Reviews

Irish Times writers review current cultural events

Slat

Smock Alley

Another waking nightmare: figures upright and crouched ­– are they man or beast? –­ flit as shadows across a dark stage, viewed imperfectly through the fog of a scrim. An agonised creature gropes a light source, claws it, chews it. And a growing cacophony of percussive sound makes the experience increasingly unbearable. Then, just when you feel distressed beyond endurance, you’re invited behind this scene, up a scaffolding, to witness Butoh performer Maki Wataname playing a feral child. Welcome to the limbic depths of the id.

Stories about feral children are legendary. Sadly, there are other feral children, those who have been confined without love or care by those unfit to parent them. Whatever children growing up outside the boundaries of human civilisation may feel, the incarceration of the others is worse than bestial, and Watanabe makes us feel it.

Using the haunting power of Butoh, Watanabe becomes the embodiment of pain and anguish. Her jerking, scratching, convulsive movements combine with her mask-like facial contortions, screams without sound, to elicit horror, distress, yet a perverse fascination. Other performers –­ Rebecca Collins, Julie Feeney –­ join in, partly through video projection. As they appear as “normal” people, viewing their exaggerated expressions, hearing their howling, is almost as disturbing.

At one point, Watanabe climbs the scaffolding and, slowly, edges around the balustrade, forcing closeness with the audience. This emphasises the voyeuristic quality of the performance: it is as much about us and our reaction as about what transpires on stage.

This piece by Trevor Knight, with his company Featherhead Productions, in the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, combines a well-considered aesthetic with an effective lighting design by Paul Keogan, and a seemingly chaotic, but discerningly conceived and achieved, sound design that is the musical manifestation of hell. If Hieronymous Bosch were a 21st-century composer and theatre-maker, this is what he would do. A powerful work that makes the audience question itself as well as what constitutes a “civilised” human. Until Sun

CHRISTINE MADDEN

Mullova, Dantone

NCH, Dublin

Bach – Sonata in G minor for solo violin BWV1001. Violin Sonatas in B minor BWV1014. in C minor BWV1017. Chaconne in D minor for solo violin.

This was, it has to be said, an odd kind of evening. Before Viktoria Mullova and Ottavio Dantone even appeared on stage, it was announced that their all-Bach concert would be performed without an interval. Then, when Mullova got to what should have been the climax, the D minor Partita for solo violin, which itself peaks with the greatest movement ever written for solo violin, she announced she was not going to play the whole piece, but just the actual Chaconne. It was an anti-climax to an evening of anti-climaxes.

Mullova is, musically speaking, a cool customer. She plays with a rare precision and perfection. And, among leading virtuosos, she is unusual in her embrace of the stylistic challenges well outside her original comfort zone – she plays jazz, and approaches earlier music from the perspective of period performance practice. Here, sadly, her playing seemed to fall between stools. The two violin sonatas with harpsichord were unduly dominated by the violin, Mullova’s tonal strength rather dwarfing the keyboard writing which Bach did not actually create as a background accompaniment. The effect was to make these sonatas sound too small for the auditorium.

There were no such problems in the solo music, which she played with taste and sensitivity. Her vibrato was light, her violinistic athleticism allowing her a litheness of delivery which ensured an easy rhythmic flow in the face of the music’s most daunting challenges. But there was also a strange kind of grayness about the playing. There was a lot to admire, but a lot less to engage with. And then, of course, there was the 15 minutes or so of solo Bach which she simply didn’t play at all.

MICHAEL DERVAN