REVIEWS

Irish Timeswriters review The Parker Projectat the Old Northern Bank, Belfast, and Boylan, RTÉ NSO/Maloneyat the NCH, Dublin.

The Parker Project

Old Northern Bank, Belfast

FEW WOULD expect to find a rewarding symmetry in the first and last works of any playwright's career - a clear continuity in form and theme from start to finish. The strong evidence of The Parker Project, though, a co-production between Belfast's Lyric Theatre and Dublin's Rough Magic, suggests that Stewart Parker's deceptively freewheeling debut, 1975's Spokesong, and the sombre majesty of his last bow, Pentecost, 13 years later, are less bookends to his short career than prescient companion pieces.

It helps that director Lynne Parker, the playwright's niece, shares a similar understanding of time and place. Both plays carefully evoke Belfast during the early 1970s and its ever-present echoes of its history, together with the rich possibilities of a stagecraft where the living and dead can mingle. The setting of each play is on the faultline of sectarian division and ruinous redevelopment, the Victorian bike shop of Spokesongthreatened by both bombers and city planners, while the unlikely sanctuary in Pentecostis a shabby home "eloquent with the history of this city" and "slap bang in the firing line" of the tumultuous Ulster Workers' Strike in 1974.

Both plays confront the bleak reality of the times with humour and pain, while carefully advancing human and spiritual ideals. In short, both plays dare to be hopeful. Twenty years after Parker's death and 10 years after the Belfast Agreement, that hope seems suffused with quiet vindication.

What strikes you most about Spokesong, in which Dan Gordon's endearing, big-hearted Frank holds the bicycle as an emblem of liberation and an alternative to the social disintegration of motorways, is its nerveless balance between frivolity and seriousness. Hampered by the performance space, which lends an atmosphere of civic history but restricts both plays to a traverse staging, ungenerous to whirrs of movement or the swell of music, the production is charming, but never climbs to its higher gears.

Marty Rea's extraordinary propulsion as the Trick Cyclist compensates handsomely, though, combining physical wit and fluid characterisation. The play's idealistic conclusion may seem glib, but it is the playwright's prerogative to suggest that real problems might be solved with a little imagination.

The potential of transformation and transcendence is more stirring in Pentecost, Stewart Parker's bold and brilliant swansong. Lynne Parker accentuates a continuity between the plays by giving Kathy Kiera Clarke, Richard Clements and Marty Rea a place in both. Clarke - attractively salty as Daisy in Spokesong - brings a more calloused, headstrong presence to Marian, one of four refugees squatting in the home of the recently deceased, fiercely Protestant tenant Lily Mathews.

Astutely played with quiet intimidation and concealed wounds by Eleanor Methven, Lily again represents a past that must be confronted if there is to be any possibility for a future. The scenes between Clarke and Methven are the production's most compelling, granted a spectral intensity by Sinead McKenna's lights and the distended realism of Monica Frawley's design.

Clements, largely one-note as the returned cynic in Spokesong, finds greater nuance in Lenny, Marian's shiftless estranged husband, while Rea again excels as Peter, another tortured exile scorning his "teeny wee province".

Gemma Mae Halligan asserts both cultural pride and personal victimhood as Ruth.

An accomplished production with still stirring exhortations towards spiritual, human transformation, it is odd that this Pentecostnow misses the voltage of performing against the Troubles, as the future that Parker dared to envision comes closer within reach. That The Parker Project is presented as a commemoration, a victory lap rather than a defiant stand, is a strange consequence of the triumph of the playwright's imagination. His genius and importance to Irish theatre are unquestioned; the urgency of his message may have been muted by its own achievement. - PETER CRAWLEY

Spokesong and Pentecost are performed alternately during the week and as a double bill on Saturdays, until May 17th, as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. The productions perform in The Empty Space, Dublin from May 24th until June 14th.

Boylan, RTÉ NSO/Maloney

NCH, Dublin

Beethoven - Symphony No 8

Henryk Górecki - Symphony No 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs).

POLISH COMPOSER Henryk Górecki is not exactly a one-hit wonder. His music was already being played in Ireland before the runaway success of his Third Symphony which followed on the Nonesuch recording issued in 1992.

In the previous five years, his music had been advocated by the Belfast-based new music ensemble Sequenza, the Smith String Quartet had taken his First Quartet on a Music Network tour, and various choirs had performed his Totus tuus, written for a visit by Pope John Paul II to his native Poland.

But nothing else in the composer's output has yet rivalled the popular appeal of the famous symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which sets a 15th-century lamentation, a prayer scratched on a wall in the Gestapo headquarters at Zakopane by a prisoner in 1944, and a folk-song from the Opale region. And nothing else in Górecki's output would fill the National Concert Hall as the symphony did for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's performance under Gavin Maloney last Friday.

Maloney chose to emphasise the austerity of the music, offering a rigorous and lean-sounding exposition of the long, opening canon. It was an approach that allowed the contributions of the soprano to stand out in even sharper focus than usual. Orla Boylan was compassionate and radiant, and the audience took her to their hearts. The weak link in the work is the finale, where the melodic line over rocking patterns lacks the patient momentum of the first movement or the raw pathos of the second. Here, the severity of Maloney's approach served the music least well.

Maloney took a high-pressure approach to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, as if he saw it as a work of rawly driven energy, with little to smile at and hardly a touch of geniality.

The heaviness of accentuation and paucity of really meaningful contrast became fatiguing. The music simply was not allowed to breathe. - MICHAEL DERVAN