Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Knowing Cairoand classical music in today's reviews.
Dublin Theatre Festival: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Project Arts Centre
It is another sweltering summer day in contemporary Munster, where the soil of an Irish plantation swells with fertility and deep southern heritage. Its inhabitants, twisted by desire and beset by anxiety, spar over their dying Big Daddy's "28,000 acres" and swallow their illicit yearnings in the face of the crippling sexual bigotry of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland . . . Um, wait just one cotton-pickin' second.
Anxious to underscore the relevance of Tennessee Williams's 1955 classic of materialism and heartbreak to the here and now, Corn Exchange Theatre Company has transplanted the story to more familiar climes and times. We're not in Mississippi any more. Williams, a fragile and poetic creature who needs a hothouse to flourish, certainly survives the move. But despite director Annie Ryan's clear sensitivity to the material and her wry appreciation of cultural incongruities, her production makes some awkward and needless substitutions. We get Ennis in place of Memphis, midges filling in for mosquitoes and, in something of a cop-out, nobody instead of "Negroes".
The accents have changed accordingly, although the idiom has not - a clear sign that the text will not bend to the design. And if that fitful translation underestimates the audience (desperate, rapacious desire and the threat of an impoverished past are not currently themes that need underlining), the performance style, conversely, expects too much knowledge.
Corn Exchange has developed a physically playful aesthetic, modelled, it seems, as much on Looney Tunes as Commedia dell'arte. Although that style is curiously subdued here (no mask-like make-up or punctuating drumbeats), the acolytes will know why Rory Nolan's distant, alcoholic Brick and Simone Kirby's sexually over-ripe Maggie are whipping their heads towards the audience but never meeting each other's gaze. The uninitiated will just feel bewildered.
This matters, because while previous shows Everyday or Dublin By Lamplight showed how well Corn Exchange's theatrical grammar can be used to create new plays, its muted application to a classic distracts from some otherwise truly beautiful work.
Kirby, crazed with longing and hissing with self-loathing, offers a wonderful, complex Maggie. As her sexually tormented husband, Nolan (a gifted comic actor) plays it utterly straight and displays a moving gift for tragic embodiment. His taciturn Brick is one of life's also-rans, despising the "mendacity" around him but remaining a hypocrite to his heart, seeking peace only in a drunken stupor. When he is paired with Andrew Bennett's hilariously bestial but remarkably tender Big Daddy, the production becomes electrifying. Bennett - the only actor who could transcend a fat-suit - hints at what Ryan is aiming for: humanity and grotesquerie folded into one.
Around them, though, swirls a gallery of absurd figures, and though Ruth McGill's "monster of fertility" Mae is a scream, it's her child, Clare Barrett's Dixie, who makes the production's most lingering impression. More visual gag than character, she wears a Bunratty gown and an American-Indian headdress, waving a gun and flapping angel wings. She is gobsmackingly amusing and wholly confusing, a compelling chaos of mismatched signifiers, a walking identity crisis.
That's the point, that's the problem, and that's the production. Until Oct 12
PETER CRAWLEY
Knowing Cairo:Cork Arts Theatre
This Cork Arts Theatre production is the first presentation of Andrea Stolowitz's play in Ireland, which should have made the plot a little less predictable. Especially as the title carries a message which never quite comes through: Cairo is the town at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Knowing this is crucial to the action of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as the town is also the borderland between slavery and freedom.
It will seem unfair to the well-balanced and very competent trio of actresses in this production to suggest that a different, perhaps more weighted, sense of timing might have achieved a stronger impact, but the players are challenged from the start by the structure of this piece, which progresses in brief episodes interrupted by 20 minor but prolonged, noisy and intensely irritating scene changes. This means that each scene is super-charged, or should be, but instead of giving the cast time to build their characters, the playwright seems to prefer to save trouble by using stereotypes.
Rose, played with sensitivity by Fionula Linehan, who has managed to age herself by half a century for the role, is an octogenarian of German-Jewish background whose psychotherapist daughter engages an African-American carer for her. As Rose and her carer sort themselves into friendship, the daughter, relieved of the pressures of a thorny familial relationship, allows her jealousy of a closeness she never enjoyed with her mother to prompt suspicion of the carer's motives.
Roisin FitzGerald and Tracy Harper complete this triangle of domestic rivalry and, with director Dolores Mannion, offer a skilful as well as faithful rendering of a play which is often funny, always compassionate, but somehow never quite recognises Cairo. Until Oct 18
MARY LELAND
Alexeev, St Petersburg Philharmonic/Tortelier:National Concert Hall, Dublin
Elgar - Introduction and Allegro.
Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No 3.
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No 6 (Pathétique).
There were two major substitutions at this appearance by the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier replaced the orchestra's principal conductor, Yuri Temirkanov, and Dmitri Alexeev replaced Elisso Virsaladze as the soloist in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto.
The changes meant the concert opened with a rather unusual proposition: a Russian orchestra playing a major work by an English composer under a Frenchman. The result was a full-blooded performance of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for strings that was built on a particularly strong double-bass foundation, with the players sometimes leaning on the melodic lines in unexpected ways, and settling in to some unorthodox strides in passages of accumulating drive.
Dmitri Alexeev played Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto as if it might have been written for him, handling the spray of notes with delectable point, thundering with authority when the music went into heavy-duty motoric mode, and responding with good taste to the piece's sometimes extreme turns of schmaltziness. Tortelier and the St Petersburgers conveyed the orchestration as an endlessly fascinating splurge of clever colouring.
There was a feeling of sometimes unbridled earthiness to the orchestra's playing which was bound to find effective outlet in Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony. Tortelier didn't seek the kind of tight musical weave that Valery Gergiev brought to the composer's Fifth Symphony with the Kirov Orchestra at the National Concer Hall two years ago. He painted instead in larger patterns and with broader strokes.
The St Petersburg orchestra boasts highly distinctive sonorities. There's a sometimes throaty massiveness to the string tone, and a laser-like focus to the brass section. Add to this the players' collective ability to project the feeling in climaxes that the escalation might simply never stop, and you have the recipe for a performance of gripping emotionalism.
That's what Tortelier delivered, and though the audience made clear how much they loved it, they were frustrated in their efforts to secure an encore.
MICHAEL DERVAN
