An odd one, this. At the suggestion of Gate Theatre producer Michael Colgan, Brian Friel has written a very short play about an imagined present-day encounter between the dead composer Leos Janacek and a fictional scholar, Anezka Ungrova. They discuss - and then argue about - the relationship between the composer's last work, the String Quartet No 2, and the woman who inspired it, Janacek's much younger muse Kamila Stosslova. In the play's fiction, Janacek inhabits a limbo-like netherworld, in the company of four musicians whom he calls his "life support group". In real life these musicians make up the Alba String Quartet, and their playing of the composition in question underscores the second half of the 65-minute-long production.
In the play Friel engages many of his favoured themes: the difficulty of establishing the truth of any event or encounter; the relationship between lived experience and the artist's expression of it; and the ability of music to communicate feelings and impressions that words cannot. In the conflict between Janacek and Ungrova he raises troubling questions about the power and responsibility of the artist, questions that remain provocatively open: is Ungrova justified in calling the composer exploitative and a misogynist when he asserts that his imagination transformed Kamila "into something immeasurably greater - of infinitely more importance - than the quite modest young woman she was"?
Here, and in Friel's other recent plays, the full-length Give Me Your Answer Do! and the Chekhov-inspired short Afterplay, we see a great, ageing artist grappling with posterity. All seem like attempts to imagine - to will into existence, perhaps - an afterlife for artists through their works and characters. But none of the three represents anything near Friel's best work. There is no escaping the fact that Performances is a discussion of ideas, not an embodiment of them through conflicts and relationships.
Director Patrick Mason attempts to compensate by staging the evening as entertainment rather than something to be taken too seriously, a largely successful task thanks to the extraordinary brio that the great Romanian actor Ion Caramitru brings to the central role. Caramitru plays the composer as wry, playful, and self-aware - he directs many of his best lines to the audience; his confidence and humour are marvellous to watch. Niamh Linehan fares remarkably well in the intense, potentially grating role of Ungrova; but having the four musicians also function as characters in the play never stops feeling like a slightly embarrassing conceit.
· Until October 25. Box office: 00 353 1 874 4045.
