A Little Bit of Blue, Andrews Lane, Dublin
As might be expected from the first stage play by an experienced actor, Alan Archbold's debut for The Passion Machine shows a good sense of timing. As this hymn to Hill 16 arrives, the Dublin Gaelic football team has just reached the Leinster final and hasn't yet lost it to Laois.
The Hill itself was restored to its full glory last Sunday in the new Croke Park with the sun beating down on swaying ranks of Jacks. And A Little Bit of Blue is in fact rather like the current Dublin team itself: frantically energetic, full of heart and passion, but a bit chaotic in the midfield, inclined to shoot some blanks and far from the finished article.
Directed by Passion Machine's artistic director Paul Mercier, lit and costumed by the company's regular designers Megan Shepard and Ann Gately and starring company veteran Pat Nolan, the play is very much in the mould that Mercier has shaped. His own early plays and many of those he has staged for Passion Machine have often used aspects of Dublin working-class popular culture (from rock bands to Tops of the Town and from pub quizzes to soccer clubs) to explore the unheroic realities of daily life.
Archbold, who himself performed in many of these shows - most notably Mercier's own Studs - stays very much within this genre. A Little Bit of Blue uses Hill 16 as the fulcrum for an account of the mid-life crisis of a Dub (called, rather too cutely, Sam Maguire) who works in a food-processing plant. As his marriage breaks up, he loses his job and his daughter gets pregnant by a bullying yob, the Hill stands as the last bedrock of certainty in a collapsing world.
The sense of broad familiarity is not confined to the subject matter. The general style of the production is forged from elements that Mercier has used before, especially in Studs: slow-motion action, mime, a rapid-fire, almost cinematic shifting of scenes, high-energy performances and ruthlessly efficient storytelling. But while in Mercier's own best work, these up-front methods have been combined with sophisticated content and a startling theatricality, there is a sense in A Little Bit of Blue that they are sometimes used to fuse elements that are not fully integrated in the writing.
Essentially, the play has two ideas: Sam's befuddled loneliness as he struggles to understand why his wife Mary (Catherine Byrne) doesn't love him any more, and the collective oblivion of the Hill, where all the fears and complexities melt into one simple cauldron of hope and anxiety. There are times when we see what a really successful integration of these two strands looks like. At the start, and intermittently thereafter, the action is imagined on the Hill itself, with the triangular relationship of Sam, Mary and their wayward daughter Clare (Rebecca Grimes) played out amidst the banter and chanting of the blue-clad masses of fans. The fans act as a down-at-heel Greek chorus to a domestic tragedy, echoing and amplifying the family's rows and misunderstandings. These are brilliantly illuminating moments, in which the ordinary, everyday pain is bathed in a universal light and given a real sense of scale.
The challenge would be to keep this going for the 80 minutes of the play. It would be a demanding task, but there would be something large at stake. Instead, though, the play shifts for the most part into a low-key domestic realism in which Sam's problems are given a crisp but rather shallow exposition. With five actors playing everyone from Joe's workmate and boss to the Croatian pizza-maker who gives him a job to the variety of women he hooks up with to Mary's old flame with whom she elopes for Paris to assorted fans of various teams, the characterisations are inevitably sketchy.
It is all done with great skill and aplomb, and there are moments of great wit in both the performances and in Jack Kirwan's clever designs. But basic questions such as why Mary is so cheesed off with Sam are never really explored, and the presentation of such a wide kaleidoscope in so short a time means that there is also a resort to easy class and sexual stereotypes. For all the liveliness, commitment and sporadic brilliance, A Little Bit of Blue can't escape the qualifiers.
Runs until June 30
-Fintan O'Toole
Peregrine, O'Brien, OSC/Agler, St Ann's Church, Dawson Street, Dublin
Barber - Adagio. Haydn - Cello Concerto in C. Mozart - Exsultate, jubilate. Symphony No 29.
When is an orchestra not an orchestra? Well, back in the mid-1930s, Thomas Beecham annoyed the powers-that-be at the New York Philharmonic by declaring that although it had many good players, it was not an orchestra. He was talking about the kind of phenomenon which means that having the best footballers is no guarantee of having the best team.
The sort of teamwork that makes for good orchestral playing, the alertness of response between players, the high quality of listening while performing, has never really been a consistent feature of the work of the Orchestra of St Cecilia, an orchestra which came into being in 1995, made up of players who stayed in Dublin and stuck with the old ways when the Irish Chamber Orchestra re-invented itself and relocated to Limerick.
Programming, however, has been one of the OSC's strengths, and an area in which it could teach the ICO a thing or two. It's engaged in a mammoth series of Bach cantatas. It's offered major cycles of Mozart and Beethoven at the NCH. And it has been assiduous in offering work to Irish conductors and soloists of all generations.
It has also been quick off the mark in offering a Dublin engagement to David Agler, the first conductor to become artistic director of the Wexford Festival, an institution which the OSC's manager and artistic director, Lindsay Armstrong, has been vociferous in criticising for its neglect of the Irish musical profession.
Agler's OSC debut at St Ann's, Dawson Street, on Monday, in a concert sponsored by Allied Pension Trustees Ltd, got off to an underpowered start. The orchestral version of Samuel Barber's Adagio was conceived with the sonority of a large symphony orchestra string section in mind. Agler's approach was lucid and welcomely unsentimental. But with only 12 string players at his disposal there was an inescapable lack of body to the tone.
Size and numbers were not issues in the rest of the programme, and under Agler's guidance the orchestra sounded both better and worse than it normally does, with both outcomes stemming from a single cause. Much as, say, a new carpet without other changes may serve to highlight the outstanding decorative issues in a problematic room, Agler's sharpening of focus and successful shaping of the kind of expressive detail that this orchestra often glosses over, served to set the remaining infelicities of ensemble and intonation in higher relief.
His musical approach was rewarding, measured but invigorating, interventionist but not unduly fussy (he clearly likes to hear what the inner parts have to offer), and with a frequent spring in the rhythm that was independent of speed. In fact, so successful was the orchestra in Haydn's Cello Concerto in C, that its playing was often more sharply characterised than that of the soloist, Gerald Peregrine, whose understandable concern for firm projection of tone left him sounding effortful in a way Haydn can hardly have wanted.
Soprano Sylvia O'Brien showed an impressive facility in Mozart's demanding Exsultate, jubilate. Her singing was attractive in tone and easy in delivery, though not everything in the rapid-fire runs was hit dead-centre. The perplexing aspect of the performance was the way some exquisite moments rubbed shoulders with others that seemed matter-of-fact, even casual. However, the resources to do exactly what this often virtuosic music demands are clearly within her grasp. - Michael Dervan
