Going to the theatre

[philipchevron]

Ruddigore by William S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (Theatre Royal, Nottingham) November 3

In 1961, when the copyright expired on Gilbert and Sullivan, there was a worldwide glut of amateur, community and school productions. In O'Connell's in Dublin, as befits an inner-city Primary and Secondary School of almost 2000 pupils, the Christian Brothers, who took a while to grasp the idea of post-colonialism, embraced the G&S canon wholeheartedly and even produced the operettas with a professional pit band. We Primary juniors were relegated to the role of Opening Acts - the shows themselves were performed by the older boys. So it was that I spent the years 1965 to 1970 in the Choir, the Irish Dancing and the Verse Speaking Group in the pre-show concert before the annual "opera", looking on enviously as the older boys got to don the greasepaint, costumes and wigs of Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo or the Pirates and Constabulary of Penzance or the Orphan Major General Stanley with his retinue of "sisters and cousins and aunts", or the Fairies who married into the House of Lords or Sir Joseph Porter KCB who "polished up the knocker on the big brass door" or the various matronly dragons who set out to spoil everyone else's fun. Already hopelessly stagestruck, the G&S shows opened up a whole new area of possibility and, as was my custom, I became word-perfect on each of them in no time.

And so my academic future when I graduated to Secondary did at least promise such thrills to alleviate the relentless evil and propaganda of a Christian Brothers' education. Unfortunately, the Brother who "produced" the shows emulated many of his Broadway counterparts in my first year and had a massive heart attack, summarily cancelling that year's show with a promise to return with bigger and better fare the next year. At which point, I launched into a strategic battle against time and Mother Nature to preserve my prepubescent voice at all costs: in O'Connell's Secondary School, the junior boys, with their treble voices (though the Brothers always persisted with the terms "soprano" and "alto", worryingly enough) played the gals and the 5th and 6th years, with their recently acquired baritones, tenors and basses, played the men. In the inbetween years, there was an enormous chasm into which squeaks and croaks, zits, pubic angst and "Kevin" syndrome were pitted until they had resolved themselves somewhat. Typically, this ruled out the participation of 3rd years in the frolics. By the time I was in 2nd year, our impresario's heart was once again working well enough to face the rigors of another opening night. By now, though, he had moved on from Gilbert and Sullivan and proposed to offer the student and parent population Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly's The Student Prince instead - a 1924 show which, at Al Jolson's 59th Street Theatre, had been the longest running Broadway show of the 1920s, beating out even 1927's Show Boat. Romberg was essentially the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day, churning out tuneful muck until the public cried halt. Still, it was a show. An American show [Romberg was Hungarian actually, but let it pass]. In four acts - the Gilbert and Sullivans only had two and were hoplessly English, however melodic.

And so I battled with the unexpectedly early onset of puberty and a rapidly breaking voice, got through the audition by highlighting the vestigial traces of my boyish treble and, summoning up unsuspected reserves of willpower, keeping the lid firmly shut on the croaks and octave oscillations of the impending baritone. I got picked for the chorus of Heidelberg tavern wenches who doubled up as the society ladies who danced a minuet later in the show. Wigs! Make up! Two frocks! Costume changes! Show business!

I got in just under the wire - it was the last ever student show in my time at O'Connell's, which soon reverted to just being the grim academy of nationalism, catholicism and the Irish language I knew and despised. And to this day, I've never quite figured out what attracted the Brothers to the slightly gauche Gilbertian world of Victorian English satire, though I suppose the waiving of a royalty payment is as good a reason as any. There was some nonsense about Sullivan being of Irish parentage, which he was, but it was never a persuasive case: he was a knight of the British empire, for heaven's sake! Roger Casement apart, what sort of an Irishman was that?

But all those years of exposure to Gilbert's witty lyrics and surreal plots and Sullivan's melodious ballads and rhythmic blood-stirrers left their mark. I recognised that G&S were among the many parents of the Broadway musical tradition and, by the time I got my first proper professional job in the theatre as a composer/musical director, within a year of leaving school, in Agnes Bernelle's production of Aristophanes's Lysistrata, I had acquired enough command of context to find common cause with the Greek playwright's antiwar satire and Gilbert's irreverent debunking of Empire mythology and thus Sullivanesque pastiche became a core element of the musical setting I gave Lysistrata.

Even then, I was dimly aware that appreciation of Gilbert and Sullivan was a tribal marker for the British among whom I would soon come to live. Being a G&S buff in England instantly puts one into that slightly dotty-but-harmless stratification of Middle Englandism that also embraces history reenactment, a devotion to Radio 4, morris dancing and caravan holidays. But, as Mike Leigh astutely and affectionately caught in his 1999 movie Topsy-Turvy [about the rehearsal and production period of The Mikado in 1884/5] knowing your Gilbert and Sullivan also aided comprehension of the undergrowth of England's bigger societal and political picture.
The Mikado, probably the team's biggest hit, and still the most frequently revived, I believe, was a hard act to follow, and Ruddigore decidedly did not fit the bill with the public. It was a burlesque of theatrical melodrama, a form already out of fashion on the London stage by the time the new show replaced The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre in 1887 and its uninspiring theme, aligned with a kind of Gothic ghost story was not well received. Critically too, the endless rowing between the partners, which often had a creative upside, had become mostly just toxic by then and, with the exception of a brace of patter songs and an insinuating ballad, it is a fairly poor example of the G&S style. It sometimes lapses into generic, even formulaic G&S but few of the innovations work either - Gilbert protested Sullivan's atypical "ghost scene" music loud and long and publicly but, a departure though it was for the composer, Gilbert, we can now hear, was right, even if Sulivan did, mischievously, bequeath him the autographed score of the scene upon his death.

Never given again in the lifetimes of either partner, Ruddgore became the victim of second thoughts and third thoughts by the D'Oyly Carte Company when it did return to the repertoire in the 1920s and Opera North have provided something of a public service by producing this authorative critical editon which removes most of the "improvements" and offers, it claims, the first professional production in 120 years which is faithful to its creators intentions. So, I'm glad to see it, but I won't be investigating it further. Unlike, say, Patience , another lesser G&S operatta which thrives upon rediscovcery because its satirical parody of Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic movement still somehow speaks to our time in a way which moustache-twirling melodrama, however ironic, simply does not.

[philipchevron]

The Queen of Spades by Peter Tchaikovsky. Libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky and the Composer (Theatre Royal, Nottingham) November 4

Though it is, I think, a less substantial opera than Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, also based upon a novel by Pushkin, it does share with that masterpiece his assured and distinctive genius for astringent orchestration - even his Mozart pastiche is delightful. Opera North's new production allows us another opportunity to pay tribute to venerable Dame Josephine Barstow, always welcome, in the featured role of The Countess; Irish soprano Orla Boylan is on great form as Lisa, the lead soprano, though Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts seems out of his depth to me as the obsessed Herman.

On the down side, Neil Barlett's new production is badly hampered by his own bathetic English translation (with Martin Pickard) which, because it is also flashed up on the surtitles screens, has its awfulness reinforced in a way we might not have noticed had the piece been performed in Russian, the translation serving only to aid comprehension. The design by Kandis Cook aims for needlessly sparse gilt rooms, but Chris Davey's lighting design is unable to illuminate it with that in mind, and the overall effect is of a dull matt yellow, the sort of colour most readily found on Teflon shelf coverings in kitchen cupboards. Cook's costume designs, however, in the deep rich tones of imperial Russia, are stunning.

[philipchevron]

Good by C. P. Taylor (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester) November 5

"I grew up during the war under a deeply felt anxiety that the Germans might win the war, overrun Britain and that I and my mother and father would end up, like my less fortunate co-religionists, in a Nazi Death Camp - perhaps specially built in Scotland or England" - C. P. Taylor, 1981

It occurs to you, seeing this revival in Manchester, home to one of Britain's largest Jewish communities, that though Taylor was a Glaswegian Jew, this specific point must have been a common enough anxiety in the UK at the time. The play depicts the journey to moral corruption of a Good German, an academic named Halder whose best friend is a Jew, and who at the outset of National Socialism's rise in Germany, finds it unconscionable that the German state could possibly survive Hitler's avowed purification of the Nordic race via the elimination of the Jews. Apart from the likely social and economic outcome of such a policy, it would be catastrophic for the arts, medicine and the humanities.

No, it's a temporary aberration, a fleeting moment of irrational racism and will not endure. And yet, by the end of the play, Helder is in SS drag and supervising eugenics at Auschwitz, undone by incremental, almost imperceptible self-justification as the moral climate clouds up around him. Taylor, it must be said, is largely successful in stealthily and systematically showing the plausibility of this process. He is less persuasive in the verisimilitude of the bosom friendship with the Jewish guy, Maurice, and one or two of the other characters are insufficiently sketched too. For this, and some other structural reasons, I can't say I care greatly for the play, which does not mean I'm not grateful it exists.

Director Polly Findlay comments in the programme about contemporary resonance - "Someone once said that Good is a play about moral compromise in a political fog, which I think is a reasonably good description of the series of actions following 9/11 that led us to go to war in Iraq" - but her production doesn't really make the analogy stick. The demonisation of Muslims for the purpose of gaining ground in the Energy Wars (real or imagined), was self-evidently the behaviour of politicians and militarians entirely lacking in moral compass, but Good is specifically about how a, well, a good man gets corrupted, not men who are already so venal that the only way is up.

[philipchevron]

Measure For Measure by William Shakespeare (Rose Theatre Bankside, London) November 6

In 1988, quite detailed foundations of the Rose Theatre (1587-1605), the first theatre in Bankside and only the fifth in all of London were discovered during a routine excavation between site clearance and redevelopment of an office block. Though continued excavation and preservation has since flowed and (mainly) ebbed as resources allow, the current Trust has managed to restore part of the site to a functioning theatre within a sort of provisional exhibition space which aims to show the public the extent of the excavation thus far.

Ordinarily, the words "sacred space" used in the context of a theatre building, even one as venerable as a house that once hosted the original runs of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd and Fletcher, would have me reaching for my revolver, but the Rose Theatre Trust clearly feels justified in using the words without embarrassment and to be honest, I see their point. On the one hand, the Rose is just a covered building site with a puddle of muddy water where the groundlings once stood, but it undeniably has an atmosphere and presence you're unlikely to find a few hundred yards away at, say, any of the National's three auditoria. I don't think this has anything to do with Shakespeare and Co: my strong suspicion is that there may always have been something magical about the Rose, an oasis of reason in an area beset by bear-baiting, taverns, whoring and teeming, brawling humanity (and that's before the financial services crims set up shop on the Northern bank of the river).

Initial dismay that you're basically sharing the temporary stage with the actors - it's the only part of the site which passes all the health and safety conditions - soon subsides as the Owl Schreame Theatre Company, the resident company, brings the play to life with vigour and wit and only the barest minimum of production values. Their Measure To Measure is billed as "a reduction" and its 95 minutes playing time - no intermission - does indeed suggest it's had quite a large amount of cutting. But this is done so intelligently that the play still seems intact. This version plays less on Isabella's turbo-virginity and contrasts instead the bawdiness, fecklessness and corruption of historic Vienna and the moral issues policed by the Duke as he goes about town in the guise of a monk. Walking back to my base via St Paul's after the show, it's impossible to watch the Occupy camp in action and not observe that we will always need Will Shakespeare's plays. Which is about the only upside of corruption, cant and hypocrisy I can imagine.

[philipchevron]

Death And The Maiden by Ariel Dorfman (Harold Pinter Theatre, London) November 7

The spirit of the theatre's namesake hovers significantly over this enthralling revival of the 1991 play by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The 1881 theatre itself was, until lately, called the Comedy and its final production with that marquee was Pinter's Betrayal and the first under its new moniker is a play by a Pinter disciple and subsequent friend, and it was Pinter's influence which ensured the original London production 20 years ago. There is a not unhappy synchronicity here for one more crucial reason: Death And The Maiden, a play about the aftermath and reconciliation process on foot of the regime of torture visited upon the people of Chile by Baroness Thatcher's old pal General Pinochet plays like a sequel, as Pinter himself recognised, to his own 1984 play about state-sponsored torture, One For The Road [I had the good fortune to see Pinter himself play the lead in the Gate Theatre Dublin's revival of this later - he was almost as good an actor as he was a playwright].

The first thing to note is that the theatre's new name is welcome. Not that Pinter's own plays, many of which played in this theatre, are not rich with comedy, but the previous name often jarred with other fare produced there and only occasionally seemed to host self-designated comedies.

I'm not a great fan of agit-prop theatre but what Death And The Maiden - the title comes from the Schubert piece the Pinochet era torturer used as the deceptively serene soundtrack to his enhanced interrogations - has in common with One For The Road is how richly theatrical they are: they both get to the heart of the matter by utilising the insinuating cadences and rhythms of theatre, not the bellow and bluster of the soap-box.

Why now? Well for one thing, as Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith covers very well in a programme note, Bush and Blair's War of Terror managed to effectively reverse the gains accrued via the UN's 1984 Convention Against Torture. "Borrowing tactics from the Pinochet regime, British and American officials have repeatedly conflated national security with national embarrassment, trying to hide how far they have sunk in pitch while at the same time commissioning secret memos to provide "legal" justification for their acts and omissions." Stafford Smith, as one of the most prominent and regular legal visitors at Gitmo, knows what he's talking about. "I have myself tried to negotiate deals in Guantanamo Bay where my client would not contest the nonsense that was tortured out of him, on condition that he might go home and get on with his life. Unfortunately, the United States military has proven averse to compromise: the torturer would rather accept the tortured statement as true, and punish the prisoner anew."

This utterly insupportable - ungodly, even - abuse of human decency is at the heart of Dorfman's play. When Paulina, still battling post-traumatic stress disorder 14 years after her own experience of torture, overhears her husband, a judge in post-Pinochet Chile charged with joining a panel investigating the war crimes of the regime, talking to a new acquaintance, a stranger who has apparently helped him with a car breakdown, she instantly identifies the new man as "the Doctor" who tortured and repeatedly raped her all those years ago. Though she was blindfolded at the time, she seems to recognise him by his voice, his skin and his smell. Dorfman then ups the stakes. We never know for sure whether she has made a correct identification or not and he drops in plenty of clues for and against but, as Paulina lays seige to the Doctor at gunpoint and commences her own summary kitchen table trial, we see that that's the playwright's point. On the vast pH scale between so-called "bad apple" soldiers and veteran trained torturers, at what precise point do we start to lose our humanity and just who gets to judge who anyway?

Would Paulina be justified in shooting dead this man who destroyed her life but, as he ventures to argue, may have saved her life in the process (that is, his torture program may have rescued her from summary execution - he makes a slightly dodgy case for his own compassion and, indeed, when we first encounter him, he is cheering on Paulina's husband's new appointment to the truth commission)? Dorfman, like Pinter, does not dodge this and other questions, but the tacit conclusion is one which, it is crystal clear, is the only thing which can save us as a society: that our kindness, generosity and mutual humanity must always trump our need for revenge and our abuse of power, not just as a society but as individuals. Otherwise, what's left that's worth saving?

[philipchevron]

Backbeat by Iain Softley and Stephen Jeffreys (Duke of York's Theatre, London) November 8

"The Birth of the Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World" is what the poster promises but what this play offers instead is the story of a band of greasy, gobby professional Scouser teenagers, temporarily resident in Hamburg, who play rock and roll not terribly well, or at least not to any level of distinction that hints at a future life as a forlorn and unfulfillable promise on a theatre poster. However, when we are not subjected to Andrew, Will, Daniel, Oliver (and Nick) murdering a bunch of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Motown covers, there are glimmers of a half-decent play in there. But every time you're starting to come round to that idea, the din commences again, sapping all verisimilitude from the events depicted. Nobody's saying it's easy to impersonate an iconic rock band though, as I know all too well, that doesn't stop people from trying. However, as an actor seeks to convey the spirit of a real life figure rather than the likeness, so a group of actor-musicians has to be able to do more than just plod through a series of barre chords and hope for the best. Not until Ringo Starr (Adam Soop) replaces Pete Best (Oliver Bennett) very late in the show is there a flicker of chemistry here though, in fairness, Bennett probably has as much or as little information about Best's performing style as the rest of us.

I've never actually seen the eponymous movie the play is based on, but I've always imagined the music to be the least significant component of this story. Nobody who's ever heard Live at the Star Club, Hamburg will be under any illusions that The Beatles spent their time in the North German port city transforming from ugly ducklings to musical swans, which is surely the only story worth telling if you're trying to have your cake and eat it by presenting the Fab Four/Five's tale as a sort of grittier Jersey Boys.

However, it's not all bad news. The real story at the heart of Backbeat is the sometimes tempestuous love triangle between Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr and John Lennon and it's told well, sometimes better than that, as when the infuriatingly wise-cracking, black-humoured Lennon suddenly crumples with howling belated grief for Stuart, at Astrid's feet. Lennon is played by yet another star graduate from NT/Broadway/Movie The History Boys, Andrew Knott. Ruta Gedmintas as Kirchherr and Nick Blood as Sutcliffe are good too, the latter tasked with the tricky job of playing a silent, moody, beautiful early counter-culture casualty (Stuart Sutcliffe died on April 10, 1962, aged 21, from a brain haemorrhage, without ever knowing he was part of the greatest rock n roll story ever told) but also investing him with a life that predates his iconic status. Undeniably, the fact that Stuart Sutcliffe was once in the Beatles deepens their mystique several fathoms, not least because it was never something they themselves tried to exploit.

Yoko Ono later said "Hardly a day went by that John did not talk about him" and, given that you can never compete with a ghost, Paul McCartney (Daniel Healy) gets relatively short shrift as John's partner, but a nice scene, short but effective, neatly encapsulates their working relationship as John, scornful and dismissive as ever, goads Paul into vast improvements on "Love Me Do".

I make my excuses and leave just after the curtain calls, before the inevitable, spurious and superfluous hoedown begins, And yes, John tells us to rattle our jewellery.

[Walshy]

Off to see The Playboy of the Western World next week at the Old Vic - looking forward to it, Philip

[philipchevron]

Katya Kabanova [Káťa Kabanová] by Leoš Janáček, libretto by Vincenc Červinka (Hippodrome, Bristol) November 9

It'd never be in any list of favourite operas I might feel inclined to compile, but Katya Kabanova, based on Ostrovsky's play The Storm, in which a thunderstorm becomes a somewhat obvious metaphor for the guilty torment the heroine goes through in the wake of an illicit affair, has some undeniable strengths, principally in its always surprising, sometimes startling orchestration, with its heavy reliance upon percussion, heavy brass and eccentrically-pitched strings. Hire the always superb Amanda Roocroft for the title role in Welsh National Opera's revival of Katie Mitchell's 2001 production and it's damn near irresistible.

[CM]

Off to see The Playboy of the Western World next week at the Old Vic - looking forward to it, Philip

Fuckin Jury service.

If anybody would like this ticket face value pls PM me.

Details Quantity Total Price
The Playboy of the Western World (23-Nov-2011 14:30)
Stalls Q3-Q3 Pillar is at edge of field of vision, may need to lean very slightly
The Old Vic 1 20.00

[CM]

... with music by an eighth of The Pogues.

Coming up: a triple bill of Ye Olde Revenge Tragedies: Hamlet / The Malcontent / The Changeling @ Young Vic / White Bear / Southwark Playhouse.

[philipchevron]

... with music by an eighth of The Pogues.

Coming up: a triple bill of Ye Olde Revenge Tragedies: Hamlet / The Malcontent / The Changeling @ Young Vic / White Bear / Southwark Playhouse.

The Michael "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" Sheen Hamlet looks intriguing.

[philipchevron]

Big Maggie by John B. Keane (Town Hall Theatre, Galway) seen in previews November 11, opens next week prior to Irish tour

Keane's Maggie Polpin would have considered the notion of feminism fanciful but, unmistakably, in the late 1960s Ireland of the playwright's most fertile period, she is a peculiarly Irish female icon - and rural Irish too, in an era when matters of dowry, inheritance, estate and widowhood were still economic issues of the utmost priority. It's been interesting to watch the play's performance history in major productions over the years, with Anna Manahan, Brenda Fricker, Marie Kean and Pat Leavy all bringing new energies to the title role as the position of women in Irish society evolved.

In 2001, Garry Hynes, with Marie Mullen as Maggie at the Abbey, set herself the task of discovering the play's heartbeat beneath its social significance, treating it, in other words, as a modern classic. Fresh from Broadway with McDonagh's decidely 1990s play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane with Mullen as the middle-aged spinster (and indeed Manahan as her demonic mother), Big Maggie probably seemed irresistible as a sort of touchstone of controlling Irish motherhood. Reputedly, Hynes trimmed the play of some of the comic whimsy to which Keane was occasionally prone. I've never read the play but I did see that production and marveled at the shining jewel she unearthed, not of feminism but of a complex humanity which redrafted Maggie as a sort of Irish Mother Courage, making decisions for both herself and her four adult children with a ruthlessness that brooks neither sentimentality, hypocrisy nor compassion. Every decision she makes after she has efficiently buried her unloved husband is, to her, absolutely the correct one and, though her kids disagree to the point of abandoning her one by one, Keane does take the trouble to show that, objectively, her thinking is sound.

Now Hynes returns to Big Maggie on the very same day that a new President (Galway's own Michael D Higgins) is inaugurated after a period of twenty-one years in which the office has only been held by women and before which a female Head of State was almost certainly inconceivable. Today, it is not even a matter of comment that the two female contenders in this year's election polled dismally, as the nation welcomes a new President who is, in no particular order, a liberal, an intellectual, a male, a party animal and a poet. This speaks of a country which, underneath its myriad troubles with corrupt bankers, politicians and clerics and yet another wave of economically fuelled emigration, is full of people who are increasingly happier in their own skin, even if their "leaders" have yet to figure that out. In its own way, in part by reminding us how far we've come, Big Maggie remains a vital part of that discourse.

The Widow Polpin is explored this time for Druid, and with a doozy of a Maggie in Aisling O'Sullivan. The production scrutinises the character more forensically than ever, and this allows some surprising elements to surface more boldly than before. Her major scene with Keith Duffy (a considerably better actor than he was a boyband star: no disrespect to his genuine affection for his singing colleagues) as a sexy, smooth-talking travelling salesman, borders on the shocking as what looks at first like Maggie getting herself a bit of Cougar action turns out to be yet another ploy to control the fate of her children: she now has the independence she's dreamed of and is not about to throw it away on a nice piece of suit. But Maggie's striking out for her autonomy is also - perhaps - her tragedy - because it turns out to be inconsistent with also managing the lives of her children.

[winn-dixie]

Hi Phil,

Sorry I couldnt private message you it kept denying it as spam
I just found out that you are FINALLY coming to Australia! you probably wouldnt remember but i posted on here back in 2006 that i went to see a concert in NYC and ended up being drugged, missing the concert, and waking up in a hospital on a drip with no recollection of the night. You said to get in touch if you were in my neck of the woods so here i am! still a huge fan and psyched to see you in Sydney!

Cheers
Alice Winn-Dix


Subject: saddest day ever

someone spiked my second drink and i woke up in hospital on a drip at 1pm.

That's really fucked up. I hope there was no long-term damage to you, and whoever did it falls under a bus at some point.

Winn-Dixie that's awful. I hate to hear this stuff, I think how I would feel if it happened to my sister. or nephew or mom. Fortunately, such incidents appear to be infrequent at our shows, but I guess what people are saying is true - trust no one with your drink. I feel we owe you one, so if we do come back (or play Oz) please PM me and I'll arrange guest tickets for you.

[philipchevron]

The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien (Gaiety Theatre, Dublin) November 12

Quite how the pace of change had accelerated in Ireland in the decade prior to Big Maggie can be seen in Edna O'Brien's dramatisation of her own debut novel from 1960. When it was first published, the book was banned and, in some cases, burned, because of its frank representation of what then passed for sexuality in Ireland. What's interesting is not so much that attitudes towards sex itself have moved on by 1969 but how women, in particular, had developed a more sophisticated grasp of its power as a commodity.

Baba and Kate, convent girls from "a parish in the West of Ireland", before that precise demographic became hackneyed under the pens of the O'Brien doppelgangers which followed, view men as an economic transaction, which involves the males - as varied and as unsavoury a collection as ever gathered in an Irish play - providing drinks, dinners, even tryst flats up in Dublin in exchange for sexual favours. Intriguingly, the only persuasive emotional bond in the play, apart from the girls' own chalk and cheese friendship, is the mutual attraction between Kate and the young nun whose ecstatic declarations that she's the bride of Christ are somehow less convincing than the small kindnesses she puts in Kate's direction. For Maggie Polpin, sex is also a commodity, but by 1969, it's Maggie who's closing the deal, not the men, whether her sons, the travelling salesman or the stonemason whose offers of marriage get more and more forlorn as the play progresses.

Though it's many years since I read Edna O'Brien's novel The Country Girls , I remember being quite fond of it. It was hard too, in the 60s and 70s, to separate the writer from the subject matter. Ms O'Brien, who left Ireland for London in 1954, six years before she published the novel, was that most mistrusted of Irish women, a beauty, an exotic - indeed, at the age of 81, she still is - who men, even gay men, instantly adored. Her sultry voice and lyrical language made her seem like Maud Gonne, Queen Maedbh, Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Texas Guinan all in one unlikely package.

However, though she has in the past made telling contributions to Irish drama, she has not been able to translate that personal magic into the theatre on this occasion and director Mikel Murfi, caught between a stage direction which reads "the play is not intended to be performed realistically" and dialogue which veers uncertainly between the poetic, the purely expositional and the downright melodramatic, is unable to do much to help her, though his trademark freewheeling style was, on paper at least, ideal. Maybe The Country Girls has always just been more at home between the covers of a book.

[philipchevron]

[quote="winn-dixie"]Hi Phil,

Sorry I couldnt private message you it kept denying it as spam
I just found out that you are FINALLY coming to Australia! you probably wouldnt remember but i posted on here back in 2006 that i went to see a concert in NYC and ended up being drugged, missing the concert, and waking up in a hospital on a drip with no recollection of the night. You said to get in touch if you were in my neck of the woods so here i am! still a huge fan and psyched to see you in Sydney!

Cheers
Alice Winn-Dix


Subject: saddest day ever

Alice, please remind me again - preferably over in the OZ 2012 thread - at the start of April and I'll be happy to arrange this for you and a companion.