Going to the theatre

[philipchevron]

Hedda Gabler by Henry Gibson, sorry Henrik Ibsen, in a new version by Brian Friel

(Gate Theatre, Dublin) Seen October 1, Dublin Theatre Fstival 08

To the great Heddas of our time - Eve Best, Cate Blanchett - must be added the comparatively unknown (though not for long) Irish actress Justine Mitchell, who is perhaps the best of the three. Brian Friel's courageous version is not so much an adaptation as a tribute from one great playwright to another. Friel does Ibsen the great honor of acknowledging there are flaws in the play, which he mostly succeeds in repairing, though there are still some jarring moments of mere exposition. In addition, Friel has done away with all the stuffy Edwardian English we have been accustomed to in lesser, or perhaps just older translations, replacing it with a full-blooded sense of Hiberno-English which seems more appropriate both to Norway and to Ireland, which is surely the point here. In the process, Friel manages to release an astonishing sense of almost rapturous madness in Hedda Gabler which we probably never hear in the play as performed outside Norway. Never has it been more accurate to call Hedda "the female Hamlet".

It is a uniformly excellent cast, directed by Anna Mackmin, with Peter Ganly particularly good as the idiotic George, a role that seems to me to define the expression "thankless task", a handicap he overcomes magnificently, delivering a performance rich in comedy and mercifully impoverished in pathos. But it is Justine Mitchell's Hedda who will linger in the memory, and Justine Mitchell who must be added to the list of female Irish actors who will always be unmissable - Marie Mullen, Derbhle Crotty, Dearbhla Molloy, Fiona Shaw, Donna Dent, Brid Brennan and a few more. Today's Irish Times review correctly points out that for Mitchell's controlled Hedda, "practising cruelties" is not merely a game for a bored bourgeois housewife but a blind stab at self-determination".

[philipchevron]

After 'winning' the ticket, I know need to give away the ticket.

Mrs Me has been a bit unwell for a while (nothing too serious) but she has to have some tests done on the same week as the play below and she doesn't think she'll be up to attending the show, the surprise of the ticket was (thankfully) overshadowed by the referral she's been waiting months for, which came at the right 'wrong' time, if you get my drift.

Anyway, thanks (and apologies)to Phil, PM me and it's yours.

Friday 31st October 7:15 Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare (RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)

I wish her well with the tests.

[Jon]

thankyou

[Heather]

Eric's
Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
Saturday 4th October 2008, 7.30pm

This was a musical I'd been looking forward to seeing since I first heard of it about nine months ago. Eric's was Liverpool's first punk nightclub, so I was really interested to see what a musical based on it would be like.

For a start it was rather short, 40 minutes for the first act and 45 for the second, so all in all along with the usual delays it was finished by 9.30pm, and it turned out totally different from what I expected it to be.

I was expecting it to be more about the club and the characters that went there, but it was more about the main character Joe (based on the author of the play Mark Davies Markham), who starts to reflect on his young life when he went to Eric's when he is told that he has Leukaemia. The play goes backwards in time to the time he spent at Eric's and the people he met there, Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch, Holly Johnson and Pete Wylie.

I was a bit dubious about some of the old punk numbers being used in musical form, but it was a lively performance and I really enjoyed it and would definitely go and see it again should it show again sometime in the future.

Reviewed here in the Independent in a bit more detail:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 47306.html

[philipchevron]

The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh

Directed by Garry Hynes for Druid Theatre, Galway and the Atlantic Theater, New York

(Olympia Theatre, Dublin) Seen on its Dublin premiere, October 6, 2008, in the Dublin Theatre Festival

Aaron Monaghan has long threatened a star-making acting performance and here it is as the eponymous Cripple Billy. He is, as you would expect, well matched by Marie Mullen, Dearbhla Molloy and Kerry Condon and the rest of a brilliant company of actors. Previously seen at the National Theatre London (directed by Nicholas Hytner) and the Public Theater New York (directed, implausibly enough, by Jerry Zaks), Cripple had yet to be seen in a production the play merited, but that is no longer the case. Garry Hynes slows the action and the dialogue down, resisting at all times the impulse to succumb to a wisecracking Irish comedy, a sort of Celtic Sgt. Bilko. Garry seems to recognise, as I did the first time I even read The Cripple Of Inishmaan that it is a genuinely moving and layered play and decidely modernist behind its John B. Keane style facade. It is almost certainly destined to become McDonagh's most underestimated play, though that may change a little now that The Pillowman has revealed the seemingly hidden depths of the playwright.

Cripple, though it is ostensibly about how the natives of 1934 Inishmaan respond to the making of Robert Flaherty's legendary film documentary Man Of Aran on the adjacent Aran island of Inishmore, is really about compassion, loyalty, kindness, the buried virtues of the most unlikely people and the disguised hatreds in the hearts of seemingly "good" folks. Billy, ulimately, gets more love, more empathy, from the people who appear, on the surface, to bluntly characterise him as a useless cripple than those who seem to have a gentler way with him, something Billy learns the hard way. But Martin McDonagh never sentimentalises these characters - every small victory over badness and greed is hard-won and painful.

Garry Hynes production is a dream. In addition to purposefully slowing the play down, giving weight to every word, and refusing to play it for easy laughs, Hynes has confidence enough in the writing to play some sequences entirely without laughs, none more effective than the beautiful scene in a cheap Hollywood hotel, basically a monologue by Billy, a pivotal scene in the play and, last night, one during which you could literally have heard a pin drop in the Olympia theatre. There are some great technical tours-de-force also, all the more brilliant because they do not call attention to themselves, not least the scene in the church hall, in which the dialogue is tied so tightly to the movie (Man Of Aran) the characters are watching in real time, that any misstep would be fatal! This may well be Martin's equivalent of Pinter's excruciatingly timed pauses or Becketts measured dots..........! Crucially, this may well help the actors to keep hold of Garry Hynes's pacing as the production moves forward to its widely expected Broadway transfer next March. The vast 1200-seat Olympia Theatre and whichever Broadway house it ends up in, are no less than this play deserves. All the same, do yourself a favour and try to see it in one of the smaller spaces it is booked into:

Longford Oct 13 – 14 http://www.backstage.ie

Portlaoise Oct 16 – 18 http://www.dunamaise.ie

Ennis Oct 20 – 22 http://www.glor.ie

Tralee Oct 24 – 25 http://www.siamsatire.com

Letterkenny Oct 28 – Nov 1 http://www.angrianan.com

Salford Nov 4 - 8 http://www.thelowry.com

Oxford Nov 11 - 15 http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com

Dun Laoghaire Nov 18 - 22 http://www.paviliontheatre.ie

New York Dec 9 – Mar 1, 2009 http://www.atlantictheater.org

[philipchevron]

Briefly noted - other shows seen in the 2008 Dublin Theatre Festival

Delirium by Enda Walsh/Theatre O (Peacock Theatre, Dublin) October 4
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Olympia Theatre, Dublin) October 2

It there is a serendipitous theme to this year's Festival, it is the adaptation to the stage of the literary novel. I missed Gatz (based on The Great Gatsby) and Heart Of Darkness because they are both extremely long pieces of theatre, and after my recent illness I cannot be trusted with a theatre seat for that length of time, but they were, by every account, quite brilliant one-man performances. I expect also to miss Beckett's First Love, performed by the always-reliable Conor Lovett and Caligula by Camus, which was already a play in any case.

So I appear to have inadvertently drawn the two short straws. Though I liked many of the set-pieces in Enda Walsh's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, there were too many of them, and they stood too conspicously in isolation from each other, for Delirium to be judged an unqualified success. Enda Walsh is a really great writer, but what he does better than anybody else is a sort of Theatre of Claustrophobia, as witness in both Bedbound and The Walworth Farce. He seems, for the moment at least, to be on less certain ground with both collaboration and adaptation.

The Kafka piece suffers from a bit of a clunky script, though as piece of devised movement theatre, it is in a class of its own, as leading actor and co-adaptor Gisli Orn Gardarsson leads Kafka's Gregor on a journey literally along the walls and ceiling of the split-level set. Samsa Kafka's Metamorphosis is such a personal, internally experienced piece of writing that it defies dramatisation. If it was ever going to work on stage, this was undoubtedly the direction to go, though ironically, what it really needed was a script by Enda Walsh to bring Gregor's world more clearly to light.

Rank by Robert Massey (Helix Theatre, Dublin) Seen October 4

Fishamble Theatre company has, since 1990 [when it was called Pigsback] helped Irish playwrights like Marina Carr, Michael West, Joe O'Connor and Pat Kinevane to take their first public steps as dramatists and helped established writers like Sebastian Barry to consolidate their earlier work. Robert Massey may yet write a great play. That Rank is not it is not really the point. There is some good writing in this post-Celtic Tiger Dublin tale of gangster morality and some very funny scenes, but it is let down by it's final lines which serve more to wrap the play up than to conclude it in any worthwhile and non-glib manner. But watch this space. Bryan Murray and Luke Griffin are especially good in a strong cast.

[philipchevron]

Waves devised by Katie Mitchell and the company from Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

The National Theatre of Great Britain in the 2008 Dublin Theatre Festival

(Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin) Seen October 8

And so the literary adaptations continue, although, as Woolf's novel contains several overlapping streams of consciousness, this is a particular challenge. But Katie Mitchell, consistently one of the NT's most innovative and searching theatre practitioners, meets the challenge and then some. Eight actors, four of each gender, work their asses off, reciting text, lipsynching text, moving an astonishing array of props around, operating the digital video cameras, creating radio-style sound effects and taking great care not to get too much in each other's way. They, and Mitchell, bring the Woolf novel to life by showing us how they achieve all the effects, so that an exquisitely beautiful piece of real-time film is shown to be made from a tray of gravel, a few petals, a plastic water-spray, a small sheet of glass. A collar or cuff stands in for an entire costume. We never see more from the actors than is visible on the screen. At one point, a dinner party, a split-screen effect is achieved though the actors appear to be on the "wrong" end of the table. All very inventive, often funny and very metasomething. The performance is not merely clever, it dramatises the very artifice and deceit and delusion Virginia Woolf writes for her characters. It does her the great compliment of picking up her modernist baton and seeing if it can still run a race. It can and does.

Video in the theatre is more often a distracting pain in the ass than a genuine "multi-media" experience, something that reached its absolute nadir when the video replaced an actual set design in a recent Lord Lloyd Webber turkey. With Waves, Katie Mitchell and Theatre-video man of the moment Leo Warner (he has also worked on Black Watch, War Horse, Dorian Gray, some trace of her, Minotaur, Satyagraha and John Adams' much-awaited new opera Dr Atomic.) are setting new standards of integration and dialogue between the medias that purport to be "multi-".

[philipchevron]

Mozart's The Magic Flute - Impempe Yomlingo by Mark Dornford-May and Isango/Portobello

(Gaiety Theatre, Dublin)

in the 2008 Dublin Theatre Festival. Seen October 8

If Virginia Woolf is well-served by her adaptors, Mozart's are a little less generous. The prefix "Mozart's" sometimes appears before The Magic Flute in the publicity and programme materials and sometimes does not. Moreover, despite a two-paragraph acknowledgment in the programme notes that Mozart had anything to do with the show, the credits list no less than four South Africans who are all credited, mystifyingly, with "Words and Music". Somewhat in sync with the oddness of the credits is the fact that the show's brief but successful West End run earlier this year was rewarded with the Olivier Award for, ahem, Best Revival of a Musical.

This is all the more negligent because Mozart's Enlightenment "vaudeville" The Magic Flute is not just one of the two or three greatest pieces that Wolfie A wrote, it is also one of the most astonishing pieces of music theatre in history. When it is well done, as it was in, for example, Nick Hytner's famous production for English National Opera, it has the redemptive, transcendent, healing powers of truly great art and makes the spirit soar. But the catalyst for that result is, above all else, the dying composer's magnificent score, containing as it does all the subtext and psychological exposition the work depends upon. I'm sorry, but when you reduce this to a small marimba orchestra, it's never going to be quite the same.

It has to be said that it's an undeniably great theatrical moment and an absolute delight to hear the once-familiar Overture of The Magic Flute played on eight marimbas, conducted in t-shirt and military strides by Mandisi Dyantis. The trouble starts when this instrumentation is called upon to provide the emotional carpet upon which the singers must perform. The marimbas are simply not up to the job, within minutes one is hankering for Mozart's perfectly-calibrated orchestrations, and there is an additional problem with the marimbas - again and again, because of their dull harmonics, they compromise the pitching of what appear to be otherwise very able singers.

Nevertheless, judging it on its own terms, as an adaptation of The Magic Flute, not really The Magic Flute itself, the show is worthwhile. It succeeds at its best when it gives full weight to the Township context in which it is set. There are, especially, some glorious moments of ensemble choral singing when we get the best of both worlds - the genius of Mozart and the life-affirming joy of South African folk music.

[Shaz]

Very much enjoying all your reviews, Philip (and quietly going green with envy!)

[strummercalling]

Hamlet by WS (RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford) Seen September 17

Thank you for sharing this very interesting review, which I've only just now seen. I plan to see Hamlet at the Novello in a few months' time and, having very little idea of what to expect from David Tennant's theatre acting, this was very encouraging. I'll admit to being a Doctor Who fan, but I've never seen any of his stage performances. This one seems sure to be a fascinating performance, at the very least.

[philipchevron]

Dodgems by David Bolger and Charlie O'Neill (O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin) Seen October 10

Part of the 2008 Dublin Theatre Festival

I had seen this earlier in the Festival (September 23) when it was still in previews and vowed then to go back and see it again by which time, I hoped, Bolger had lopped off 20 minutes of the show and made up his mind about how he was going to end it. Delighted to report that he has done both things and the result is a triumph, the piece of theatre by which, despite the glut of novels-into-theatreworks which so characterised it, I will always recall the 2008 Dublin Theatre Festival. So many images linger in the mind - the bolshy legless (in the sense that one holds nothing against his left leg or, indeed, his right leg) actor-dancer David Toole, chastising the audience for its patronising middle-class guilt and "tolerance" of his affliction - "the fact that I'm fucken English"...........the entire company joining the sign interpreter in manually translating Bernstein & Sondheim's "Somewhere" as Tom Waits sings it on the sound track.......the acrobatic nuns.........the claim that the word Burqua, as worn by the suspected Islamic Terrorist in Limerick, derives from the Gaelic-Norman name Burke or, as the terrific African-American dancer Jason E. Bernard explains, "as Gaelge - DeBurca"...........self-same black American (who has previously worked with the world's greatest dancer Savion Glover, and it shows) in a storming tap duet with David Toole, the latter with tapshoes on his hands............the wonderfully eccentric musical score by Ellen Cranitch..........the free cotton-candy/candyfloss.............the Polish immigrant to Ireland who arrives wearing a judge's wig but is soon working as a cleaner on the dodgems................the Romani immigrant who trumps the dodgems owner's attempt to bamboozle him by speaking exclusively in ad hoc rhyming slang, when the Romani issues a parting "goodbye, Sri Lanka"...............the same dodgems supremo, played by veteran Irish actor Mark O'Regan, turning out to have an exquisite singing voice.....................the final revelation - a bit bathetic this - of what the Muslim woman in the Burqua was really up to.

From the moment the cast "arrives" on a ship fashioned from a bumper car and an old sheet (and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Raft Of The Medusa) to be greeted by the aggressive devils of the Celtic Tiger, complete with pairs of remedial walking sticks used as weapons, to the final moments of pure dance, when the cultures of origin of the immigrant "new Irish" are all absorbed into a joyous new form of Céilí, this show is exactly what dance theatre should be about.

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It's been an especially good theatre festival this year. one of the best ever, and I haven't even mentioned the shows I did not have time to see or the ones I had seen elsewhere - apart from Black Watch (seen in New York) I had seen Fiona Shaw's tour-de-force in Beckett's Happy Days at the NT in London, so I skipped it at the Abbey Theatre. And I had disliked Joan Didion's stage adaptation (yes, another one) of her book The Year Of Magical Thinking when I saw it on Broadway earlier this year. so I saw no reason to revisit it at the Gaiety last week. Ultimately, it's an acquired-taste of a book adapted into a play by a woman who has herself clearly failed to find deliverance from grief in her work, or she would not revisit it so compulsively [she even had her own table at rehearsals in New York] and not even the great skills of Vanessa Redgrave can elevate this piece much above all that.

[MissWalshy]

I saw Fat Pig in the Comedy Theatre last night. .. I thought it was fantastic and Kelly Brook was ace. I just can't stand the English attempting the American accent. The show would of sounded just fine in an English twang. Ah well.

[philipchevron]

Miss Walshy is back. There's lovely!

[MissWalshy]

Shhhh I'll get all embarrassed.

Bill Bailey on Thursday at the Royal Albert Hall - can I call that theatre ? Nah I suppose its comedy/concert .. but I want to tell you anyway

[jennylois]

H E L L O M I S S W A L S H Y !

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be on-stage audience at the Sydney Theatre Company's production of The Convict's Opera - the director wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the original Beggar's Opera when some of the audience were seated on the stage. It was a fun experience and great show.

"The world’s first musical – and still one of the best – The Beggar’s Opera is the raucous tale of ladies’ man Macheath and sweet Polly Peachum juggling love and deceit in the dirty underbelly of 18th Century London.
The Convict's Opera is The Beggar's Opera re-written by Stephen Jeffreys, directed by Britain's Max Stafford-Clark. The setting is shifted to a creaking convict ship bound for Australia. To pass the time, a group of convicts put on an opera set in the world they’ve left far behind, and will probably never see again. The Convict’s Opera is a unique co-production between Sydney Theatre Company and Out of Joint, Max Stafford-Clark’s legendary touring theatre company. The cast of actor-musicians are drawn from Britain and Australia. The Convict’s Opera brings together the classic folk songs of the original with some modern musical surprises. Following its Sydney Theatre season, The Convict’s Opera will tour extensively throughout the UK."