Theatre review: Piano Recital at TDC
With 'Piano Recital' Cork Fringe ends on an eccentric note that's right at home in the inaugural festival which finished this past weekend.
Watching Andy Ingamells and Benjamin Burns perform Piano Recital at the Triskel Arts Centre in one of the final shows of the Cork Fringe Festival last night, I couldn’t help but think of Glenn Gould.
Not Glenn Gould the virtuoso pianist whose interpretations of Bach are widely accepted to be without comparison; but Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s fictional character of Glenn Gould in his novel The Loser, and more specifically the effect this Gould has on the lives of two of his classmates, who first encountered him while they were studying in music school together.
Such was Gould’s talents, his classmates in the novel come to the realisation that he represents a level of artistic excellence they could never attain and subsequently never recover from crossing paths with him.
Similarly in Piano Recital, a character called Andy (Ingamells) attempts to play a programme of music while his assistant (Burns) fills the piano with thick red wallpaper paste.
However, as is revealed through a series of pre-recorded diary entries projected onto a screen behind them, Andy is riddled with anxiety over his performance and feels his ideas pale in comparison to previous artistic movements such as Dadaism or Futurism. As a result of encountering such work, which he feels was way more original than anything he could come up with, Andy is paralysed by his own perceived lack of talent.
We learn through the video diary that Andy is taking piano lessons and has no idea what he will play during his performance. Each entry is eighty seven seconds in length and begins about three months out from when the recital is due.
His favorite expression throughout is “I should”, which only reinforces his laser like focus on everything he can’t do, as opposed to what he can. Some entries are dubbed to fix the dates they were supposedly recorded on, but in each one he appears nervous, narcissistic and unsure of whether or not he even ought to go ahead with the recital.
All the while, the Andy on stage is banging away at the piano wearing oversized gloves, or with a paint roller, or a piece of two by four, while reading the music from scrawled sheets he has duct taped to the piano. As the show progresses the keys begin to stick as more paste goes into the piano and he has to get ever more creative to knock a tune out of the instrument.
If this all sounds a little odd, well that’s because it is, as the show clearly aims to satirise the world of contemporary music performance, the use of online platforms to promote one’s own work and the way in which artists sometimes tend to take themselves a little too seriously.
And in many regards it gets all of this spot on, even down to the exaggerated gestures at the end of each section where Andy allows his hands to hang in the air having played the last note of that section.
However, the piece itself could’ve been so much funnier if the writing in the diary entry had been sharper. Instead, large sections of the show took on the feeling of being tests of endurance rather than actually enjoyable.
Perhaps this is a matter of one’s own sense of humour, because although there were certainly some laughs throughout, there was a lingering feeling that a lot of the audience, while curious to see what was going to happen, could’ve done with a little more respite over the course of the hour long performance.
That said, this is exactly the kind of piece that should be in a Fringe festival and it’s doubtful anyone who was there last night is likely to forget in a hurry the sight of red adhesive paste gradually filling the wonky see-through piano on stage. Nor Andy, in his glittery wig banging on about his piano recital.
It takes courage to perform a piece like this and no little creativity to conjure it up in the first place and it’s great that there is now a space in the calendar to showcase this kind of work.
Andy Ingamells is a lecturer in MTU. To see more of his work, including a video recording of an older performance of Piano Recital, you can visit his website here.