Reviews

Reviews today include The Goat or Who is Sylvia? at the Project, Dublin, Enchiriadis Treis/Doherty at the Mahony Hall, The Helix, Dublin and Teenage Fanclub at The Village, Dublin

The Goat or Who is Sylvia? Project, Dublin

Fintan O'Toole

When major playwrights fail to write great plays, it is usually not for want of trying. But Edward Albee's The Goat or Who is Sylvia? which opened on Broadway in 2002 and is now given a fine Irish premiere at the Project, is an exception. It is, perhaps, Albee's way of saying that there are no great plays anymore, that tragedies can no longer be written.

Replete as it is with references to classical drama, its tone is fiercely mock-heroic. Albee's play evokes a time when the world was defined by myth and ritual. The subtitle is from Shakespeare's poem that begins with the same question and ends "To her let us garlands bring."

In its ancient origins, tragoidia or tragedy was the song sung at the sacrifice of a goat - a reference to the festival of Dionysus from which tragic drama emerged. But all of this grandiose allusion is relentlessly debased.

Sylvia really is a goat, with which the hero Martin has fallen love. And Martin himself is the nearest a fallen world comes to a god - a fabulously successful architect who has just won the commission to build World City in the American midwest.

The play itself is an illustration of Albee's thesis, a farce in the form of tragedy. It is shaped like a play by Sophocles.

It has one set: an opulent, tastefully decorated apartment, nicely evoked by Joe Vanek's designs. The action unfolds over the course of a little more than a day. And the plot is a classic Greek tale of the reversal of fortune. Martin (Bryan Murray) is at the peak of his success, celebrating his 50th birthday by winning both the commission to build World City and the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

He and his wife Stevie (Susan Fitzgerald) have the perfect marriage. They are still in love, they have great sex, and we see them engage, in the opening scene, in joyful, affectionate banter. And then, in what is meant to be a celebratory interview with an old pal (Philip O'Sullivan), Martin reveals his ludicrous secret: that he is having sex with a goat.

If the absurdity seems ham-fisted and unsubtle, that is Albee's point. Ours is a moral universe, he implies, where you have to reach very far to find something really shameful. This is a play in which the howling of the Eumenides, the Greek spirits of shame and remorse who pursue the matricide Orestes, is probably just the hum of a washing-machine.

The grand epics of transgression and conscience are gone and the only real sanction is the fear of seeming ridiculous. In the cool, opulent world that Martin inhabits, his sin is resonant, not because it is horrible, but because it is silly.

The moral universe of the Greeks is so shrunken that there is no shame, merely embarrassment.

What we get, then, is a play with a very peculiar emotional texture. Something terrible happens - Martin and Stevie's relationship and their sense of themselves are shattered. They and their gay son Billy (Tadhg Murphy) suffer deep anguish.

But everything is coloured by an overwhelming, and entirely deliberate, sense of the ludicrous. Even the pain is part of a linguistic game.

The characters keep up a running commentary on their own language, doing a double-take whenever it includes a high-flown, rhetorical word. Even in the depths of her agony, Stevie finds time to apologise for her imagery: "Women in deep woe often mix their metaphors."

This makes not for a great play - a possibility that is implicitly ruled out - but for a highly original and engaging one.

The tone is funny, sardonic, brittle, yet Albee also creates a kind of amused awe at the entry into settled lives of the inexplicable - the way, as Martin puts it, "something can happen that's outside the rules". And Michael Caven's finely-tuned production captures this odd note to perfection.

The difficult mix of wry humour with an elegy for the sacred is a fierce challenge for actors, but Murray and Fitzgerald rise to it superbly.

Both avoid histrionics. Murray maintains the dazed, almost dreamy dignity of a man who has one foot in another world, where different rules apply. Fitzgerald hones in on the sardonic distress of a woman who is far too self-contained to rant and rave.

She does wonderful things with her voice, achieving at times a scratchy monotone, like an old record playing in another room - the sound of a dead life that must still be lived. Together they make a statement of why there can be no great plays into at least an oddly intriguing one.

Enchiriadis Treis/Doherty

Mahony Hall, The Helix, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Pinzger - Missa Brevis. Vivaldi - Nisi Dominus. Mozart - Requiem

Conductor Marion Doherty, who founded the large Malahide choir Enchiriadis Treis in 1994, had more than just a dissertation in her suitcase when she returned from three years of doctoral studies at the University of Iowa.

She also had a forgotten Missa brevis written by an obscure monk-composer, Romanus Pinzger, and published in 1750.

After stumbling on incomplete manuscripts in Iowa, Doherty painstakingly reassembled the complete work following research in Switzerland and Bavaria.

This performance was the culmination of all her far-flung detective and reconstructive work.

Sometimes the chase is better than the catch. Doherty herself appears under no illusions about the work's value, describing it in this newspaper as "light" and "charming". She also quotes Pinzger's own rather telling remark upon the publication of the set - his second - to which the present work belongs: "I hope these Masses will find better favour than the first set, because they're shorter".

In this performance the music's lightness was at odds with its liturgical purpose. Pinzger's word-setting is often awkward, and he generally could not disguise the way harmonic necessity - rather than melodic beauty or even integrity - dictated his choral lines.

A difficult masterpiece often lends itself more easily to performance than a simpler but lesser work. This was certainly true for Enchiriadis Treis, whose tuning, ensemble, balance and overall involvement improved dramatically as they tackled Mozart's Requiem.

While Doherty allowed lapses in cohesion between choir and orchestra in slower, quieter music, she and her enthusiastic charges were at their best in the more overtly dramatic movements, notably the opening Requiem and Kyrie and in the closing Lux aeterna.

The fine quartet of soloists were soprano Colette Boushell, tenor Declan Kelly, bass Philip O'Reilly, and alto Juliana Mauger who also gave her rich yet nicely controlled voice to an introspective performance of Vivaldi's solo psalm-setting Nisi Dominus.

Teenage Fanclub

The Village, Dublin

Joe Breen

The sight of Teenage Fanclub ambling onto the stage at a packed Village was less redolent of rock stars than five 30-something friends heading down to the pub. But that casual approach has always been a key part of this veteran Scottish band's appeal - it proclaims that everything else is superficial, it's just the music that counts. And 16 years after they gained their first headline, it still does.

The band are touring their new album, Man-Made, which has just been released on their own label, PeMa. This follows the ending of their relationship with major record labels which culminated in the excellent 2003 compilation, Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub.

This departure is not surprising. The Fanclub have never been the apple of the record industry's eye, and the charms of their sublime harmonies, paired with irresistible melodies and crashing chords, have never started stampedes at record stores.

But those who have heard the likes of albums such as Grand Prix, Songs From Northern Britain and Howdy know that these unlikely lads from Glasgow occasionally score bullseyes. And the band willingly rolls them out for the faithful, gems such as I Don't Want Control Of You and Ain't That Enough are reheated and served with a decent flourish.

However, it is the new songs, scattered through the old classics, that are handled with most care and delivered with most gusto, perhaps because in some cases they are being played live for the first time.

Before we know it, the 75-minute show is over, 16 years of craft laid out in short ringing bursts. It is a good show, but a couple of degrees short of a great show.

But the next time the Fanclub come to Dublin you can be sure that the fan club will be there to greet them, because as is clear from the rapport with the audience, this relationship is no one-night stand.