Performances - Brian Friel

Gate Theatre
September 30 - October 25, 2003

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Ion Caramitru Niamh Linehan

By Brian Friel

Other culturevulture.net reviews
of Brian Friel plays:
Dancing at Lughnasa
Translations
Two Plays After

    Brian Friel’s Performances is a minor work, a one-act meditation on familiar themes in which music finally, literally takes center stage in the playwright’s idiomatic exploration of the fissures in human communication. Inspired by the life of Czech composer Leos Janacek, particularly his latter-day obsessive romantic (Platonic) relationship with younger, married Kamila Stosslova, it examines the linkages between the musician’s life and his music.
    Historically, Janacek’s most productive period followed his meeting with Stosslova in 1917, and many of his most acclaimed works were dedicated to her. His second string quartet, entitled "Intimate Letters," is widely acknowledged to reflect the passionate correspondence between them during which Janacek wrote over seven hundred letters in eleven years. Janacek was clearly smitten, but those few of Stosslova’s letters which survive (she requested that he burn the majority of them) suggest that she remained doggedly committed to her husband and children although she did not necessarily discourage the composer’s attentions.
    Friel uses the backdrop of this relationship to create a space for memory and reflection which informs the drama but is never represented directly. The setting for the play is the present day when PhD student Anezka Ungrova (Niamh Linehan) is interviewing the deceased Janacek (Ion Caramitru) for her doctoral dissertation. She is intrigued by the intertwining passions of word and music embodied in this story, and seeks to tease out the nuances from the maestro (who is not very interested in hearing that he has been dead for nearly eighty years).
    Meanwhile a string quartet (the Alba String Quartet) prepares to perform "Intimate Letters" at the old man’s country cottage in Moravia, and their rehearsals are heard throughout the play, climaxing with the live performance of the third and fourth movements center stage.
    When Janacek denies the influence of his life experience on his art and questions the academic’s interpretation of the facts, the stage is set for an ideological and emotional confrontation in which perceptions and understandings of self and other are in play. Ungrova finds her illusions shattered when Janacek speaks dismissively of Stosslova as a delusionary muse consciously created over the reality of a relatively uninteresting woman. She becomes indignant and confronts him with the
suggestion that this story is his own illusion, created to shield him from the truth about his artistic inspiration and his need for communication.
    There is no denying the philosophical bent of Friel’s work, nor is his use of language any less elegant than before. Performances has many levels of interplay between notions of ‘performance’ and even of ‘play’, as Richard Pine points out in the program. Neither is there any doubt that Friel is one of the most important dramatists of the Irish stage, and that even his less ‘important’ works are significant events in contemporary Irish theatre. On the other hand, Performances is certainly not the most exciting work he has ever written, nor the most challenging, nor the most rich. In most respects the play resembles the ‘doodles’ about which the character of Janacek complains early on in the action: it is an extended sketch which is not without worthwhile qualities but which fails to ignite.
    Bucharest-born Caramitru is entertaining in the role of Janacek, bringing plenty of controlled gusto to his portrayal of the maestro’s imperious but gently self-mocking attitude. The character has enough facets to give the actor a variety of tones and emotions, and the transitions between them are generally smoothly done. Linehan fares rather less well as the romantic academic, lumbered with a one-note character who repeats herself far too often to play against her co-star.
    The Alba String Quartet contribute their dimension of ‘performance’ best when they play their instruments, but are also called upon to contribute some lines of dialogue in character roles which are clearly not their forte.