Reviews

Fintan O'Toole was at A Cry From Heaven in the Abbey, while Kevin Courtney heard Weezer in Vicar Street.

Twice in the 20th century, versions of the Ulster Cycle story of Deirdre and the Sons of Usneach announced new eras in Irish theatre. In the first decade of the century, a cluster of Deirdre plays, by, amongst others, WB Yeats and John Synge, marked the beginnings of the National Theatre movement.

In 1979, Brian Friel's Faith Healer, through which the Deirdre story runs like a watermark, signified a shift towards the kind of narrative-based theatre that has become the new mainstream of Irish drama.

So when the Abbey mounts a large-scale new version directed by a major international figure, as it does with Vincent Woods' A Cry From Heaven, it creates the expectation that this, too will be a landmark event. Welcome as this sense of ambition must be, it also brings a painful awareness that this play is not in the same league as Yeats, Synge or Friel.

A return to the Deirdre myth through a play written in blank verse raises two obvious questions. What does this story mean in the 21st century? And how can a poetic epic be staged now? Woods's collaboration with the French director Olivier Py suggests some lively answers to the second question, but hardly begins to address the first.

Woods's version of the story differs markedly from both the concentrated, stately approach of Yeats and Synge and from Friel's notion of it as an oblique, ghostly presence in the modern world. Woods sees the task of dramatising it in simpler terms: begin before Deirdre's birth, end after her death and enact all the important moments in between. What we get, then, is an essentially linear narrative, moving from the prophecies of doom that accompany Deirdre's entry into a pre-Christian world to her flight with the warrior Naoise from a planned marriage with the king, Conor, to the tragic consequences of their return and betrayal.

Given the relative simplicity of this approach, Woods relies on his blank verse to create a deeper resonance. And this is where the essential problem lies. For while the verse is, in its own way, rather accomplished, it is seldom convincingly dramatic. All the characters speak in the same, rather rigidly rhetorical, declamatory style that sounds at times like a passable imitation of Shakespeare and at others like a 1920s English translation of a Greek tragedy. The effect is odd rather than startling. The text has an archaic feel, with no real flavour of our own times. The lack of fluency, immediacy and variety creates a barrier between the story and a contemporary audience, and leaves the story in a kind of suspended animation.

There is neither the mythic pull of Yeats' ritualistic version of the tale nor the directness of a contemporary account.

Py's ferociously energetic production, on the other hand, is unmistakably a product of the here-and-now. He and his habitual designer Pierre-Andre Weitz deploy, with great aplomb, the favoured weapons of the European avant-garde: a stark monochrome of white faces and white lights set against black costumes and mobile black towers; deliberate anachronisms and Brechtian disjunctions; a harsh soundtrack of rumbles and screeches; violent sexual imagery and a rapid, breathless pace. All of this is at times exhilarating and there are moments of stark beauty.

But while Py stages the play superbly, he does not really direct it. He never manages to create a world in which the concepts that govern the story - honour and shame - come alive. The big, epic style allows some of his performers to blossom but drowns out others. Actors with large voices and full-on presence like Olwen Fouere, Barry McGovern and Denis Conway revel in the high-pitched rhetoric and hurly-burly motion, but younger actors like Kelly Campbell as Deirdre and Alan Turkington as Naoise find it hard at times to assert themselves. And the decision to make Ciaran Taylor's Conor into a idiotic figure, more Ubu Roi than prehistoric king, undercuts the necessary sense of grandeur. Thus, even as it reasserts the Abbey's loyalty to the high ambitions of its founders, A Cry From Heaven falls short of fulfilling them.

Weezer
Vicar St, Dublin

By Kevin Courtney

We are All on Drugs. That's the only possible explanation for why Vicar St is filled with grown adults grinning stupidly, bouncing up and down and singing along lustily to Weezer's above-titled teen-satire anthem. "I want to reach a higher plane," sneers the band's bespectacled leader, Rivers Cuomo. For the delighted audience, every chorus, hook and chant is a step up to the next level of ecstasy, as we overdose on our drug of choice: pure, pristine, puerile power-pop. This is Weezer's first-ever visit to these shores, and fans are making the most of this rare sighting of the LA quartet, going bonkers to such college-nerd classics as Say It Ain't So, Undone (The Sweater Song), Hash Pipe and Buddy Holly.

For some reason, though, the band don't seem to be feeding off the enthusiasm, and throughout their all-too-short set, Cuomo looks as if he'd rather be at home organising his baseball card collection. Of course, this is part of Weezer's appeal, and as Cuomo shyly mumbles the intro to each song, you have to admit he plays the palooka card like a pro. But you also wish that the band would push the sound out a bit more, turn it up to 11, and catapult us all into power-pop heaven. Still, who could fault the quiet, sun-drenched charm of Island in the Sun or the parental admonishment of Slob? Weezer wrote the book on geeky high-school angst, and every short-pants combo in Christendom has been cribbing off it ever since. It's great to finally see the original of the species - even if they are being infuriatingly calm and mature.

Eleven years after their debut, Weezer are still plugged into that messed-up teenage hormone bank, and their new album, Make-Believe, has neatly elbowed its way to No 2 in the US; we may not yet be au fait with such new tunes as Peace and Haunt you Every Day, but it's okay: like all their other tunes, it only takes a verse and a chorus to become fully versed. Better than drugs - and the hit lasts longer.

Andrea Lucchesini (piano)
King's Inns, Dublin

By Martin Adams

Beethoven - Sonata in E minor Op 90

Scarlatti - 5 Sonatas

Berio - 6 Encores

Chopin - Preludes Op 28

Outstanding piano playing and bold programming marked the opening of the IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses series on Thursday. The Italian pianist Andrea Lucchesini was born in 1965, and developed a close working relationship with the composer Luciano Berio before the latter's death in 2003.

Lucchesini's playing suggested why this relationship between musicians born 40 years apart proved so profitable. For all his avant-garde reputation, Berio was at heart a lyricist with a characteristically Italian sense of harmonic and instrumental colour.

Those qualities were evident in Lucchesini's playing of Beethoven's Sonata in E minor Op. 90, but above all in the astonishing aggregation of pieces that followed it. Between each of five carefully chosen Scarlatti sonatas he played one or two of Berio's Six Encores - short, concentrated character pieces composed between 1965 and 1990.

There was little or no pause between each work, and sometimes the pulse was constant across two or more pieces.

It was revelatory in the best sense. Lucchesini's playing of Scarlatti made no concessions to the music's harpsichord background. It was vividly coloured, with layered textures that showed the music's sensuousness and as well as its discipline and iconoclasm. The mingling with Berio revealed the same qualities there too, as if one work was an inspired out-growth of another.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this recital was a spontaneity that entirely hid the player's preparation. That was especially valuable in one of the most striking performances of the Chopin Preludes Op. 28 that I have ever heard. Each one came across as a characterful burst of invention. As Chopin's contemporaries remarked, this is extreme music, a set of fragments so bold that they rise above their brevity. This performance was full of extremes, guided by deep thinking and a rare ability to deliver.

Festival continues until 18th June. For details telephone 01-6642822 or visit www.musicirishhouses.com.

Concorde/O'Leary
National Gallery, Dublin

By Michael Dungan

Elaine Agnew - Mushrooming.

Deirdre Gribbin - To Bathe her Body in Whiteness.

Peter Rosser - Slow Drug.

Garrett Sholdice - Quintet.

Derek Kelly - Lion in the Rain.

Karen Power - we're not there yet.

Thursday's concert included the first performances of works by four emerging Irish composers, part of a programme that new music ensemble Concorde and director Jane O'Leary will present at London's Spitalfields Festival tonight.

The four composers were all on hand to introduce their music. Garrett Sholdice spoke of simply indulging his delight in sounds and of moving from static to fluid. His 12-minute Quintet for flute, clarinet, cello, accordion and piano does just that, appealingly combining these straightforward parameters with a high degree of timbral subtlety and a sure feel for pacing.

Peter Rosser's Slow Drug is based on a PJ Harvey song and featured unaccompanied soprano Tine Verbeke in increasingly gasp-infused repetitions of the words "this drug I need". The accompanied section that followed was less arresting but very assured in the writing. It would have been good to have the text.

The full text was provided for Derek Kelly's Lion in the Rain, what he called a "dreamscape" reflection on poems from Michael Longley's collection The Weather in Japan. Kelly's responses - for example to images of walking in snow and of the stitching on quilts - are at once abstract and gently evocative.

Karen Power's we're not there yet doesn't quite measure up to her interesting premise, a contest between natural and "man-made" sounds. To level the playing-field she confines the instruments to the least lyrical end of their respective sound-spectrums, for example grating on the cello, noteless breathing in the clarinet. But then the natural sounds, represented by morse code-like tapping on wood and stone, never really assert themselves.

The concert opened with established pieces from Elaine Agnew and Deirdre Gribbin, Agnew's Mushrooming having a depictive, sometimes almost programmatic response to the forest imagery of Chris Agee's New Hampshire-inspired poem, and Gribbin's To Bathe Her Body in Brightness being a surprisingly dark and stormy reflection on the rather gentle idea of wind bathing a woman's body.