Irish Times writers review Aristocrats at the Abbey Theatre, Bob Dylan at the Point Depot, Fool for Love at the New Theatre in Temple Bar and Riona O Duinnin, Nancy Johnson, Geraldine O'Doherty at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
Aristocrats
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Fintan O'Toole
If Brian Friel had written Hamlet, it would probably look a little like his tough and tender 1979 play Aristocrats. The royal court would be the shambolic Big House of a dying breed, the rural Catholic gentry. Its fall would be represented by the decline of the O'Donnell patriarchs over the generations from Lord Chief Justice to circuit court judge to district justice to failed solicitor.
The prince would be the last of that line, the painfully ineffectual Casimir, who may or may not have ended up in a sausage factory in Hamburg. The ghost would be the disembodied voice of his senile father, speaking through the baby alarm that is being installed downstairs as the play opens. The funeral-turned-wedding at the start of Hamlet would become the wedding-turned-funeral at the end of Aristocrats.
The tone, in other words, would be mock-heroic. The twist, though, is that in Friel's vision, the mock-heroic still contains a kind of heroism. In the diary he kept while writing Aristocrats, Friel quotes T.S. Eliot on Coleridge: "Sometimes, however, to be a ruined man is itself a vocation." With his abiding interest in dying worlds and burnt-out stars, Friel is the great dramatic laureate of ruination. The extraordinary achievement of Aristocrats is that, even while it savagely dissects the pathetic fall of the house of O'Donnnell, it also acknowledges, with real compassion, that there is a certain epic significance in being at the very end of history. He allows the O'Donnells to find their vocation in ruin.
Aristocrats is often called a Chekhovian play. Superficially, the presence of three sisters and their inept brother in a debt-ridden country mansion bears this out. The alcoholic Alice and the enervated Casimir have returned to Ballybeg Hall, where Judith minds their rambling and incontinent father. The occasion is the intended wedding of the fragile Claire to a much older widower who sells vegetables from a white van with a giant plastic banana on top.
But what is genuinely Chekhovian about the play is the way every character on stage could be a play in themselves. Their stories are hinted at but largely suppressed, creating a series of overlapping voids. We learn, for example, that Judith took part in the Battle of the Bogside and had a child with a Dutch reporter, but nothing more is said until the very end. Alice's husband Eamon was a promising Irish diplomat whose career was destroyed when he, too, got caught up in the Troubles, but again, his epic tale is largely withheld. And the same sense that much is not being told hangs around all of the characters.
This makes Aristocrats an unusually subtle and demanding play for actors, requiring as it does the creation of a powerful sense of what is not being said. For those with long memories it will always be haunted by the original Abbey cast with John Kavanagh, Stephen Rea and Dearbhla Molloy. Ben Barnes's new production clearly lacks that kind of stellar potency. It is careful, sure-footed and thorough, more likely to hold the attention rather than blow the viewer away.
There are, though, some impressive touches. Paul Hickey captures very well Eamon's vivid self-contempt, the simultaneous hatred for and attraction to the O'Donnell's pretensions and evasions. Peter Hanly manages to display both Casmir's utter incompetence and the dignity with which he has faced his terror of the world. And Ingrid Craigie is quite superb as Judith, using quiet self-restraint and self-effacing courage to conjure up an ocean of desolation.
As a reminder of Friel's mastery, this production is fulfilling enough. But as a reminder, too, of how much charismatic performances could add to even such a virtuoso text, it also creates an appetite it can't quite satisfy.
Runs until January 24th
Bob Dylan
The Point, Dublin
Tony Clayton-Lea
Bob Dylan doesn't play guitar shock! Instead, he potters about behind a keyboard, occasionally venturing out centre-stage to conduct his band with hand motions that recall Groucho Marx just before he bursts into song.
Yes, folks, it's another strange yet occasionally brilliant gig from Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan. Opening song Maggie's Farm set the tone: heavily blues-based, duelling guitars, pretty good sound mix and Dylan, all spiv-like, croaking out pieces of his broken luck, hard times and steely resolution to an audience that not only bridged the generation gap but cemented it.
Dylan's Neverending Tour continues apace, and reports from his European gigs have focused on the peculiarity of this particular segment. Yes, some of the songs are radically altered - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue benefits from a Southern country gentrification; Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) is virtually unrecognisable - but they're held together by a crackforce of a band and the words of the songs, which have become public poetry as much as property. Other songs are just plain gorgeous: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is slowed down and played like a modern ballad, Highway 61 Revisited is driven by fluent and fluid blues rhythms, and Every Grain of Sand is imbued with the kind of melody lines you wish you could hear every day. A version of Desolation Row hums with energy and Like A Rolling Stone is the lights-shining, crowd-pleasing moment.
It's not all as good as this; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum is as ridiculous as its title suggests, arguments over lack of songs from Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind (insert your favourite album here) continued into the night, and Dylan - well, he looked preoccupied, totally uncommunicative outside the arena of the songs, and not a little bit dazed. Business as usual, then.
Fool for Love
New Theatre, Temple Bar
Gerry Colgan
Sam Shepard is a prolific American playwright who has set most of his work in that psychological terrain between the passing of the old west and the emergence of an industrialised society. They are not sociological studies, but explorations of the emotional life of individuals caught in a crossfire of history. It is a fertile field for drama, as Chekhov demonstrated in his day.
This short play opens with an old man dreaming at the edge of a stage that contains a motel room. A sultry woman, May, lies on the one bed, and a restless man, Eddie, paces about. When he addresses her, it immediately generates a quarrel, rooted in hostility that is almost palpable. He has followed her for nearly 3,000 miles, and there are questions about who deserted whom. But it is clear that they have been lovers, and are still in thrall to that passion.
The love-hate thing is often something of a cliché, but there is more than that to this clash of emotions. He has had a fling with a rich woman, who has followed him to become a menacing offstage character. May has been waiting for her date, a local man, to arrive. When he does, the tequila flows and the story emerges. The star-crossed Eddie and May are related by blood. The old man fathered them both on different mothers, a situation that blighted the lives of his women and their children.
It is not a scenario that can have a resolved ending; it simply dissolves to a flight into a threatening future. Ronan Wilmot, who plays the Old Man, also directs, and Laoisa Sexton, Sean Power and Patrick Joseph Byrnes are altogether convincing in the other roles. They make for absorbing and powerful theatre.
Runs until December 13th
Riona O Duinnin, Nancy Johnson, Geraldine O'Doherty
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Douglas Sealy
And then I knew 'twas Wind (1992) - Takemitsu, Sonata for flute, viola, and harp (1915) - Debussy, Walk/Don't Walk (2002) - Eric Sweeney, All collisions end in static - Linda Buckley and Keith O'Brien.
Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola and harp, with its weaving of melodies, might have seemed out of place beside the much more recent music around it, but the combination of flute, viola and harp encouraged the other composers to write with an unexpected sweetness. Takemitus's piece might have been by Debussy, with a lot of notes left out, and even the piece by Buckley and O'Brien, in which the acoustic sound was electronically manipulated, avoided the outré effects that often tempt composers to assail rather than woo the listener's ear. In the programme notes they announce that "these aphoristic bursts of energy eventually exhaust themselves into a state of enlightened torpor". More continuous energy was manifest in Sweeney's Walk/Don't Walk, for flute and harp, in which the rhythmic impulse of an aerobic walk was so persuasive, not to say hypnotic, that the few abrupt halts, obeying the instruction "Don't Walk" hardly disturbed the onward flow.
The three instrumentalists played with an easeful rapport, bringing to each piece an acute appreciation of the aims of the different composers.
