Reviews

Critics from The Irish Times review the latest acts at the National Gallery and the Dublin Fringe Festival.

NCC/Antunes,
National Gallery

Celso Antunes's programmes with the National Chamber Choir are intended not only to engage the ear and the heart but also, with a consistency that's currently unique in Ireland, the mind.

The Shakespeare strand in the Motets and The Bard programme, which opened its national tour at the National Gallery on Thursday, offered no less than four settings of Full Fathom Five. There was one from the 17th century (Robert Johnson, "almost angelic" as Antunes himself put it), and three from the second half of the from the 20th century, Giles Swayne emphasising the stillness of the murky depths, Vaughan Williams concentrating on a sense of mystery, and Frank Martin creating a characteristic, haunting sway.

The concert opened with an unusual pairing. Guillaume Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores was performed at the 1436 consecration of Florence Cathedral, and the architectural proportions of the building are worked into the music. German composer and theologian Dieter Schnebel's Motetus I (1989-93) is from the "tradition" strand of Schnebel's unusually categorised output, and shows the same kind of disparate layering as the Dufay.

The polarisation of the austere and the rhythmically giddy in Antunes's approach to the Dufay may have been extreme, but it certainly had the effect, even independently of the Schnebel, of highlighting connections between the ancient and the modern.

The demanding, polyglot Schnebel motet, which celebrated in the 1990s the tradition of the post-war avant-garde as well as the distant past, was done with the apparently unassailable confidence which is now a hallmark of this choir's delivery of the most difficult of new music.

Their handling of Bach's Fürchte dich nicht was, however, very wide of the mark, stressed, choppy, imprecise, often unprofitably loud. It only fitfully sounded persuasively like the work of Bach. The motet's partner in the programme, Brahms's early Schaffe in mir, Gott, restored a sense of musical composure only for it to be lost again in the fast moving parts of the early settings of Shakespeare.

However the 20th-century Shakespeare settings found Antunes and his singers once again in musically and technically commanding form.

Michael Dervan

DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL REVIEWS

Romcom ***
Project Cube

Boy meets girl, they make each other miserable in their attempts to be happy, and then . . . In this quirky re-mix of the romantic comedy genre, the point is not the end of the story, but all the stages in between. The pleasure for the audience derives from admiring the skill of two actors (different each night) improvising their way through a narrative that's being fed to them on headphones. The filmed backdrop - with cinematic echoes ranging from Godard to Woody Allen - and the soundtrack are played on a DVD, running on autopilot. Last year, this talented British company, Rotozaza, brought the intriguing Doublethink, which also walked the tightrope between improvisation and scripted theatre. This is a less complex piece, mainly because Glen Neath's script, though initially humorous, brings little to the well-worn formula. If the content matched the innovative form, there really would be a happy ending.

Ends tonight

Helen Meany

Under the Skin ***
Project Upstairs, Dublin

Before leaving the theatre, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer asked us to vote for Under the Skin, a nomination for the eircom Best Use of Technology Award. Acquiring technological kudos is now important to the choreographers, which is a shame. Having danced together without for nearly 30 years, more and more video in their live performance means we can only marvel at synchronicity. The main event - Under the Skin - was technologically flamboyant, but choreographically apologetic as the live bodies seamlessly wove into projected doppelgangers. It is a common complaint with such collaborations but, as masters of the duet, you particularly missed their physical nuance, the tiniest detail between bodies. Ken Field's colourless, densely voiced score matched the visuals trundling towards a topless hugging duet bathed in warm light and images. It was a rare respite from the game of "spot the real person".

Ends tonight

Michael Seaver

Eileen's lament for Art O'Laoire *
Handel's Yard, Fishamble St, Dublin

Suspicions of amateurism were piqued when our guide got lost on the five-minute walk to the venue (enough with the secret locations, already!). The production confirmed these inklings: this felt like an early workshop at barely secondary-school level. A recorded voice-over tells the familiar tale of Art O'Laoire as three performers in black provide unintentionally hilarious physical demonstrations of the story's ideas (Two men plant feet and thrust arms into the air: they are Spain and England. Woman quavers in the centre: She is Ireland).

Another woman (the director, Coirle Anna Mooney), wearing leotard, tights, and cape stands on a plinth and, via her stentorian declamation, proceeds to suck all the passion and interest out of one of the most heart-rending pieces of love-writing in the canon, as her cohort continue to move their arms around, and eventually put on white masks. Bob Quinn's film gets a programme credit but never materialises.

Ends tomorrow

Karen Fricker