The Stalls (2019)
Cork Opera House as part of Cork Midsummer Festival
Mary Leland, The Irish Times, June 14th 2019 ★★★★★
The Stalls review: original, confident and hilarious
Skilful skewering as opera ensemble shows audience exactly what it’s like
The Cork Midsummer Festival promise of The Stalls is to present what theatre-goers never see: our watching selves. Here we are, politely trying to find the correct seats, one of us breathlessly late, another unwrapping mints like bombs going off in the middle of the third act, another so bored that she wonders if she should get a divorce and find a man who hates opera as much as she does (she finds him and elopes to Mullingar) and here too is the critic who doesn’t really know what’s going on but maybe that’s the point? This happy slice of a hopefully typical audience sits beneath the interior galaxy we rarely notice in an auditorium turned backwards. Behind us is conductor Tom Doyle, before us this representative group assembled by Deirdre Dwyer’s design. Beyond them is the orchestral accompaniment which provides the punctuation, and sometimes the elaboration, for the soaring interrogative recitatives with which composer Tom Lane has embroidered the sprightly libretto by Lily Akerman without causing any apparent difficulties for five sopranos led by Majella Cullagh and Kelley Petcu or for two tenors and three baritones. And a chorus.
Commissioned by Cork Opera House and the Irish Arts Council this production completes an introspective trilogy on the workings of a theatre It is easily described as hilarious, except that it is such a tightly woven composition that the fun can’t disguise its achievement of musical originality within a classical convention yielding brightly confident performance. The ensemble structure for the singers is so well-managed that it is almost unremarkable, with Drew McCarthy’s lighting design supplementing Doyle’s musical control. Director Conor Hanratty reins in the absurdities even as John Scott’s maddened critic reveals his inner mastersinger of Nuremberg before settling the dilemma of star-rating. No dilemma at all for this reviewer.
The White Devil (2017)
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe, London
Paul Taylor, The Independent, February 2nd 2017 ★★★★
Director Annie Ryan responds with a scathing relish to John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy of ruthless self-interest, convoluted intrigue and gory revenge in her impressive candlelit production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The flickering half-light and the gilded intimacy of the space provide, on one reckoning, the ideal conditions for conjuring up the amoral murk and treacherous dazzle of the claustrophobic court in this play.Lately there have been attempts to alter this perception of the piece – most notably in Maria Aberg’s bracing RSC revival, which located the play in the neon glare of a fantasy version of today's celebrity culture. She did so in order to emphasise the powerful and advanced critique of sexual double standards that undoubtedly lies at the heart of the work. Ryan’s production is not quite so single-minded. While drawing on the distinctive ambience of the Playhouse, it sets the piece in an Edwardian/punk/Gothic dystopia and, though it eschews any plonking references to current events, the show is a forceful reminder that barefaced misogyny and corruption continue to cast their shadow in certain other high places.
The White Devil is, in a sense, a trick title, designed to expose reflex sexism. You assume that it's meant to denote the heroine, Vittoria Corombona, a sensual, a frustrated married woman whose adulterous liaison with Duke Brachiano triggers a mountingly mad chain reaction of brutal retributions. In fact, it would more justly apply to the hypocritical, self-seeking men who mishandle and oppress her.
As Flamineo, the malcontent brother who pimps her to Brachiano in the hope of preferment, Joseph Timms gives a vivid whirlwind of a performance, jokily collusive with the audience, but I don't think he sufficiently conveys the vicarious erotic kick (possibly bisexual) that Flamineo derives from organising this match for his sibling (linking him to the incestuous Ferdinand in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi) and the Cockney likely lad act starts to grate. The rather high-pitched touchiness and petulant self-concern of Brachiano are adeptly captured by Jamie Ballard, while Garry Cooper's portrayal of Monticelso, the corrupt Cardinal who is later elevated to Pope, is all the more effective for being subtly shaded rather than grotesque.
When Vittoria is put on trial for adultery, it is the Cardinal who subjects her to a barrage of misogynistic abuse and, though he has only circumstantial evidence, condemns her to imprisonment in a house for fallen women. In this eloquently staged arraignment scene (the dock is cage-like), Kate Stanley-Brennan is magnificent as Vittoria – an imposing, beautiful woman who can knock spots off the Cardinal with her witty scorn and agile intelligence but who is at his mercy nonetheless because it's male “justice” that is being meted out here. Vittoria is not, of course, guiltless. By recounting a suggestive dream, she did nudge Brachiano to murder. She has not been monogamous.
It's great that Webster’s play does not require the character to be a pillar of conventional virtue before it will defend her against a judicial system so rigged against her because she’s a woman. And it’s a wonderfully liberating stroke that Vittoria is allowed to admit to having a sensual life – with a fierce and almost withering lack of shame, as Stanley-Brennan excellently plays it. You want to cheer her for the chutzpah with which she fibs that she was merely tempted to lust. Is she to be condemned, she asks, just for being looked at carnally by Brachiano? “So may you blame some fair and crystal river/For that some melancholic and distracted man/Hath drowned himself in't”. I’d call that proto-feminist.
Ryan's vivid cast always make the verse sound bounding and spontaneous, even though, on the page, it can have a pre-digested ring – as if the characters were forever flipping through a Rolodex of resonantly translated Quotations from Montaigne to find one to suit the moment. But nearly everything here is well-judged. Ranging from melodramatic tremolos to cheeky transitions (as when the ceremonial pomp of wedding march relaxes into a bout of louche jazz), Tom Lane’s music expertly underscores the shifting moods. And as the plot gets more and more deranged, you feel that villains and victims alike are caught up in some monumental sick joke, tricked out with references to the revenge play tradition. “It ain't Shakespeare – maybe it's more Tarantino,” as the director says in the programme. Recommended.
Oedipus (2015)
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Peter Crawley, The Irish Times, October 1st 2015 ★★★★
The fate of Oedipus ought to be blindingly obvious. That’s as true for the protagonist of Sophocles’ classic, a ruler determined to discover the culprit behind the crime that has cursed his city and looks everywhere but at himself, as it is for his observers: his family, his citizens and, for close to 2,500 years now, his audience. The riddle of Oedipus – here a dress-down king in a new production of quite daring simplicity from director Wayne Jordan – is not so much how he unwittingly became the incestuous killer he seeks, but how anybody can ignore it.
Jordan’s own limpid new version of the play, which announces a debt to WB Yeats from the opening, cataclysmic words – “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” – is a solemnly rendered and starkly beautiful retelling of societal collapse, whose emphasis on the chorus attempts to share some responsibility. With little on stage but an ensemble of 19 people and an encircling wilderness of wooden chairs, Ciaran O’Melia’s design conjures up the city as a sundered and shifting space. These chairs could belong to a church or a council meeting, a telling collision in this drama between personal struggles and preordained fate.
The more startling addition, though, is composer Tom Lane’s arresting choral work, giving the 12-strong chorus a striking musical commentary on the action that forcibly recalls devotional hymns. The difference lies in the expression of doubting voices among a bereft choir: “For death is all the fashion now,” they sing. “And everywhere the people say god is dead.”
The tussle between fatalism and free will is clearly sounded, whether it’s Mark Huberman’s defensive Creon eschewing responsibility (“I already live like a king, but I sleep at night”), or Fiona Bell’s evasive Jocasta shunning the gods: “There is no such thing as prophecy.” Barry John O’Connor’s Oedipus, who subtly matches a regal gait to a dragging limp, traces the humanity within his flawed hero, and like his performance the clarity of Jordan’s production seems intent on discovering emotional resonance. The question is whether the play still can, in Aristotle’s words, arouse pity and fear among an over-familiar audience.
Perhaps that’s why Jordan seems less fascinated with Oedipus’s slow discovery than in how he is then hastily deserted. In a play that is all about seeing, it moves the focus away from the individual hero towards the actions of the people, and at one point a blanket glare from Sinead Wallace’s lights puts us squarely in their position: to trust our fate to the hands of gods, or decision of leaders, makes us all wilfully blind to the truth.
HARP | A River Cantata (2014)
Tiger Dublin Fringe
Lawrence Mackin, The Irish Times, September 7th 2014 ★★★★
Olwen Fouéré’s voice rolls off the Samuel Beckett Bridge, as dry and warm as leaves on stone. Not for the first time this year does Fouéré seem to become the spirit of the river Liffey.
The bridge itself is lit up in shades of blue and red, and boats row purposefully up river. Lonesome brass notes swell on a crystal clear night, as composer Tom Lane’s rich music takes shape. Choirs and drums hum and thrum; dancers cut deft white shapes on the bridge; and everything is shot through with the vibrating clank of the bridge’s stanchions, hammered hard to make rough hewn notes.
The inspiration for this 30-minute piece is Dagda’s harp, which the Irish deity played to inspire his warriors and keep the seasons in order. Here the bridge is reimagined as Dagda’s instrument, and for 30 minutes it entrances huge crowds on both sides of the quays. There are lovely shifts in tone and colour, as lights flicker up to the skies, or suddenly strafe the crowd. Much of the action is packed into the opening five minutes, with the music taking a more exotic tempo towards the end. A playful finale sees water cannons duel across the river while a phalanx of rubber ducks sets sail for wider seas.
This is a a stirring, epic way to launch this year’s Tiger Dublin Fringe. To take one of the most recent parts of the city’s architecture and repurpose it as part set, muse and player is an artful stroke that won’t be matched for scale and ambition, and a deft coup de théâtre that all the city can savour.
WAKE (2014)
Chamber Made Opera / Limerick City of Culture
Rachel Donnelly, Totally Dublin
Limerick is a cursed place. At the mouth of the Shannon estuary, the city that has been sacked at various points throughout history by Vikings and Danes was also once famously confounded by a Saint Munchin. An irreverent 1868 poem documents the incident, wherein Munchin appealed to some locals to help heave a stone to the top of a church he was building. The locals refused, but some passing ex-pats (Danes, perhaps) obliged, whipping the saint into such a frenzy of indignation that he cursed all future generations of Limerick natives and blessed all immigrants to the city
This idea, of an inescapable curse that thwarts all efforts before they’re made, was the starting point for Chamber Made Opera’s Wake, a Limerick City of Culture commission. The Australian theatre company worked with Irish director Maeve Stone, Irish composer Tom Lane and Irish dancer Katherine O’Malley to realise a personal tragedy that’s deeply embedded in its environment, as the fabric of Limerick is dyed deep with Munchin’s curse.
The score for Wake is drawn from its surroundings. In the Limerick family home where the performance takes place, the bones of the house itself as well as the daily sounds of its inhabitants make up the soundscape. Radiators and staircase bannisters are made to sing. A cup scraping off a counter top and the rattle of an extractor fan are parts of an operatic puzzle that is only pieced together by traipsing through the downstairs rooms, taking up different acoustic vantage points.
The audience enters on a looped scene, a woman trapped in a cycle of making sandwiches and taking up stalled poses leaning against the kitchen counter. As spectators, we filter around this scene from a life without puncturing the membrane. The air is soupy with sadness. Sounds crackle over the radio, news reports about the storms that battered Limerick in February earlier in the year. These fragments gesture towards strife without foregrounding it.
In the central atrium of the house, and at the centre of the performance, the movements of the woman stuck in the sandwich-making loop (O’Malley) soften and become strange, changing from mundane action to an invocation. The dancer is an unearthly presence, the attention of all audience members pinned to her quivering and yet sure-footed solo that stitches funereal rites into performance. Long sweeps across the table top with a cloth move to the performer’s own legs and arms as she lays herself out as though a corpse being prepared for last rites.
Wake is both stark and gentle, a rough-cut gem of a piece that thrums with depth. The paraphernalia of a wake in a family home are there, but the comfort of protocols has been removed, setting the audience off-balance, uncertain. Stone’s skill as director, evidently alive to her environment, and O’Malley’s sensitivity as performer draw the spectators into the action at the close, so that we become part of a very personal farewell. As the dancer exits the house, flinging double patio doors wide behind her, to the tremulously sweet tones of Rory Grubb’s ceramophone (an outsize xylophone constructed from flower pots), we’re left bereft, emotionally emptied as the early evening air floods in.
Cork Opera House as part of Cork Midsummer Festival
Mary Leland, The Irish Times, June 14th 2019 ★★★★★
The Stalls review: original, confident and hilarious
Skilful skewering as opera ensemble shows audience exactly what it’s like
The Cork Midsummer Festival promise of The Stalls is to present what theatre-goers never see: our watching selves. Here we are, politely trying to find the correct seats, one of us breathlessly late, another unwrapping mints like bombs going off in the middle of the third act, another so bored that she wonders if she should get a divorce and find a man who hates opera as much as she does (she finds him and elopes to Mullingar) and here too is the critic who doesn’t really know what’s going on but maybe that’s the point? This happy slice of a hopefully typical audience sits beneath the interior galaxy we rarely notice in an auditorium turned backwards. Behind us is conductor Tom Doyle, before us this representative group assembled by Deirdre Dwyer’s design. Beyond them is the orchestral accompaniment which provides the punctuation, and sometimes the elaboration, for the soaring interrogative recitatives with which composer Tom Lane has embroidered the sprightly libretto by Lily Akerman without causing any apparent difficulties for five sopranos led by Majella Cullagh and Kelley Petcu or for two tenors and three baritones. And a chorus.
Commissioned by Cork Opera House and the Irish Arts Council this production completes an introspective trilogy on the workings of a theatre It is easily described as hilarious, except that it is such a tightly woven composition that the fun can’t disguise its achievement of musical originality within a classical convention yielding brightly confident performance. The ensemble structure for the singers is so well-managed that it is almost unremarkable, with Drew McCarthy’s lighting design supplementing Doyle’s musical control. Director Conor Hanratty reins in the absurdities even as John Scott’s maddened critic reveals his inner mastersinger of Nuremberg before settling the dilemma of star-rating. No dilemma at all for this reviewer.
The White Devil (2017)
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe, London
Paul Taylor, The Independent, February 2nd 2017 ★★★★
Director Annie Ryan responds with a scathing relish to John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy of ruthless self-interest, convoluted intrigue and gory revenge in her impressive candlelit production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The flickering half-light and the gilded intimacy of the space provide, on one reckoning, the ideal conditions for conjuring up the amoral murk and treacherous dazzle of the claustrophobic court in this play.Lately there have been attempts to alter this perception of the piece – most notably in Maria Aberg’s bracing RSC revival, which located the play in the neon glare of a fantasy version of today's celebrity culture. She did so in order to emphasise the powerful and advanced critique of sexual double standards that undoubtedly lies at the heart of the work. Ryan’s production is not quite so single-minded. While drawing on the distinctive ambience of the Playhouse, it sets the piece in an Edwardian/punk/Gothic dystopia and, though it eschews any plonking references to current events, the show is a forceful reminder that barefaced misogyny and corruption continue to cast their shadow in certain other high places.
The White Devil is, in a sense, a trick title, designed to expose reflex sexism. You assume that it's meant to denote the heroine, Vittoria Corombona, a sensual, a frustrated married woman whose adulterous liaison with Duke Brachiano triggers a mountingly mad chain reaction of brutal retributions. In fact, it would more justly apply to the hypocritical, self-seeking men who mishandle and oppress her.
As Flamineo, the malcontent brother who pimps her to Brachiano in the hope of preferment, Joseph Timms gives a vivid whirlwind of a performance, jokily collusive with the audience, but I don't think he sufficiently conveys the vicarious erotic kick (possibly bisexual) that Flamineo derives from organising this match for his sibling (linking him to the incestuous Ferdinand in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi) and the Cockney likely lad act starts to grate. The rather high-pitched touchiness and petulant self-concern of Brachiano are adeptly captured by Jamie Ballard, while Garry Cooper's portrayal of Monticelso, the corrupt Cardinal who is later elevated to Pope, is all the more effective for being subtly shaded rather than grotesque.
When Vittoria is put on trial for adultery, it is the Cardinal who subjects her to a barrage of misogynistic abuse and, though he has only circumstantial evidence, condemns her to imprisonment in a house for fallen women. In this eloquently staged arraignment scene (the dock is cage-like), Kate Stanley-Brennan is magnificent as Vittoria – an imposing, beautiful woman who can knock spots off the Cardinal with her witty scorn and agile intelligence but who is at his mercy nonetheless because it's male “justice” that is being meted out here. Vittoria is not, of course, guiltless. By recounting a suggestive dream, she did nudge Brachiano to murder. She has not been monogamous.
It's great that Webster’s play does not require the character to be a pillar of conventional virtue before it will defend her against a judicial system so rigged against her because she’s a woman. And it’s a wonderfully liberating stroke that Vittoria is allowed to admit to having a sensual life – with a fierce and almost withering lack of shame, as Stanley-Brennan excellently plays it. You want to cheer her for the chutzpah with which she fibs that she was merely tempted to lust. Is she to be condemned, she asks, just for being looked at carnally by Brachiano? “So may you blame some fair and crystal river/For that some melancholic and distracted man/Hath drowned himself in't”. I’d call that proto-feminist.
Ryan's vivid cast always make the verse sound bounding and spontaneous, even though, on the page, it can have a pre-digested ring – as if the characters were forever flipping through a Rolodex of resonantly translated Quotations from Montaigne to find one to suit the moment. But nearly everything here is well-judged. Ranging from melodramatic tremolos to cheeky transitions (as when the ceremonial pomp of wedding march relaxes into a bout of louche jazz), Tom Lane’s music expertly underscores the shifting moods. And as the plot gets more and more deranged, you feel that villains and victims alike are caught up in some monumental sick joke, tricked out with references to the revenge play tradition. “It ain't Shakespeare – maybe it's more Tarantino,” as the director says in the programme. Recommended.
Oedipus (2015)
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Peter Crawley, The Irish Times, October 1st 2015 ★★★★
The fate of Oedipus ought to be blindingly obvious. That’s as true for the protagonist of Sophocles’ classic, a ruler determined to discover the culprit behind the crime that has cursed his city and looks everywhere but at himself, as it is for his observers: his family, his citizens and, for close to 2,500 years now, his audience. The riddle of Oedipus – here a dress-down king in a new production of quite daring simplicity from director Wayne Jordan – is not so much how he unwittingly became the incestuous killer he seeks, but how anybody can ignore it.
Jordan’s own limpid new version of the play, which announces a debt to WB Yeats from the opening, cataclysmic words – “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” – is a solemnly rendered and starkly beautiful retelling of societal collapse, whose emphasis on the chorus attempts to share some responsibility. With little on stage but an ensemble of 19 people and an encircling wilderness of wooden chairs, Ciaran O’Melia’s design conjures up the city as a sundered and shifting space. These chairs could belong to a church or a council meeting, a telling collision in this drama between personal struggles and preordained fate.
The more startling addition, though, is composer Tom Lane’s arresting choral work, giving the 12-strong chorus a striking musical commentary on the action that forcibly recalls devotional hymns. The difference lies in the expression of doubting voices among a bereft choir: “For death is all the fashion now,” they sing. “And everywhere the people say god is dead.”
The tussle between fatalism and free will is clearly sounded, whether it’s Mark Huberman’s defensive Creon eschewing responsibility (“I already live like a king, but I sleep at night”), or Fiona Bell’s evasive Jocasta shunning the gods: “There is no such thing as prophecy.” Barry John O’Connor’s Oedipus, who subtly matches a regal gait to a dragging limp, traces the humanity within his flawed hero, and like his performance the clarity of Jordan’s production seems intent on discovering emotional resonance. The question is whether the play still can, in Aristotle’s words, arouse pity and fear among an over-familiar audience.
Perhaps that’s why Jordan seems less fascinated with Oedipus’s slow discovery than in how he is then hastily deserted. In a play that is all about seeing, it moves the focus away from the individual hero towards the actions of the people, and at one point a blanket glare from Sinead Wallace’s lights puts us squarely in their position: to trust our fate to the hands of gods, or decision of leaders, makes us all wilfully blind to the truth.
HARP | A River Cantata (2014)
Tiger Dublin Fringe
Lawrence Mackin, The Irish Times, September 7th 2014 ★★★★
Olwen Fouéré’s voice rolls off the Samuel Beckett Bridge, as dry and warm as leaves on stone. Not for the first time this year does Fouéré seem to become the spirit of the river Liffey.
The bridge itself is lit up in shades of blue and red, and boats row purposefully up river. Lonesome brass notes swell on a crystal clear night, as composer Tom Lane’s rich music takes shape. Choirs and drums hum and thrum; dancers cut deft white shapes on the bridge; and everything is shot through with the vibrating clank of the bridge’s stanchions, hammered hard to make rough hewn notes.
The inspiration for this 30-minute piece is Dagda’s harp, which the Irish deity played to inspire his warriors and keep the seasons in order. Here the bridge is reimagined as Dagda’s instrument, and for 30 minutes it entrances huge crowds on both sides of the quays. There are lovely shifts in tone and colour, as lights flicker up to the skies, or suddenly strafe the crowd. Much of the action is packed into the opening five minutes, with the music taking a more exotic tempo towards the end. A playful finale sees water cannons duel across the river while a phalanx of rubber ducks sets sail for wider seas.
This is a a stirring, epic way to launch this year’s Tiger Dublin Fringe. To take one of the most recent parts of the city’s architecture and repurpose it as part set, muse and player is an artful stroke that won’t be matched for scale and ambition, and a deft coup de théâtre that all the city can savour.
WAKE (2014)
Chamber Made Opera / Limerick City of Culture
Rachel Donnelly, Totally Dublin
Limerick is a cursed place. At the mouth of the Shannon estuary, the city that has been sacked at various points throughout history by Vikings and Danes was also once famously confounded by a Saint Munchin. An irreverent 1868 poem documents the incident, wherein Munchin appealed to some locals to help heave a stone to the top of a church he was building. The locals refused, but some passing ex-pats (Danes, perhaps) obliged, whipping the saint into such a frenzy of indignation that he cursed all future generations of Limerick natives and blessed all immigrants to the city
This idea, of an inescapable curse that thwarts all efforts before they’re made, was the starting point for Chamber Made Opera’s Wake, a Limerick City of Culture commission. The Australian theatre company worked with Irish director Maeve Stone, Irish composer Tom Lane and Irish dancer Katherine O’Malley to realise a personal tragedy that’s deeply embedded in its environment, as the fabric of Limerick is dyed deep with Munchin’s curse.
The score for Wake is drawn from its surroundings. In the Limerick family home where the performance takes place, the bones of the house itself as well as the daily sounds of its inhabitants make up the soundscape. Radiators and staircase bannisters are made to sing. A cup scraping off a counter top and the rattle of an extractor fan are parts of an operatic puzzle that is only pieced together by traipsing through the downstairs rooms, taking up different acoustic vantage points.
The audience enters on a looped scene, a woman trapped in a cycle of making sandwiches and taking up stalled poses leaning against the kitchen counter. As spectators, we filter around this scene from a life without puncturing the membrane. The air is soupy with sadness. Sounds crackle over the radio, news reports about the storms that battered Limerick in February earlier in the year. These fragments gesture towards strife without foregrounding it.
In the central atrium of the house, and at the centre of the performance, the movements of the woman stuck in the sandwich-making loop (O’Malley) soften and become strange, changing from mundane action to an invocation. The dancer is an unearthly presence, the attention of all audience members pinned to her quivering and yet sure-footed solo that stitches funereal rites into performance. Long sweeps across the table top with a cloth move to the performer’s own legs and arms as she lays herself out as though a corpse being prepared for last rites.
Wake is both stark and gentle, a rough-cut gem of a piece that thrums with depth. The paraphernalia of a wake in a family home are there, but the comfort of protocols has been removed, setting the audience off-balance, uncertain. Stone’s skill as director, evidently alive to her environment, and O’Malley’s sensitivity as performer draw the spectators into the action at the close, so that we become part of a very personal farewell. As the dancer exits the house, flinging double patio doors wide behind her, to the tremulously sweet tones of Rory Grubb’s ceramophone (an outsize xylophone constructed from flower pots), we’re left bereft, emotionally emptied as the early evening air floods in.
Twelfth Night (2014)
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Peter Crawley, The Irish Times, May 1st 2014 ★★★★
Five large speakers roll on stage, blaring a barely compatible beat and waves of distortion. Although director Wayne Jordan’s brilliantly imaginative new production of Shakespeare’s comedy will feature more transfixing melodies, this death metal belongs to the lovelorn Duke Orsino (a hysterical Barry John O’Connor), and it puts the matter well. In a play about discordant desires, deceptions and disguises, order and chaos work well together: if music be the food of love, rock on.
In this whip-smart production, such transformation is everywhere, from a funeral wreath of black helium balloons to a Prodigy number sung in close harmony. Sophie Robinson’s gentle Viola is just as malleable: separated from her twin brother by a shipwreck, she disguises herself as a man, becomes smitten with Orsino and accidentally seduces the object of his desire, Olivia (Natalie Radmall Quirke, stunning and knowing).
Recruiting a young team mostly new to the Abbey, the production looks at the play through clear, contemporary eyes: if Viola’s brother Sebastian (Gavin Fullam) has an erotic intimacy with the captain Antonio (Conor Madden), why be coy about it? Robinson’s cross-gender disguise, likewise, is free from hang-ups. In Ciarán O’Melia’s colourful, sparing design, the play’s subtitle, What You Will, is emblazoned high on a sky-blue wall: part joke, part licence.
It’s a move as smart and self-aware as Ger Kelly’s wise fool Feste and Elaine Fox’s harried servant Valentine, who explore the play while commenting on it. Jordan chooses his modern emphasis carefully. That’s why Mark O’Halloran’s comically severe, expertly performed Malvolio is given prominent place. Gulled into romance, O’Halloran’s transition from killjoy to eccentric is made endearingly brave (and Emma Fraser’s modern costume takes his risk still further). This also makes the cruelty of the ruse much starker. Sir Toby Belch becomes vicious in Nick Dunning’s performance, plotting Malvolio’s humiliation with Ruth McGill’s sinister- sweet Maria. The production’s keenest sympathy is for anyone punished for being themselves. The play’s concluding wedding bells come off as an almost violent resolution after such uninhibited sexual play. The performer’s faces say it all: happily never after.
Nothing makes the show seem so effortlessly equal to Shakespeare as its music. Composed by Tom Lane, performed on dulcimer and vibraphone by Alex Petcu and sung (with a revelatory range) by Kelly’s Feste, these songs embrace the text delicately, make it sound new. Feste’s counsel for “present laughter” still stands as a shelter from eternal storms of identity and desire, but in Jordan’s daring coda, the show is impressively unafraid of the rain.
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Peter Crawley, The Irish Times, May 1st 2014 ★★★★
Five large speakers roll on stage, blaring a barely compatible beat and waves of distortion. Although director Wayne Jordan’s brilliantly imaginative new production of Shakespeare’s comedy will feature more transfixing melodies, this death metal belongs to the lovelorn Duke Orsino (a hysterical Barry John O’Connor), and it puts the matter well. In a play about discordant desires, deceptions and disguises, order and chaos work well together: if music be the food of love, rock on.
In this whip-smart production, such transformation is everywhere, from a funeral wreath of black helium balloons to a Prodigy number sung in close harmony. Sophie Robinson’s gentle Viola is just as malleable: separated from her twin brother by a shipwreck, she disguises herself as a man, becomes smitten with Orsino and accidentally seduces the object of his desire, Olivia (Natalie Radmall Quirke, stunning and knowing).
Recruiting a young team mostly new to the Abbey, the production looks at the play through clear, contemporary eyes: if Viola’s brother Sebastian (Gavin Fullam) has an erotic intimacy with the captain Antonio (Conor Madden), why be coy about it? Robinson’s cross-gender disguise, likewise, is free from hang-ups. In Ciarán O’Melia’s colourful, sparing design, the play’s subtitle, What You Will, is emblazoned high on a sky-blue wall: part joke, part licence.
It’s a move as smart and self-aware as Ger Kelly’s wise fool Feste and Elaine Fox’s harried servant Valentine, who explore the play while commenting on it. Jordan chooses his modern emphasis carefully. That’s why Mark O’Halloran’s comically severe, expertly performed Malvolio is given prominent place. Gulled into romance, O’Halloran’s transition from killjoy to eccentric is made endearingly brave (and Emma Fraser’s modern costume takes his risk still further). This also makes the cruelty of the ruse much starker. Sir Toby Belch becomes vicious in Nick Dunning’s performance, plotting Malvolio’s humiliation with Ruth McGill’s sinister- sweet Maria. The production’s keenest sympathy is for anyone punished for being themselves. The play’s concluding wedding bells come off as an almost violent resolution after such uninhibited sexual play. The performer’s faces say it all: happily never after.
Nothing makes the show seem so effortlessly equal to Shakespeare as its music. Composed by Tom Lane, performed on dulcimer and vibraphone by Alex Petcu and sung (with a revelatory range) by Kelly’s Feste, these songs embrace the text delicately, make it sound new. Feste’s counsel for “present laughter” still stands as a shelter from eternal storms of identity and desire, but in Jordan’s daring coda, the show is impressively unafraid of the rain.
FLATPACK
From The Irish Times, 10th of September 2012
Michael Dungan
You know going in – from the title – that this is silly. Even the libretto turns out to consist entirely of those exotic Scandinavian product names Ikea gives to its ready-to-assemble furniture. And yet, amidst the silliness, composer Tom Lane offers snap-shots of human situations: tension between partners, loneliness. Comic but poignant. At the start, the audience is filtered into three adjacent rooms in the venue, each of which is kitted out and authentically lit as one of those artificially perfect Ikea showrooms (kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom). Then short stories begin in all three rooms at once, the music from each coming round the corners and intermingling in semi-controlled randomness. At the end of each story the audience is rotated and the stories repeated until everyone has seen all three. Experimental, brightly and snappily produced, gently iconoclastic, thought-provoking, absurdist and good fun.
4/5 stars
You know going in – from the title – that this is silly. Even the libretto turns out to consist entirely of those exotic Scandinavian product names Ikea gives to its ready-to-assemble furniture. And yet, amidst the silliness, composer Tom Lane offers snap-shots of human situations: tension between partners, loneliness. Comic but poignant. At the start, the audience is filtered into three adjacent rooms in the venue, each of which is kitted out and authentically lit as one of those artificially perfect Ikea showrooms (kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom). Then short stories begin in all three rooms at once, the music from each coming round the corners and intermingling in semi-controlled randomness. At the end of each story the audience is rotated and the stories repeated until everyone has seen all three. Experimental, brightly and snappily produced, gently iconoclastic, thought-provoking, absurdist and good fun.
4/5 stars
FLATPACK
From the Irish Theatre Magazine, 10th of September 2012
Michael Seaver
With current uncertainly about the future direction of opera in Ireland, Ulysses Opera Company's IKEA-inspiredFLÅTPÄCK proposes a cheap, easy-to-construct, yet stylish model. That metaphor, however convenient, is also unfortunately flatpack. Although this production ignores the weighty heirloom of tradition by cheerfully replacing red carpet and chandeliers with plywood and Allen keys, it also lays bare IKEA's empty catalogue promises of blissful living.
The Swedish company's spiritual tradition might lie in the 1930s notion of the folkhemmet (people's home), but however hard its marketing department might push that harmonious, classless ideal, IKEA has become a style hegemon, shaping our desires and daily routines. The now-universal language of its catalogue - read as much as Harry Potter - provides FLÅTPÄCK with a nonsensical libretto where singers portray domestic dramas only uttering the names of IKEA products. Style identity is quickly constructable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The excellent cast reflect the empty emotional weight behind the instant gratification of a cheap makeover and do full justice to Tom Lane's music, which is perfectly pitched, not only to the singers' capabilities, but to the narrow dramatic tessitura. And being opera, there were moments where the drama gave way to glorious singing, particularly in the closing sequence when all four voices basked in the CHQ's generous acoustics. At this moment the perfect harmony was uplifted by combined individuality rather than IKEA-like conformity.
Star rating: ★★★★★
With current uncertainly about the future direction of opera in Ireland, Ulysses Opera Company's IKEA-inspiredFLÅTPÄCK proposes a cheap, easy-to-construct, yet stylish model. That metaphor, however convenient, is also unfortunately flatpack. Although this production ignores the weighty heirloom of tradition by cheerfully replacing red carpet and chandeliers with plywood and Allen keys, it also lays bare IKEA's empty catalogue promises of blissful living.
The Swedish company's spiritual tradition might lie in the 1930s notion of the folkhemmet (people's home), but however hard its marketing department might push that harmonious, classless ideal, IKEA has become a style hegemon, shaping our desires and daily routines. The now-universal language of its catalogue - read as much as Harry Potter - provides FLÅTPÄCK with a nonsensical libretto where singers portray domestic dramas only uttering the names of IKEA products. Style identity is quickly constructable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The excellent cast reflect the empty emotional weight behind the instant gratification of a cheap makeover and do full justice to Tom Lane's music, which is perfectly pitched, not only to the singers' capabilities, but to the narrow dramatic tessitura. And being opera, there were moments where the drama gave way to glorious singing, particularly in the closing sequence when all four voices basked in the CHQ's generous acoustics. At this moment the perfect harmony was uplifted by combined individuality rather than IKEA-like conformity.
Star rating: ★★★★★
The Spinner
From the Irish Theatre Magazine, 13th of April 2012
Rachel Donnelly
Who believes in fate anymore? There’s really no room for such a fanciful notion in this enlightened day and age, but it was a concept the ancient Greeks set a lot of store by. In DISH Dance Collective’s The Spinner, choreographer Aoife McAtamney takes the Greek legend of the three Fates, or Morai, and turns it on its head to present a commentary on ideas of mortality and free will…….. A gold-hued Tom Lane (he is clothed in a loincloth and gold spraypaint) provides live accompaniment on viola, the sometimes creaking, sometimes soaring twanging of the instrument wonderfully evoking the image of taut threads while building tension ……. The Spinner is rich with the possibility of multiple interpretations, which is what makes it so compelling. This, along with innovative choreography, completely engaged performances from the three dancers and Lane’s eerie score, make for a wonderfully unsettling experience. I’d say McAtamney and DISH Dance Collective are fated for greatness, if I believed in that sort of thing...
Rachel Donnelly is a Dublin-based freelance writer and editor
Who believes in fate anymore? There’s really no room for such a fanciful notion in this enlightened day and age, but it was a concept the ancient Greeks set a lot of store by. In DISH Dance Collective’s The Spinner, choreographer Aoife McAtamney takes the Greek legend of the three Fates, or Morai, and turns it on its head to present a commentary on ideas of mortality and free will…….. A gold-hued Tom Lane (he is clothed in a loincloth and gold spraypaint) provides live accompaniment on viola, the sometimes creaking, sometimes soaring twanging of the instrument wonderfully evoking the image of taut threads while building tension ……. The Spinner is rich with the possibility of multiple interpretations, which is what makes it so compelling. This, along with innovative choreography, completely engaged performances from the three dancers and Lane’s eerie score, make for a wonderfully unsettling experience. I’d say McAtamney and DISH Dance Collective are fated for greatness, if I believed in that sort of thing...
Rachel Donnelly is a Dublin-based freelance writer and editor
Listowel Syndrome and Ten: white grey studies in movement
From the Irish Theatre Magazine, 20th of May 2011
Seona Mac Réamoinn
From Emma Martin’s opening salvo to Liv O Donoghue’s gentle, textured duet at the close, there was a note of confidence emanating from the two programmes in Re-Presenting Ireland, part of Dublin Dance Festival (DDF). These internationally curated programmes have become a regular feature of the festival: co-hosted by Dance Ireland, Culture Ireland and DDF, they are designed to showcase the diverse range of dance making in Ireland, and they subtly blended into the overall festival programming this year.
Listowel Syndrome was the most finished offering of the two programmes, benefiting from its previous life as a longer work seen during the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin last year. The extract here is the abstracted choreographic element separated from the original, which included spoken text while the musical collaboration, composed and played live by Tom Lane and Bryan O’Connell, remained. The notion of the territorial was very strong, not just in a sense of place being protected but in its dramatic narrative, where an insider is transformed into an outsider. It was all underlined by the strong physicality of the dance, as one figure could literally shoulder out another, or a forceful intervention is witnessed and the dancers hang back. We realise this is not only because of being outside any geographical or physical borders but because one figure has involuntarily become estranged from the cultural and spiritual cohesion of the group that had formerly embraced her.
There is supremely quiet confidence seeping through choreographer and performer Liv O’Donoghue’s Ten: white/grey studies in movement. She assuredly inhabits her territory, using swathes of gentle, reflective and accessible movement as she embraces the space, sometimes pushing against the ground as if to test its robustness. The soundscape is again provided by Tom Lane: a continuous, almost inaudible whispering, with hints of birdsong or distant waves as if the sound is intermittently running up and down the bodies of the dancers. Watching her duet with Maria Nilsson Waller gave a sense of being washed with movement, shadow and light, where even the sand being scattered or heaped in a small pile is both controlled and seductive. Final circular moves from the two dancers low to the ground seemed like stones softly skimming a pool of water.
From Emma Martin’s opening salvo to Liv O Donoghue’s gentle, textured duet at the close, there was a note of confidence emanating from the two programmes in Re-Presenting Ireland, part of Dublin Dance Festival (DDF). These internationally curated programmes have become a regular feature of the festival: co-hosted by Dance Ireland, Culture Ireland and DDF, they are designed to showcase the diverse range of dance making in Ireland, and they subtly blended into the overall festival programming this year.
Listowel Syndrome was the most finished offering of the two programmes, benefiting from its previous life as a longer work seen during the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin last year. The extract here is the abstracted choreographic element separated from the original, which included spoken text while the musical collaboration, composed and played live by Tom Lane and Bryan O’Connell, remained. The notion of the territorial was very strong, not just in a sense of place being protected but in its dramatic narrative, where an insider is transformed into an outsider. It was all underlined by the strong physicality of the dance, as one figure could literally shoulder out another, or a forceful intervention is witnessed and the dancers hang back. We realise this is not only because of being outside any geographical or physical borders but because one figure has involuntarily become estranged from the cultural and spiritual cohesion of the group that had formerly embraced her.
There is supremely quiet confidence seeping through choreographer and performer Liv O’Donoghue’s Ten: white/grey studies in movement. She assuredly inhabits her territory, using swathes of gentle, reflective and accessible movement as she embraces the space, sometimes pushing against the ground as if to test its robustness. The soundscape is again provided by Tom Lane: a continuous, almost inaudible whispering, with hints of birdsong or distant waves as if the sound is intermittently running up and down the bodies of the dancers. Watching her duet with Maria Nilsson Waller gave a sense of being washed with movement, shadow and light, where even the sand being scattered or heaped in a small pile is both controlled and seductive. Final circular moves from the two dancers low to the ground seemed like stones softly skimming a pool of water.
The Spinner
From The Irish Times, September 24, 2010
Christine Madden
THE ANCIENT Greeks saw the three fates – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – as workers in a kind of celestial textile industry: one spun, the second measured out and the last cut the thread of life. In making a new work depicting these three deities, choreographer Aoife McAtamney infuses it with the spirit of another weaver remembered in Greek mythology: the spider.
Dancers Anna Kaszuba, Emma Martin and McAtamney fuse the godlike and arachnid in a work with all the delicate grace and meticulous ruthlessness of both. With its reedy, chafing melody and dampened pizzicato, the musical accompaniment on viola by Tom Lane perfectly complemented a piece that elicits both fascination and gnawing anxiety.
The spindly-limbed dancers evoked what they embodied beautifully, and would have been able for even more adventurous choreography. Which I hope we will see, in ample measure, from this promising young choreographer. The fates foretell a bright future here.
From The Irish Times, September 24, 2010
Christine Madden
THE ANCIENT Greeks saw the three fates – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – as workers in a kind of celestial textile industry: one spun, the second measured out and the last cut the thread of life. In making a new work depicting these three deities, choreographer Aoife McAtamney infuses it with the spirit of another weaver remembered in Greek mythology: the spider.
Dancers Anna Kaszuba, Emma Martin and McAtamney fuse the godlike and arachnid in a work with all the delicate grace and meticulous ruthlessness of both. With its reedy, chafing melody and dampened pizzicato, the musical accompaniment on viola by Tom Lane perfectly complemented a piece that elicits both fascination and gnawing anxiety.
The spindly-limbed dancers evoked what they embodied beautifully, and would have been able for even more adventurous choreography. Which I hope we will see, in ample measure, from this promising young choreographer. The fates foretell a bright future here.
Listowel Syndrome
From The Irish Times, September 20, 2010
Sara Keating
Syndrome is an unsettling piece of dance theatre, inspired by the true story of a small town that turns on a young female rape victim. Written and directed by choreographer Emma Martin, it uses live percussion and a four-piece choir to create an atmospheric deconstructed score that sets the tone for the powerful physical expression of this strange contemporary story of local solidarity and tribal cruelty.
Martin’s modernist choreography is at once beautiful and brutalist, as a duet of curious first encounters becomes a violent tussle and then a predatory kill. But the representation of physical violence is neither gratuitous nor sensationalist, and we are more aware of the emotional violence that lies behind this story, which Stephen Dodd’s bleak ashy lighting enhances with visceral effect.
There is vigorous conviction in this short intense thirty-minute long piece. Highly recommended.
From The Irish Times, September 20, 2010
Sara Keating
Syndrome is an unsettling piece of dance theatre, inspired by the true story of a small town that turns on a young female rape victim. Written and directed by choreographer Emma Martin, it uses live percussion and a four-piece choir to create an atmospheric deconstructed score that sets the tone for the powerful physical expression of this strange contemporary story of local solidarity and tribal cruelty.
Martin’s modernist choreography is at once beautiful and brutalist, as a duet of curious first encounters becomes a violent tussle and then a predatory kill. But the representation of physical violence is neither gratuitous nor sensationalist, and we are more aware of the emotional violence that lies behind this story, which Stephen Dodd’s bleak ashy lighting enhances with visceral effect.
There is vigorous conviction in this short intense thirty-minute long piece. Highly recommended.
Flatpack: an Opera in IKEA
From The Times of London, June 13, 2009
Ikea Opera brings harmony to the flatpack shopping experience
Kate Muir
This week I went to an opera in Ikea. The performance was, inevitably, titled Flatpack. Opera is the only art form, with its capacity for high-camp histrionics, that can truly express the agony and ecstasy of visiting the world’s favourite furniture store. It was awesome.
Around 50 opera fans — some from as far as Macclesfield and Manchester — were waiting at the Ikea escalator, and were handed programmes that looked like furniture assembly instructions. A soprano in a yellow uniform came in, yodelling tender entreaties to customers through a megaphone, and led us to the first scene in a living room, where musicans played mobile piano, viola, cello and accordion, and a diva huffily read the kitchens catalogue.
Flatpack was composed by Tom Lane, an Englishman now studying in Berlin. Lea characterised the work as “contemporary . . . German . . . avant garde?” It was free, and had certainly drawn a younger audience than the sixtysomethings of Covent Garden. “If it’s rubbish we’ll just go shopping,” said four women on a girls’ night out. But, by the end, the applause was rapturous, even from those customers with trolleys who had stormed through scenes, only to come back and ogle.
read the full article here
Come into the open my friend!
From “Opernwelt” Magazine, February 2010
Even Ikea is possible: how to devise music theatre for a furniture store.
Vera Teichmann
“Billy, Billy, Bil-ly!”, cries the confused Baritone melodically. The pianist rips his music from the stand and continues his practicing unfazed. In the background, other voices sing the fateful phrase “Heymdahl” in a seemingly mocking commentary to the unfolding drama. The assembly of a piece of IKEA furniture fails tragically. The setting of this hilarious scene is a small room, similar in size and colour-scheme to the ideal display rooms or an IKEA furniture store. The name of this evening’s entertainment is “Abenteuer im Einrichtunghaus”. It was conceived originally as the music college project of the 25 year old composer Tom Lane, most recently educated in Berlin. The audience experiences not only the adventure of the furniture store, but also the adventure of everyday life, among other things the problems of everyday relationships. Just as in the tradition of promenade theatre, the audience is led in groups from room to room, from scene to scene: living room, kitchen, bedroom. Or backwards. Each individual member of the audience becomes a co-director, creating their own personal version of the piece. With this radical break with the standard theatrical tradition, Tom Lane is at the forefront of contemporary music theatre, which sets out to discover new locations and new opera spaces.
“You can't pretend to be Wagner”, says Tom Lane. In his opinion, it is impossible as a composer to view one's own work and personal development as separate from the rest of history. He has also come to realise, however, that the socio-economic and aesthetic influences of Mozart or Puccini are of little help to a young composer of today. His IKEA opera represents the possibility of breaking free from the avantgarde à la Lachenmann. One way of many of course. Vitality is a central aspect of Tom Lane's understanding of art. In his pieces he attempts to unite complex counterpoint with luscious melodies: anything except musical sterility. Just as how Lane is attempting to tear down the fourth wall of his stage, so he tries to demolish prejudices against experimental music, which in fact has the potential to be vital and human. And simply beautiful.
read the full article here (English)
read the original article here (German)
From “Opernwelt” Magazine, February 2010
Even Ikea is possible: how to devise music theatre for a furniture store.
Vera Teichmann
“Billy, Billy, Bil-ly!”, cries the confused Baritone melodically. The pianist rips his music from the stand and continues his practicing unfazed. In the background, other voices sing the fateful phrase “Heymdahl” in a seemingly mocking commentary to the unfolding drama. The assembly of a piece of IKEA furniture fails tragically. The setting of this hilarious scene is a small room, similar in size and colour-scheme to the ideal display rooms or an IKEA furniture store. The name of this evening’s entertainment is “Abenteuer im Einrichtunghaus”. It was conceived originally as the music college project of the 25 year old composer Tom Lane, most recently educated in Berlin. The audience experiences not only the adventure of the furniture store, but also the adventure of everyday life, among other things the problems of everyday relationships. Just as in the tradition of promenade theatre, the audience is led in groups from room to room, from scene to scene: living room, kitchen, bedroom. Or backwards. Each individual member of the audience becomes a co-director, creating their own personal version of the piece. With this radical break with the standard theatrical tradition, Tom Lane is at the forefront of contemporary music theatre, which sets out to discover new locations and new opera spaces.
“You can't pretend to be Wagner”, says Tom Lane. In his opinion, it is impossible as a composer to view one's own work and personal development as separate from the rest of history. He has also come to realise, however, that the socio-economic and aesthetic influences of Mozart or Puccini are of little help to a young composer of today. His IKEA opera represents the possibility of breaking free from the avantgarde à la Lachenmann. One way of many of course. Vitality is a central aspect of Tom Lane's understanding of art. In his pieces he attempts to unite complex counterpoint with luscious melodies: anything except musical sterility. Just as how Lane is attempting to tear down the fourth wall of his stage, so he tries to demolish prejudices against experimental music, which in fact has the potential to be vital and human. And simply beautiful.
read the full article here (English)
read the original article here (German)
Further press articles:
- Flatpack the Opera, Timeout Magazine, June 2009
- "From flash opera to flatpack opera", The Independent, Michael Church, June 2009
- "IKEA goes opera", Swedish National Radio, June 2009
- "Flatpack Opera", Bachtrack Review, June 2009
- "Musik Theater Selbstgebaut", Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. Netzwerk Magazin (Pages 14-19), April 2009