Irish Timeswriters review recent arts performances

No Worst There Is None

Newman House, Dublin

No Worst There is None is a promenade performance through Newman House, the marvel of Georgian elegance where the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his last tortured years. This production from The Stomach Box, however, aspires to be something more: a promenade through the poet’s life, his art and – more audaciously – his soul.

Making art about an artist often leads towards the cul de sac of bio-drama, a dead-end biography that can never contain the artistry. Hopkins himself granted dispensation to anyone willing to be bolder. “Living art,” he wrote of his poetry, should be “made for performance, this sonnet should be almost sung.” Director Dylan Tighe thus transposes and translates the man and the verse, seeking an equivalent vocabulary in performance, a poetry in motion. That this is based largely on the “terrible sonnets”, the product of a darkening yet still formally innovative mind, explains the production’s opaque, disjointed approach and its unwavering tone of sombre menace.

The vestibule sharply announces designer Phil MacMahon’s art-installation approach: a live canary in a cage, dead rabbits piled like logs, pop-art neon tubes spelling out lines of verse, the pre- independence flag of Ireland dripping blood. Cramming so many ideas into one short performance has inevitable consequences: some ideas will be provocatively realised, others merely indicated, others fitful with their expression.

Here, the poetry is often literalised, its imagery made flesh in raw and bloody props, or its words wrought in fractured video-art signage, while the political context of late 19th-century Ireland is conveyed in clunky symbols.

Figures from Hopkins’s life appear to guide us, with an intimidating, red-cassocked David Heap as the English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman, while others – his disapproving father, his loving sister, the putative objects of forbidden desires – are simply there. Hopkins experts may recognise them and join the dots, but others will be lost in the thicket of allusions.

The piece functions, though, more as mood than narrative, however bleak that mood becomes. Each room is absorbing and unsettling: a haunted Will O’Connell as Hopkins reads eliptical snippets from his “diary of sins” while his face eerily animates every marble bust. White feathers rain down from above, as though Hopkins’ near-erotic pantheism is now shredded in the ether.

Other installations, though, are just mystifying, contorted images asked to convey too much.

Composer Seán Óg pursues a stricter reading of Hopkins, excerpting his poetry into arrestingly stark hymns, leavened with the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral Boy’s Choir, who render the poetry both as prayer and as requiem.

In his art, Hopkins strove to depict the “inscape” of things, their truest essence. It would be shame, then, to leave this fascinating homage with the impression of a chronic depressive, choked by religion, political displacement and conflicted passions. Hopkins’ dying words here reach us in a low moribund chant: “But we were framed to fail and die, the departed day no morning brings”. History records them as, “I am happy, so happy.”

The truth is harder to encapsulate; it is always somewhere in between. - Peter Crawley

Until Wednesday

As part of the Dublin Theatre Festival

Pixies

Olympia, Dublin

To begin a gig with a little-known B side is risky, to begin with four is a live music death-wish.

The Pixies are the hottest ticket this autumn. The Olympia was stuffed and the touts could not buy tickets to sell them.

The sense of anticipation surrounding their outstanding album 1989 Doolittle, which they promised to play in full, was palpable, but the opening to their show really sorted the diehards from the one album day-trippers.

There was a palpable restlessness as the Pixies opened with Dancing the Manta Ray(B side to Here Comes Your Man) followed by three more non-album tracks, each one greeted with diminishing enthusiasm.

"Those were the B sides," said bassist Kim Deal as if ushering an embarrassing relative out of the room, "here's the record". Then came the familiar bomp, bomp, bomp of her bass which presages Debaser, the opening track of Doolittle, and the real show began.

Even great albums have a few dud tracks, but live, only the half-baked vocal duo Silversent an ecstatic audience scurrying to the toilets or for a smoking break.

Frontman Francis Black was in indulgent mood, joshing with the audience and bickering – playfully or otherwise – with Deal, with whom he has a famously fractious relationship. "I was about to enjoy playing this song," he said, cutting Deal off from a meandering preamble. Black then described the extraordinarily intense

Tame as "therapeutic", not a word usually associated with that song.

Old favourites Here Comes the Man, Monkey Gone to Heaven, Heyand Gouge Awayelicited the biggest cheer, but there was few fillers. The Pixies finished as they started, with B-sides, but this time the audience knew the slow (UK surf) version of Wave of Mutilationand the wonderful Into the Whitesung by Deal. The whole thing clocked in at just over an hour.

It was short, but great fun. - Ronan McGreevy

RTÉ NSO

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Sibelius – Finlandia. Valse triste.

Grieg – Piano Concerto.

Beethoven – Pastoral Symphony.

A WEEK is a long time in music just as it is in politics, especially in the lives of orchestras whose schedules regularly present them with different conductors in successive weeks.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is a case in point. A few faces in the line-up may change from week to week, but sometimes the character of the orchestra shifts radically with the arrival of a new conductor.

Take Kenneth Montgomery, who conducted last Friday. He offered a slim, trim Beethoven, the like of which the orchestra has rarely undertaken in the past.

He clearly didn't see the composer as romping through the countryside with heavy accents in his Pastoral. The journey was swift, the step light, the manner often darting, perfectly judged to make the most of the extraordinary amount of repetition the work contains.

The approach was at once relaxed and invigorating, with incisive contributions from horns and trumpets, an almost airy flow to the brook in the second movement, an unusual, operatic feel to the storm in the fourth, and an appealing radiance in the thanksgiving of the finale.

The Pastoralwas placed as the climax of an evening of perennial favourites. In the first half, Montgomery presented the two works by Sibelius in glorious sonorities, Finlandiaall brassy menace and patriotically stirring hymns, Valse tristewith dolefully stretched tread.

And he was an always accommodating partner to Russian pianist Boris Giltburg's unhackneyed account of the Grieg Piano Concerto.

It's over 10 years since Montgomery, currently the principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, last worked with the RTÉ NSO.

Here's hoping it won't be quite as long before he returns. - MICHAEL DERVAN