Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival/Deckerat the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin and Deckchairsat the Cork Arts Theatre.

Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival/Decker

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Bizet Les Pêcheurs de perles

Of the two operas in the Anna Livia festival, Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles has these days both greater familiarity and greater novelty than Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. The familiarity comes through the famous Act I duet for tenor and baritone, Au fond du temple saint, which seems to get more radio airtime than any single number from Lucia. The novelty is the opportunity to hear the entire work - still a lot less well-known than Lucia - in the opera house.

The plot, in the exotic setting of Ceylon, tells of Leïla, a priestess of Brahma ready to breach her sacred vows for a lover. The lover, the fisherman Nadir, is himself compromised. He fell in love with Leïla at the same time as his friend Zurga, and the pair vowed to renounce her charms and beauty for the sake of their friendship. It falls on Zurga, king of the fishermen, to condemn Leïla and Nadir to death, but he relents and organises their escape. In the version presented by Anna Livia (and the variants of the opera are significant enough to keep musicologists busy) Zurga is stabbed after the lovers have escaped.

Roberto Oswald's production is in the now familiar throwback style he pursues with Anna Livia - minimal, flat settings, very basic lighting (which he does himself), with, in Pêcheurs a dash of colour from Anibal Lapiz's operatically oriental costumes.

The air of undersell attaches to the conducting of Franz-Paul Decker, too, and only the Zurga of Pierre-Yves Pruvot seems fully gripped by Bizet's music. Anne O'Byrne's Leïla is a hot-and-cold presentation, the voice often clear but sometimes also with an edge on the vibrato that grates, the phrasing sometimes fractured for no apparent reason, the line at other times soaring on high with ease. Todd Wilander is an unsympathetic Nadir, and Geoffrey Moses a wooden presence as the high priest Nourabad, though, happily, his intonation strikes the ear more comfortably than it did when he sang Raimondo in Lucia.

The potential of the production was most keenly felt in the storm-tossed confrontation that closes the second act, where the mostly young members of the chorus came into their own, and, with Decker driving purposefully, the evening became dramatically alive and gripping.

The festival runs until Sunday. Michael Dervan

Deckchairs

Cork Arts Theatre

The wavering, women-only focus of Jean McConnell's writing in Deckchairs concentrates occasionally on themes such as the usefulness or otherwise of men, the competing qualities of dogs, the solidarity of shopping and the rivalries of professional life. Directed by Musetta Joyce, Limelight Productions tries to insist that McConnell's quartet of brief plots is indicative of both social and personal characteristics, but the indications are unconvincing.

The cast of Mon Murphy, Áine O'Leary, Mary Wilson, Caroline Conway, Phyllis McMahon and Mary Mooney work with more energy than the writing deserves, exaggerating its contrasts at some cost to themselves in terms of wildly-fluctuating accents and variable pronunciation so that comic credibility is lost. This depends on contradictory identifying characteristcs: for example a dog is called off from its attempt to strangle a cat; how often is a cat seen on a public beach? Even the calling-off itself is desultory, as, it must be admitted, the rehearsals also seem to have been.

Runs until Sept 8. Mary Leland