Reviews

PETER CRAWLEYreviews Only an Appleat the Peacock Theatre, Dublin and RAY COMISKEYreviews the Marcin Wasilewski Trio at the John Field Room, Dublin.

Only an Apple

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

On the surface, dream plays always seem quite profound. From Caldéron to Maeterlinck, Strindberg to Kushner, they mint their own theatrical logic, populate the stage with real figures and elusive symbols, play fast and loose with sense, and plumb the depths of the unconscious. Much like a dream itself, however, the clues to the unconscious tend to wither under the spotlight.

That’s the overall feeling created by Tom Mac Intyre’s immensely playful new work, one that abounds with cavorting figures and scattershot references, wringing history for its imagery, mythology for its heft and, as far as I could make out, very little for its meaning.

The characters of a dream play may shift and dissolve, Strindberg decided, but they are ruled by the dreamer. Our best candidate for this role, other than Mac Intyre himself, is known simply as “taoiseach” (Don Wycherly), currently at home, entertaining guests. That this home is conceived by designer Dick Bird as a cross between Abbeville, Versailles and a magic box signals political corruption, before we hear a single affected, orotund word from Wycherly.

His guests are Queen Elizabeth I and Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen. History records a less than loving relationship between the two, but watching them straddle various menfolk together or exchange the odd snog, it seems that they have since worked it out. They may be archetypal figures of feminine power, here behaving like louts on a stag weekend, but if they represent a gendered reckoning for a sleazy Irish patriarchy, the point is allowed to drift.

For nobody seems sure what these figures actually are. Succubi, suggests the taoiseach’s flamingly gay cultural attaché (Marty Rea, overdone); adolescent fantasies and a PR disaster, worries his press secretary (Michael McElhatton, neatly done); the Furies, recognises his butler (Malcolm Adams, very well done). Selina Cartmell, a brilliant visual director, maintains all possibilities. But, paying more attention to a complementing style than a much-needed critique, her production lurches madly from sex comedy to tragedy, with neither genre finding real effect.

As Elizabeth I, Fiona Bell’s talents seem to be largely smothered by her costume and face paint. Cathy Belton, as Grace, fares better with a hilarious seduction of Steve Blount’s insurgent chief whip, a rival to the taoiseach who has “the figures” but is undone, understandably, by Grace’s.

The shame is that for all Cartmell's feeling for various theatrical possibilities (encompassing a knowing artificiality and one tremendously executed musical number), these complicated personas are reduced to a Bacchanalian deadlock. All the men are concupiscent and contemptuous; the women merely temptresses and destroyers. Had Mac Intyre found room in this Midnight Court to show us the ruin of a hero – the real measure of a tragedy – the play might touch a deeper national nerve. Instead we get a taoiseach already rotten to the core, peeled, however beautifully, into oblivion. Is that dream really revealing? Or, as Freud might have put it, maybe an apple is only an apple. PETER CRAWLEY

Until May 30

Marcin Wasilewski Trio

John Field Room, Dublin

Here frequently as the rhythm section for their great compatriot, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s trio is now touring as a unit in its own right. Completed by Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass) and Michal Miskiewicz (drums), it was already a long-time trio, well established in Poland, before Stanko took the musicians and introduced them to an international audience.

He has done them – and us – a great favour. This is a fascinating group, focused, intense, lyrical and inventive, with no signs of staleness or coasting despite so many years together. Wasilewski’s abundant technique is never used merely to dazzle, and in Kurkiewicz and Miskiewicz, he has colleagues capable, with him, of taking the music wherever they wish.

All the compositions they played at this gig (with one exception, the second set opener, Song for Swirekor Simple Song) came from their superb ECM CD, January, released last year. The opening number, The First Touch, a long, elegant rubato musical dialogue, imaginative and impressionistic, was followed by The Young and the Cinema, an uptempo excursion, mostly in ¾ time, which included one of their trademarks, their gripping facility for fixing on a single chord or two, or a vamp figure, and building endlessly over it without running out of ideas. And they have exemplary control of dynamics in bringing these episodes to a resolution.

They did it again with The Cat, which, like the others, was written by the leader. The lovely, melancholy Januarywas also part of a first set which ended with Stanko's Balladyna. Throughout the set, the standard of soloing and group interplay was stunning.

But all that was eclipsed by the second performance in a relatively short final set. Ennio Morricone's Cinema Paradisowas a lingeringly beautiful ballad, full of space and delicate placement, exquisitely played. It was bookended by Wasilewski's graceful Song for Swirekand Carla Bley's King Korn, which opened very free before donning the piece's idiosyncratic contours. Prince's Diamonds and Pearlswas the encore – that it was somewhat perfunctory didn't matter, given the quality that had preceded it. RAY COMISKEY