints at formal, courtly ritual, the actors lead us on a sometimes moving, sometimes sobering, sometimes hilarious account of royal antics.
The young Austen's breathy potted history provides a perfect counterpoint to the 18-year-old Victoria's girlish private account of her coronation; the empty bombast of Charles I at his trial for treason contrasts with the insane babblings of George III. Due deference is reserved for two kings: Richard II and Arthur, the once and future king, whose death as narrated in Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur ends this stylish entertainment on a note of genuine majesty.
Ends today
Jane Coyle
Patrick Graham
Vangard Gallery, Cork
Patrick Graham's art remains as powerful and uncompromising as ever, with this selection from his long-standing Odalisque Suite illustrating his continuing importance in Irish and international art. His images are wrought with emotive and psychological tensions that grapple with the conflict between idealised beauty and the less than edifying realities of the human condition.
This conflict seems to bring forth other apparent contradictions, such as the style employed to render images, which is at once crude and sophisticated, or the surfaces, which are simultaneously delicate and abrasive. These dichotomies are visually manifest through the discordant, sketchbook style of his work, where images appear fragmentedand disjointed yet ultimately cohesive.
The often graphic representation of the naked (as opposed to nude) form is a vehicle for the artist's expression and, as such, will unsettle or even offend some viewers. The sketchy quality of the imagery implies a detached impassivity. This is hugely deceptive, however as the effortless confidence of Graham's art is borne from a surety of drafting, where expressive, tonally diverse marks are convincingly controlled to suggest actual form. As a consequence, the paintings have a tangible reality where the characters' contorted, anguished poses take on a living, breathing presence.
Runs until November 22nd
Mark Ewart
