Reviews

Reviews of Present Laughterat The Gate, Caius College Choir, Cambridge/Webberin St Michael's Church Dún Laoghaire and The Life of GalileoThe Atrium, Office of Public Works, Dublin

Present Laughter

The Gate Theatre, Dublin

"One can't read any of Noël Coward's plays now," wrote Cyril Connolly, harshly, in 1937. "They are written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable, the cream in them turns sour overnight." Staging a 70-year-old comedy steeped in 1930s in-jokes, copious self-references and upper-class peccadilloes, the new Gate production of Present Laughtercan choose to ignore the warning and dress the play up in sumptuous costumes with carefully recreated detail, or else deflate the play's pomposity with an artful stab of contemporary irony.

To his credit, director Alan Stanford attempts both tactics, but the results are mixed. Coward’s play, about an ageing, caddishly attractive actor, Garry Essendine (played here by the ageing, caddishly attractive Stephen Brennan), is an admitted self-portrait. Louche, non-committal and satellited by protective servants, adoring ingénues, an indulging wife and assorted hangers-on, Essendine is never off the stage. In the course of the unwieldy play, little of consequence occurs – romantic entanglements eventually unravel; the unsolicited interests of a wacky playwright come to naught; an engagement in Africa requires him to pack – and yet this is clearly the performance of Essendine’s life.

Following The Real Thing, in which another group of theatre-makers dealt with matters of the heart, Stanford is again placing the theatre centre stage and asking where the act ends and the real begins. Those in his cast who deliver gently heightened performances recognise the necessity of exaggeration and no one is better here than Jade Yourell. As the first of Essendine's young admirers, Yourell delivers the line, "Oh Gehry, I'm so ridiculously heppy" with a tightrope balance between affection and parody. Not everyone is so successful, but Yourell proves you can have your cliche and eat it.

The magnificent Fiona Bell, as Essendine’s salty Scottish secretary, has similar fun, while John Kavanagh’s slapstick playwright seems to have arrived straight from the Ministry of Silly Walks and is all the better for it. But when Barbara Brennan’s perma-smoking cleaning woman spins through a roulette wheel of accents, it’s clear that the broader comedy must compensate for stale ad-hoc stretches which could easily have been excised.

For an undemanding audience, there is little here that will actively offend. Costume designer Peter O’Brien’s diaphanous creations could almost be the raison d’etre for the production, even if a couple of the performers seem subordinate to his beautifully outré hats.

That the trifling backdrop to Essendine’s self-involved existence, commonly known as the second World War, receives only the most oblique acknowledgement is extremely telling. Coward, a former British intelligence official advised by Winston Churchill to stick to entertainment, wasn’t keen to mention the war in 1942, but its darkness is conspicuous by its absence. Essendine may defend himself against the charge of frippery with some gusto, but Coward never seemed to reconcile his intelligence with his escapist formulae, forever tiptoeing away from trouble.

Staging this decadent bauble in these straitened times is a directly similar manoeuvre – consoling, distracting, irrelevant – but some of Coward's self-references threaten to derail the conceit. "She feels as though she's in a French farce and is sick to death of it," says one character in the echo of another freshly slammed door. I knew how she felt. Runs until September 5th PETER CRAWLEY

Caius College Choir, Cambridge/Webber

St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire

Haydn– Aus dem Dankliede zu Gott. Psalm 26, How oft. Psalm 41, Maker of all. Mozart– Adagio in B minor K540. Duruflé– Quatre motets sure des themes grégoriens. Fugue sur le thème du carillon des heures de la Cathédrale do Soissons. Victoria– Gaude Virgo Maria. Britten– Prelude and Fugue on a theme of Vittoria. Five Flower Songs.

The choir of Caius College Cambridge is an undergraduate ensemble of around 24 male and female voices. On the evidence of this concert, it deserves its high reputation among Britain’s finest collegiate choirs.

We heard a few rarities, including two of Haydn’s English-language Psalm settings – trios for unaccompanied soprano, alto and bass soloists, in which the voices were distinctive, yet worked well together. The college’s organ scholars, David Ballantyne and Matthew Fletcher, gave enjoyable accounts of organ works by Mozart, Duruflé and Britten; and the way these fitted the surrounding choral music showed a good awareness of how to construct an engaging programme.

The most striking qualities of the choir’s sound included its cleanly rich tone, which embraced a wide range of colour and volume.

This was evident when five solo voices sang Victoria's beautiful motet Gaude Virgo Maria, and in the performances for full choir. The latter included a delicately coloured, long-phrased account of Duruflé's Quatre motets sur des themes grégoriens, and a vivid and characterful account of Britten's Five Flower Songs.

This impressive concert demonstrated a particular side of the English choral tradition's unique strengths. Although the choir's director, Geoffrey Webber, was evidently in charge, he did not need to do much physically, because everyone listened as intently as they watched. The strengths were also epitomised in cleanness of pitch, in the unanimity and command of detail that distinguishes the upper echelons of this tradition, and in an approach to expression that placed a high value on good taste. MARTIN ADAMS

The Life of Galileo

The Atrium, Office of Public Works, Dublin

"Some of the dialectic has been edited," reads the director's note for Dublin Lyric's rudimentary production of The Life of Galileo, with the ring of an apology. It's an unusual disclaimer. Left alone, Bertolt Brecht's discussion on science, religion and oppression can unfurl over the course of about four hours. Fuelled by political indignation and an intellectual imperative, Brecht wished to be exhaustive. The consequence for a contemporary audience is that, in the wrong hands, he merely seems exhausting.

Written in 1943, this play – an historical drama, a searing comment on the time of its writing and a depiction of intelligence in shackles – is one of the fruits of a creative whirlwind Brecht enjoyed in spite of, or perhaps because of, his political exile in the US. An artist fleeing Nazi persecution need not strain to identify with a scientist under house arrest and, as written, there is a lot of Brecht in Galileo, a man who will challenge authority using simple observation techniques to assert some dangerous notions. Depending on your time and circumstances, the idea that fascism is fundamentally corrupt, or that the sun revolves around the Earth, can be equally provocative.

Sadly, the play remains a huge challenge to produce. In 2005, a fully professional company such as Rough Magic found the text so thick with verbiage and ideas it could barely sustain the urgency of Brecht’s inquiry – even against the backdrop of Bush’s America and science once again in the dock.

Dublin Lyric have a harder time maintaining focus. Performing the play in the Atrium of the Office of Public Works, a non-theatre space with a glass ceiling, has an appropriate chime – placing Galileo beneath the stars – but the acoustics magnify the offstage disturbances and defeat the articulation and projection of the cast, who must also contend with inconsistencies in performance style and fiendishly intricate dialogue currently outside their capacities.

Brecht often wrote didactic pieces for amateur performance, his idea being to educate actor and audience. If that’s the agenda here, something accentuated by educational charts that line the performance space, Conor O’Malley’s production does not appear to have cracked the play, its stilted manner conveying little sense to either performer or spectator.

"I have not failed," said Thomas Edison, another man of science, "just discovered another way that doesn't work." The same could be said about the production, which marks the International Year of Astronomy. The play will always be with us, which leaves much more time for experimentation and observation. As one character puts it, somewhere towards the two-and-a-half hour mark, "We're really just at the beginning." Runs until tomorrow. Performs at 6.15pm PETER CRAWLEY