A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.
The Sugar Wife at the Project Arts Centre
No one, not even a historian, ever writes merely about the past. Especially in the theatre - which takes place in the here-and-now - the point of setting a play 150 years ago is not to anatomise Victorian society but to gain a new perspective on the present. And Elizabeth Kuti, in her fine new drama for Rough Magic, is well aware of this. The Sugar Wife may be set in the Dublin of 1850, but its real concern is with the moral dilemmas of today. The basic question it asks is how we are to live now, how we can be moral in a world where our very freedom of choice is predicated on the exploitation of others. All that stops a hugely admirable piece from being a work of great moment is that Kuti doesn't quite manage to connect the metaphor of the past with the reality of the present.
The Sugar Wife follows one of the classic dramatic patterns: strangers arrive into a relatively enclosed world and their presence brings barely articulated tensions to the surface. The world in this case is that of strong and principled belief. The tea and coffee merchant Samuel Tewkley and his wife Hannah are Quakers. (The inspiration is not hard to discern.) While Samuel makes money and builds his business through a reputation for fair dealing, Hannah devotes her energies to good works. In the aftermath of the Famine, she visits the poor, in particular the syphilitic Martha. And, driven by her passionate hatred of slavery, she prevails on Samuel to host the freed slave Sarah and Alfred, an English ex-Quaker who has broken his ties to his rich industrialist family in order to accompany her on her lecture tours.
Together, the bitterly moralising Alfred and the richly ambiguous Sarah are the catalysts for a set of reactions that expose the instabilities in the Tewkleys' righteousness: his hypocrisies, her unhappiness, their childlessness.
If its basic structure is thus familiar enough, The Sugar Wife is also in its way a rare bird. It reaches back for its inspiration to an unfashionable source: the intellectual dramas of Bernard Shaw. Though she lacks Shaw's capacity for humour, Kuti matches his ability to elaborate a moral dilemma through a set of believable characters. Poor Martha is pretty much a stock Dublin drudge (leaving Neili Conroy with little room to manoeuvre), but the others are thoroughly imagined.
Kuti shows great skill in making them both coherent and contradictory. Samuel is a good man who betrays his wife and his faith for sensual pleasure and economic gain. Hannah is both cold and passionate, priggish and full of yearning. Sarah is a brilliant campaigner against slavery who also relishes the money to be made from stirring the consciences of the liberal middle-class. Alfred is brave and perceptive but also takes a perverse pleasure in suffering and in his own nobility. Through their imperfections, Kuti asks how much imperfection we can live with. When does realism become self-serving compromise? When does idealism become self-righteous vanity?
These questions are explored with impressive suppleness in Lynne Parker's production. On Paul Keogan's ingenious set, whose combination of wood and light, of austerity and beauty, neatly captures the paradoxically gorgeous simplicity of the wealthy Quaker style, the cast moves with great confidence through the shifting contours of the characters' consciences. Barry Barnes as Samuel and Robert Price as Alfred are especially good in their scenes together, suggesting as they do that if each had a dose of the other's virtues, he would be a pretty impressive man. Susan Salmon's Sarah is a deliciously lush combination of epic heroism and clear-eyed cynicism.
But even in this company, Niamh Lenihan is outstanding. She captures brilliantly the suppressed hysteria that lies behind Hannah's half-dead exterior, and navigates the character's transitions from control to crisis with riveting conviction. She is particularly brave in going against the stereotypical grain and making Hannah's sexual awakening so gauchely undignified.
These achievements are somewhat qualified, however, by the play's failure to make the final leap from intriguing metaphorical construct to the electrifying immediacy of the present tense. If anything, Kuti's instinct is too refined, too restrained, too subtle. An excess of subtlety, though, is about the rarest and least culpable failing in Irish theatre, and it takes its place among an array of uncommon achievements in this consistently intelligent and beautifully shaped play. Fintan O'Toole
Nicolai Demidenko at the Waterfront Hall Studio, Belfast
Scarlatti - Sonatas in C (L355), C minor (L360), D (L361) and D minor (L370). Clementi - Sonata in B flat Op 12 No 1. Mozart - Sonata in A minor K310
When a pianist can draw beauty of sound such as Nicolai Demidenko produced from the piano at the start of the slow movement of the Mozart A minor sonata, you know you are hearing a considerable player. Demidenko supplies the expressive range and interpretative insight needed to draw one into the composer's world, ingredients missing from many other perfectly competent performances.
Dating from Mozart's disastrous visit to Paris in 1778, the A minor is one of his great sonatas, technically and expressively in advance of his previous works in this genre. Clementi's B flat sonata is technically more demanding still, the first movement bristling with octaves. If it can't match Mozart's expressive depth, it is certainly one of his most substantial and imaginative works, let down only by the finale, an interminable set of variations on a theme from an early setting of The Barber of Seville.
This BBC series of free concerts traces "The birth of the keyboard sonata" back to Scarlatti, and even with the greatest pianists one usually feels that in these quintessentially harpsichord works, the bulkier piano just gets in the way, its expressive resources drawing attention to the performer rather than adding anything to the music.
Demidenko's pianism was however deft, rhythmical, and often attractive in itself, both in the four listed works and in an encore, Scarlatti's Sonata in F sharp (L35). The cunningly blurred pedalling added to the sense of play - not inappropriate for pieces described by the composer as "jesting with art". Dermot Gault
Sandrine Piau (soprano), Susan Manoff (piano) at the Waterfront Hall Studio, Belfast
Debussy - Mélodies de jeunesse (three extracts).
Les ariettes oubliées. Proses lyriques (extracts).
Chausson - Six songs.
Poulenc - A sa guitare.
Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon. Fancy
Debussy's songs are the most neglected part of his output. Many of them are, admittedly, very early works; Nuit d'étoiles, from the collection later published as Mélodies de jeunesse, dates from 1880, when Debussy was 18, and is very much in the opulent style of Massenet.
The latest songs given here, the Proses lyriques, date from 1895, after Prélude à l'après-midi but before Pelléas (for some reason we were only given the first and last of the four).
These early songs might seem a bit tame and conventional when compared to his later work, but they are gorgeous - elegant, arching melodies over sonorous but simple accompaniments, rich harmonies and delicate word-painting combining to create an impressionistic dream-world.
Sandrine Piau was an interesting choice of soloist as she has made her career primarily in the Baroque repertoire. She combined the uncovered clarity of voice one would expect from a Baroque performer with the warmth one needs in 19th-century music, and the American pianist Susan Manoff was a sensitive partner.
The six roughly contemporary songs by Chausson are obviously the work of a refined musician, but don't give up their secrets easily; Sérénade was the most obviously attractive. The four well-contrasted Poulenc songs, on the other hand, make an immediate appeal with their varied moods, lived-in harmonies alternating with delicate humour.
The Shakespearean setting Fancy, the only item sung in English, will eventually be the final item to be broadcast in this new series of BBC invitation concerts devoted to French song. Dermot Gault
