★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

At the centre point of the performance, ten-year-old Specky Clark, played by Faith Prendergast, walks across the stage to a radio in the rear corner and turns it on to a dance tune by David Holmes. The music begins quietly, appearing to come from the on-stage radio, and the child starts tentatively to move, before casting off his inhibitions and dancing freely and joyfully, the music booming from the theatre’s speakers. The movements recall the freestyle dance of someone alone in their bedroom: balletic kicks interwoven with techno-club fist pumping and are exhilarating and childlike.

In the rear of the stage, which is dressed as the abattoir where Clark has been sent to work by his overbearing aunts, a series of fabric sheets hang to imitate pigs’ carcasses. One of these opens and a head emerges. It is the pig killed by Clark on his first day at the abattoir that has been resurrected by the child’s dancing for Samhain, the Gaelic festival when the departed return to life, marking the beginning of the ‘Darker Half’ of the year. This moment of rupture also marks the point at which the performance shifts from the everyday into the supernatural and the performers’ dancing becomes freer and less bound by the expectations of the quotidian.

Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark is a fictionalised dramatization of the life of her great great grandfather, sent to live with relatives in Belfast after the death of his parents in Glasgow. It intermixes biography with Gaelic traditions and is permeated by the Irish language. The piece has a strong ensemble of nine dancers in gender-swapped multiroles including Erin O’Reilly, Maëva Berthelot and Malick Cissé. True to life, it is both funny and sad, and Specky’s domineering aunts’ manhandling of the child into and out of clothes and into work at the slaughterhouse to a refrain of ‘awk poor child’, ‘God love him’ is both tragic and comical. The physical performance of these aunts is a high point of the show as they peck birdlike around their new charge, a formidable double act that will shape the orphan’s life. The resurrected pig’s crawling and contorting is also excellent.

Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant, characterised by spiralling repetitions, and the sound design by Maxime Jerry Fraisse, powerful. The use of Sardinian throat singing when Specky is made to shoot the pig approaches the transcendent and original music by Lankum is good. The staging by scenographer Sabine Dargent conjures an achronological Belfast ranging from the mid-twentieth century to today, echoing the slippage between worlds of the performance’s climax. The opening is particularly striking, as Specky screams over the body of a dead parent, a life-sized puppet of death jerkily enters behind him, reaching to touch the lifeless body and raise it up – this shocking beginning sets the eerie tone for the piece.

However, some elements of the performance are less effective. A scene in which Specky is assaulted in the street after a day at work feels a little disconnected and inconsequential and the integration of Fortnite dances, while perhaps age appropriate for Specky, took me out of the moment. I also felt that the two sections of the performance, the ‘real’ and the ‘supernatural’, could have been better integrated and perhaps a longer runtime could have allowed for a fuller development of these ideas.

Nevertheless, in its scope and the powerful performances of Prendergast and the rest of the company there is much to commend Specky Clark, and the rapturous applause which greeted the end of the production suggests that maybe it just wasn’t for me.

ROTHKO CHAPEL

St John’s Church, Waterloo

★★★★

“an excellent evening of chamber music in a beautiful setting”

St John’s Church at Waterloo, a nineteenth-century Greek Revival style building with white plaster walls and golden detailing, falls silent in expectation for start of the first piece. The three musicians that will play the first selection, Andrew Norman’s The Companion Guide to Rome, sit beneath the large image of the crucifixion, flanked by two murals painted in 1950 by Jewish German artist Hans Feibusch, depicting parables in views from Waterloo Bridge, which form the centrepiece of the beautiful and sonorous church space.

Suddenly, the string trio erupts into dissonant glissandos that interweave one another, creating a dense tapestry of sound that envelops the space. Over the thirty-minute duration of the first piece, which was a finalist of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for music, Norman responds to nine churches within Rome, channelling the art, architecture, tiling and spatial quality of these places of worship within the ancient city. The musicianship of violinist Tania Mazzetti, cellist Kristina Blaumane, and viola player Scott Dickinson, all members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, is of the very highest standard. This is especially evidenced in the third movement, where Dickinson stands to take a solo lead, beginning in an almost-imperceptible pianissimo with a humming, scraping tone before building in a long, slow crescendo towards the climax of the movement. Likewise, Mazzetti’s solo, performed with her back to the audience, offers her a space to demonstrate her consummate ability.

l: Morton Feldman (photo by Rob Bogaerts) r: Andrew Morton (photo by Craig T Matthew)

The Companion Guide to Rome is a thrilling and experimental opener to a programme of works inspired by places of worship. Full of juxtapositions, it is both fizzing with life and replete with silent spaces for reflection and is chosen to complement Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel – written as a tribute to the artist to be performed at the eponymous chapel in Houston, Texas, which is decorated with fourteen large Mark Rothko canvases. The selection of Rothko Chapel also elaborates on the twentieth-century dialogue established by the altar pieces of St John’s between Jewish artists (both Rothko and Feldman were Jewish Americans) and Christian spaces of worship.

The pairing is fascinating and daring, following the arresting and often fast and chaotic composition by Norman, comes Feldman’s quieter and more contemplative work, scored for choir (performed by the New London Chamber Choir), viola (Scott Dickinson returns), percussion (Andrew Barclay, LPO) and celeste (Catherine Edwards, LPO). Contrasting with Norman’s self-expressed interest in narrative, Feldman responds to Rothko’s abstract expressionism: in a move that echoes the artist’s eschewing of the figurative, the choir vocalises, producing a wordless melody of mesmerising beauty. The interplay between the choir and the musicians is faultless, and the final two sections of the pieces are sublime, with soprano solo Lucy Humphris taking a leading role in the penultimate section before moving into a final led by Dickinson and Barclay, playing the vibraphone, who are then joined by the choir in an arresting denouement. Conductor Charlotte Corderoy is also fantastic. As she guides the ensemble through the piece, she brings in sections with a placing movement of the hand that invites an exactitude to which the choir respond with exquisite delicacy.

Both Rothko Chapel and A Companion Guide to Rome are beautiful, and thought-provoking pieces. In the case of the first, giving space for meditative thought within a rich polyphonic sound texture, and in the case of the second an alternately reflective and enlivening piece. They combine for an excellent evening of chamber music in a beautiful setting.

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 9th May 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Luca Truffarelli

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

ROTHKO CHAPEL

St John’s Church, Waterloo

★★★★

“an excellent evening of chamber music in a beautiful setting”

ROTHKO CHAPEL

St John’s Church, Waterloo

Reviewed on 22nd February 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Previously reviewed by Rob:

ROTHKO CHAPEL

ROTHKO CHAPEL

ROTHKO CHAPEL

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