Peter Crawleyreviews Honour at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin while Michael DervanWest Cork Chamber Music Festival Bantry in Co Cork

Honour
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

What is this thing called love, asks Joanna Murray-Smith's play from 1995, and more to the point, what justification can there be for infidelity? These are hardly mint-fresh questions, but at least no myth, legend or soap opera has ever given us a definitive answer.

Having been performed, with minimal adjustments, in Melbourne, New York, London and now - courtesy of a new b*spoke production - in Dublin, Honour's tale of marital breakdown between two loquacious, middle-class intellectuals adapts neatly to any given city, unhindered by a specific cultural context or fresh perspective that might enliven a hackneyed narrative.

George (David Horovitch), a leading light of literary criticism, is apparently happily married to Honor (Barbara Brennan), a writer whose once-magnificent career in poetry was stifled by marriage and motherhood for reasons that are never made plausible.

Interviewed by Claudia (Fiona O'Shaughnessy), a size-zero seductress who is literally half his age, George flees the comforts of intellectual domestic life (here represented by chin-stroking and brandy swilling) to shack up with a contentedly depthless young wan.

The real question, however, is: will Honor survive? Well, at first she is afraid.

She is petrified . . . It would be difficult enough for the cast were they merely saddled with clichés of adulterer, victim and harlot. But it seems positively unfair that they should have to contend also with mercilessly sententious dialogue. Occasionally Murray-Smith offers a rewardingly biting turn of phrase: "What is it about facing death that makes a man turn to a tanning salon?" asks Horovitch, who remains wisely understated throughout. But more often the speech, having established that it is impossible to intellectualise love and passion, involves torturously long attempts to intellectualise love and passion.

("Aren't there inherent consequences to the power dynamic in a relationship?" "Why does the heart take precedence?").

One wonders how this sounded in the original Australian production, where any pretentiousness in the
dialogue might be skewered by the hearty swearing.

But Claire Lovett's production, set in a vaguely Irish context, manages to make both the cerebral and the profane sound unconvincing. If the play reminds anyone of Betrayal, it may be a phantom memory. Pinter's play certainly dealt with the same milieu and theme, but lessened such clichés with formal invention and heftier psychological insight.

"You're coming across as thoroughly convincing," Claudia tells herself at one point, although there's never any danger of that. Marcella Plunkett fares better playing Sophie, Honor's even more jilted daughter, who takes her father to task with filial and near-Oedipal rage.

His wife will now be emancipated, we understand, but he is doomed by his worst transgression; his failure to love Honor and obey.
Runs until July 21st

Peter Crawley

West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork

Wednesday is always a day with a difference at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Festival director Francis Humphrys temporarily  abandons Bantry House for St Brendan's Church, where a
larger stage can be erected, and groups up to the size of a small orchestra can be accommodated.

The focus this year was mainly on extremes, and mainly Russian. Not all the extremes were essential. The performance of Tchaikovsky's string sextet Souvenir de Florence, bringing together members of the Kopelman and RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartets, was so fiercely driven, so dominated by the tone of Mikhail Kopelman on first violin, and so disdainful of many of the composer's detailed dynamic markings that
it took on an aspect of parody.

But it fully hit the spot in targeting listeners' responses to musical excess, constituting a kind of romping,
no-holds-barred analogue to the explosive implausibilities of the Die Hard movies.

The excesses of Alfred Schnittke's 1979 Concerto for piano and strings were fully intended by the composer, who employed gestures as heavy as the strokes of a painter using finger or hand rather than
brush, and contrasted them with sounds of almost seraphic purity. Yuri Serov was the crunching, grinding soloist who also gave a modern tinge to the mechanical patterns of the 18th century, and Nicholas Daniel conducted the Festival Strings with an ardency leavened by the variety of light, shade and texture he achieved in an often densely-conceived work.

Serov was back on stage at the end of the day with mezzo soprano Mila Shkirtil for a performance of Valery Gavrilin's Russian Songbook. Folk influences are clear in this sometimes hysterical setting of
texts exploring the experiences of a peasant girl. Shkirtil and Serov took the extraordinary range of the eight songs, melodrama and all, in their stride, with Shkirtil turning in a tour de force of vocal narrative
and acting.

This year, Wednesday fell on July 4th, so the day's first recital, still at Bantry House, focused entirely on American songs. The most remarkable inclusion in the programme from Mary Hegarty (soprano) and Nicole Panizza (piano) was John Corigliano's extended cycle Mr Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, which the composer claims to have written without knowing Dylan's original songs, although he was actually resident on Earth and not Mars in the 1960s.

His idea is a lovely one, but the settings seem altogether too arty and artsy for the plain power of the words. The imaginative appropriation turned out to be an inappropriate one.

Michael Dervan