DTF Irish Times reviews

Wannabe Deise

Irish Times reviews of DTF shows
IT won't object to them being reproduced as long as we are beind newspaper publication dates so I'll publish todays reviews tomorrow.
Cheers
WD



Long Day's Journey Into Night

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Patrick Lonergan - The Irish Times Saturday 22nd September 2007

Irish audiences should be very familiar with Eugene O'Neill's great autobiographical "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood". It received one of its earliest English-language productions at the Abbey in 1959, and has been an important part of our repertoire ever since. Yet under the direction of Garry Hynes, the play seems unsettlingly new again - at times feeling as sharp and surprising as a sudden slap in the face.

James Cromwell is cast as the patriarch, James Tyrone. His moral core has been worn away by the endless repetition of roles: loving husband, matinee idol, stern disciplinarian.

Tyrone's obsessions mirror those of contemporary Ireland. His fear of poverty means that he invests in property while neglecting his family's needs - and his tragedy is that he could have been great but chose to become wealthy.

But this play is not just about Ireland, and this production is not simply about Cromwell: he, Marie Mullen, Aidan Kelly, and Michael Esper deliver one of the finest ensemble performances I've seen on an Irish stage in years. As the Tyrone family, they act not as four individuals but as one deeply dysfunctional unit: they display astonishing levels of skill in mirroring each other's gestures, and in echoing each other's rhythm and tone.

Hynes's direction demands that we observe the pantomime of rebellion and resignation that the family members perform silently in response to each other.

And, as Francis O'Connor's set makes clear, these characters are constantly performing: a doorway becomes a proscenium arch, a light bulb becomes a spotlight, and the portrait of Shakespeare is positioned centre stage, as if sitting in judgment over actors and audience. The production thus becomes a painful stripping away of layers of performance: a process that is painful and demanding but, in the end, extraordinarily beautiful.


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Is This About Sex?
Half Moon,
Cork

Mary Leland - The Irish Times Wednesday 12th September 2007


Any play with a question in the title demands, or provokes, an answer. In the case of Rough Magic's Is This About Sex? the answer is that it's not about anything much really, although what the Americans call "giving head", or what is clinically described as cunnilingus would seem to be an issue in what nobody at all would call a plot.

Writer Christian O'Reilly gathers five people - one of whom is almost totally superfluous - to discuss in a series of pairings the sexual enjoyment they all seem to be missing. Or maybe, gathering a few stray clues, the superfluous role bravely taken on by Ruth Hegarty is there to show what it is to be without sexual enjoyment of any kind, but this is not necessarily the case in a piece of writing which, while slick and conversationally adroit, never, well, never climaxes.

No one in the cast goes wrong, but no one is challenged either and the players stroll comfortably through exchanges which may, or may not, argue in favour of greater sexual understanding of oneself and others.

A loving husband wants to dress and feel like a woman; the shop assistant who helps him buy lingerie has never heard of padded bras, which is why he stuffs this garment with socks. (There may be some significance in this as men have been known before now to have an intimate relationship with socks - but then again, maybe not.)

The shop assistant is bored by her partner who tries to woo her by adopting the tactics of a cave-man, the only role model he can find.

The husband's wife is bored by everyone, and the single really active ingredient in this scenario is the bed itself, which is pulled out and pushed back in Paul O'Mahony's clever set.

The feeling is that O'Mahony is the only one who knew what he was doing with this script; certainly costume designer Breege Fahy

decided to take the surreal approach, at one point dressing the bisexual husband in clothes which might have been worn by a clerical refugee from the French revolution.

Plus socks.

The great disappointment of this production is that the play seems to have drifted past director Lynn Parker.

No energy has been invested and nothing is generated. Whatever potential it may have had is allowed dribble into impotence.

Runs Oct 1-13 at the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, for the Dublin Theatre Festival


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The Pride of Parnell Street
The Tivoli

Peter Crawley

If pride comes before a fall, Sebastian Barry's new play asks whether it can ever again be regained. A drama that is as much about Dublin as it is about Janet and Joe, the inner-city husband and wife torn apart by the death of a child and domestic violence, it traces the moment where the rot set in to Italia '90. The Irish World Cup campaign may have accompanied the dawn of prosperity and national optimism, but, the extraordinary Mary Murray asks, "did we ever score a goal?"

That's an unsettling idea to extend to the confidence and wealth of the nation in the years to follow, as though the country's success is another series of flukes which will prove just as vulnerable. Not that Janet and Joe have shared in that fortune. Joe is a "midday man", a petty thief who rises late and steals from cars. If the World Cup was a bread and circus distraction, its end unleashes a violence in the frustrated male and sets the narrative of Fishamble's considered production in motion.

That Joe and Janet separate early, their paths barely crossing in the 10 years the play traces (the characters speak to us, in interweaving monologues, on the cusp of the millennium), in some way justifies the rather stale monologue format. Barry uses the form, rather than enhances or subverts it, and although director Jim Culleton can't disguise a distracting similarity to Eugene O'Brien's Eden, for instance, a more sinking idea may be that the monologue - the dramatic form of isolation or solipsism - is now the natural method to discuss our country and our time.

Joe's isolation - in prison, in drug-abuse, in hospital - is marvellously evoked by Karl Shiels, who spits out the irony of the term "inner-city" as a man who feels perennially on the outside. If Murray is fantastic for the worry in her words and her guarded good spirit, Shiels is compelling for his earthy humour and deep self-loathing. Yet the role of the audience is less considered. The fundamental question of every monologue play is never answered: what - or who - compels these characters to speak?

If that compounds the feeling that this is a well-told story with nothing particularly new to say, there are consequences too for the dark nostalgia of a memory play. Janet's late recollections of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, after a catalogue of traumas, feel more tacked on than a repressed memory. And, without budging beyond 2000, the play takes no pride inthe culturally transformed Parnell Street of today. There is, nonetheless, a moving history of heartbreak and Sabine Dargent's rusted set and watery details underline the corrosion and possible redemption of a love, and a city, torn asunder.
Until Sat, Oct 6


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Hibiki
Gaiety Theatre

Sara Keating


Butoh is a Japanese performance art that emerged in the wake of the atomic bombs that laid waste to the civilian landscape in the second World War. In Hibiki, Japan's foremost Butoh group, Sankai Juku, present a post-apocalyptic vision that evokes the devastation of the post-war world, both in its dusty, spare aesthetic and its strange other-worldly tone.

The ensemble of six, each stripped to the waist and whitened from head to toe, perform their "dance of darkness" on an expanse of thin sand. Under Ushio Amagatsu's superb lighting design (realised with spot-on specificity by Satoru Suzuki) glass bowls placed around the space become pools of water rippling with the suggestion of life. Meanwhile, an evocative original soundtrack evolves from a single repeated piano note that sounds like rain falling to a full symphonic composition for piano and strings.

The dancers' movements are so fluid that at times it almost seems like they are not moving at all. As they curl and unfurl foetal figures in the sand in the opening and closing moments of the piece, it could be the discs of light slowly spinning as much as the dancers. Postures are held for extended moments of meditation, both for the performers who are always building energy for their next movement, and for the audience forced to contemplate their stilled somatic sculptures.

Evolving in the same post-war climate, it seems unsurprising that so many of these composite stage pictures recall strikingly images from Beckett's plays; an interesting way in which Eastern and Western theatre traditions might find common ground. Many elements of Butoh's austere aesthetic have also been absorbed into international theatre training and performance since the 1960s, and as a result Hibiki's use of Butoh in its purest form loses some of its dramatic effect. But there is still much that is strange and fascinating in Sankai Juku's 90-minute piece.

Hibiki unfolds in six scenes, whose themes suggest a progression into darkness and a return to light. However, it would be futile to try and extract any concrete narrative from the dance. It seems to find meaning in movement alone.


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bobrauschenbergamerica
Project Arts Centre

Fintan O'Toole

Titles can be telling. If the style of this one, with its lower-case lettering and pushed-together words seems redolent of an outdated idea of what is hip and happening, the signal is not altogether misleading. bobrauschenbergamerica, written by Charles Mee and directed by Anne Bogart, had its premiere a few months before 9/11. So much has happened since that, for all its moments of brilliance, the show's kooky, nostalgic, indulgently optimistic take on the US seems strangely out of synch with the times. What might have felt refreshingly innocent before 9/11 or defiantly celebratory in its immediate aftermath now seems redolent of that most distant of times - the recent past.

This is, in part, a matter of style as well as content. Bogart is a key figure in American theatre, and her SITI company, which brings both this show and Radio Macbeth to the festival, has rooted itself in a collaborative, experimental and multi-disciplinary aesthetic utterly at odds with the blandness of Broadway. But the downside of such a position can be a reliance on energy over focus, on creativity over structure, on inspired improvisation over clarity of purpose.

Such an approach tends to be at its most potent when it rubs up against a robust text, and Bogart's take on Macbeth will be an interesting test of this proposition. But when the text is also loose and improvised, the absence of tension can be problematic. This can work the other way around too. Charles Mee's work with the choreographer Martha Clark on Vienna Lusthaus 20 years ago produced an electrifying mix of openness and rigour. But his approach and Bogart's are perhaps too similar to generate the friction that really makes sparks fly.

Bobrauschenbergamerica is an attempt to reproduce in theatrical form the world of the great visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose dynamic eclecticism involves the conjunction of created and found objects. The idea is to create a play as Rauschenberg "might have conceived it had he been a playwright". It is a notion that verges on the meaningless, implying as it does that the nature of an artistic impulse can be separated from the form in which it is expressed. But if such a thing were possible it would have to translate the artist's technique of collage - in which all the disparate elements appear to the view at the same time - into the theatrical form of a kaleidoscope, in which they follow each other in a sequence that achieves some kind of unity.

In fact, the piece remains very much a collage, not least because Mee is interested in patchwork texts that incorporate whole chunks of other texts, in this case using passages by Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, William S Burroughs, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and others. These are thrown on to a canvas that includes a gently deranged housewife (the charming Kelly Maurer) as Rauschenberg's mother, a woman in a 1960s bikini, a girl on roller skates, a tramp who lives in a cardboard box, a pair of gay men with ambitions to become chicken farmers, a rough trucker, a squabbling, on-again, off-again couple and a Domino's pizza delivery man.

Some of the individual images are superb. Ellen Lauren's way of eating a cake to assuage her emotional distress is worth the price of admission. A sequence that uses the sounds of space travel to counterpoint the journey across the stage of a man in a chicken suit rises to the level of genuine absurdity. Gian-Murray Gianino's pizza man, recounting his career as a triple murderer, is chilling and hilarious at the same time. There is a memorable strangeness in the trucker and the girl in the bikini body-surfing in a giant martini. But without an overarching structure or a sense of urgency, these images are ditzy rather than disturbing. Rauschenberg knew how to put apparently disparate elements together and give the result the feeling of necessity. Here the conjunctions remain capricious and there is less to everything than meets the eye.


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Bistouri
The Ark

Sylvia Thompson

Bistouri, from Belgian company TOF Theatre, was first imagined as street theatre and you can see why as the entire show is performed inside a mobile operating theatre that would suit an outdoor setting well. The retired surgeon (a bespectacled ruddy-faced almost life-size puppet) has an array of rusted tools that are more like outmoded household gadgets than sterilised surgical instruments. However, he does have an endoscopic camera which relays on to a video screen the procedure he is carrying out on his patient.

To give details of what does emerge from the patient's insides would ruin the show for audiences this weekend but one can safely say that the puppet surgeon and his assistant (Maxime Durin) take revenge on one familiar fairytale character.

Aimed at seven-year-olds and over, Bistouri is unusual in both its subject matter and its style. Although only 50 minutes long, it was hard to keep focused on the operating procedure which really only got more interesting as the surprising contents of the patient's insides were revealed. Also, the idea of basing an entire children's show on a surgical procedure seemed quite bizarre to this reviewer. All in all, Bistouri represented an inauspicious start to this year's family season at the Dublin Theatre Festival and one hopes for a lighter touch in forthcoming productions.
Runs today and tomorrow at 1pm & 3pm in the Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin.

Wannabe Deise

Mondays' reviews:


Ivanov

O'Reilly Theatre

Social decline, spiritual malaise, soul-destroying tedium, cultural inertia, the allure of suicide - given the ingredients of Chekhov's first completed full-length play, is it any wonder that Katona József's production of Ivanov plays out with such hilarity? That hardly violates the spirit of Chekhov's original, its own manic-depressive tone conspicuous across his two versions: the first, written in two weeks, was subtitled "a comedy"; the second, completed two years later, "a tragedy". The real tone of Ivanov, as director Tamás Ascher adroitly recognises and still more impressively realises, is somewhere between the two.

The Hungarian ensemble, which last year brought us the anarchic absurdum of Rattledanddisappeared , this time pursues a piece of fluorescent naturalism, Chekhov's late 19th-century rural ennui transplanted to the drab and stripped interior of a Hungarian factory in the 1960s. It is not, one feels, an arbitrary transfer. Chekhov, a doctor turned writer, was prone to making diagnoses of his characters and his country, suggesting that the melancholy which subsumes Nikolai Ivanov was a Russian disease.

"While in western Europe people die because it is too cramped and suffocating to live, here they die because it is too wide to live," he wrote.

Designer Zsolt Khell certainly evokes agoraphobia - even when all 22 performers fill this draughty hall, it feels cavernous - but the allusions to a Hungary anaesthetised by the violent suppression of the 1956 revolution makes the atmosphere more heavy with stasis.

Here we discover Ernö Fekete as Ivanov, the inert intellectual mired in self-absorption and cruel indifference who, without prospects, achievements or motivation, proclaims himself dead at 30. If he is a naggingly familiar character, it is because Chekhov stresses that he is "a spineless Hamlet" (but throw in a tracker mortgage and he's most of the people I know). Loved by his consumptive, self-sacrificing wife (Ildikó Tóth), chided by her doctor, the unswervingly upright (and therefore oddly contemptible) Lvov, egged on by the gadabout Borkin (Ervin Nagy in a high-energy comic turn), and object of the young Sasha's misplaced desire (a striking Adél Jordán), Ivanov is the indulged centre of a play whose peripheries are always more intriguing.

That's why the production, which moves with a perfectly judged dizzy momentum, is at its best in the ensemble scenes. Here a rare sort of theatrical alchemy takes place: tedium becomes riveting. "God I'm bored! I'll die of it," exclaims Ági Szirtes in a fit of laughter during a birthday party so listless Ascher nudges it into almost hallucinogenic moments of absurdity.

It may err on the side of comedy - almost right up to the climax, pathos will always bow to bathos - yet the real achievement of this beautifully conceived Ivanov is to confront us with rootless souls, adrift and endlessly complaining, without apologising for their excesses, excusing their behaviour or dictating our response. Chekhov would be pleased with the results. You don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

Peter Crawley


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On the Case

George's Dock, IFSC

With its blend of digital technology and drama, On the Case is a wonderful example of how contemporary theatre can engage with a mass audience. Performed against an animated backdrop by four aerial acrobats, it trades on visual spectacle and physical skill for its effect, rather than storytelling. However, like all of the best drama - from the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to the work of Peter Brook - its coup de théâtre is its reliance, its insistence, on illusion. As the performers bounce off the digital backdrop, real life and virtual reality momentarily coalesce.

Carl Polke's original score and Dave Jones's animation combine to give a biff-bam Batman effect ( Batman the comic strip, not the film franchise), while the random PLAY conceit at the heart of the unfolding story makes the concept seem fresh, almost improvised, even on second viewing. At just 25 minutes long, it is also perfectly measured for an outdoor audience's attention span, not to mention engaging enough for those in the audience who would not be caught dead in a theatre.

As Ulster Bank's gift to the people of the city for Dublin Theatre Festival's 50th anniversary, this Legs on the Wall production works particularly well. However, ticketing the event seemed both unnecessary (you could see perfectly well from outside the arena area) and exclusionary (why ticket it at all if it is meant to be a piece of public art?). Evaluating numbers was most likely the logic behind the formalities. But, really, there's no way of measuring the delight on the faces of the pedestrians, the residents, the random revellers at George's Dock, who looked skyward and found themselves thrust into a thrilling fantasy, a virtual world of pure theatre. - Sara Keating

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Homeland

******* Theatre

Laurie Anderson's Homeland , a spoken-word and musical performance largely involved with addressing the supposedly changed landscape of American society and politics after 9/11, should be considered essential viewing for anyone who has spent the last six years in a coma.

Whether Anderson's floating poem, told in her trademark tone of aloof and arch tranquillity, which will forever resemble a slightly chattier version of HAL from 2001 , actually adds anything to the understanding of even lightly informed members of the human race is another matter.

Given that layers of cynicism have coated our sensibilities, so that terms such as security, freedom, terror and fear can be deployed only with hollow irony, Anderson's challenge is to find something new to say about the US, or at least to address these ideas with a fresh and bold perspective. Sadly, for all the beautiful, bare aesthetic of her stage, where lightbulbs hang so low they graze the ground and nightlights form flickering constellations upon the floor, the design of her performance never seems quite so considered.

"Let me blow up your churches," she growls over a pulse of burbling electronica, which alternately surges and subsides. "Let me blow up your mosques . . . Let me blow them all to hell as I'm ringing freedom's bell."

It's hardly Byzantine in its subtlety. By the time we have heard similarly caustic but depthless remarks about rigged elections and weapons inspectors (and who mentions them any more?), there is a weary sensation that Anderson, once so challengingly opaque, is simply leading the choir and leaving nothing to our imaginations.

Does the music redeem the exhausted sentiments? There is certainly a compelling groove to a lot of these compositions. Only an Expert , a rather facile assembly of sub-Chomsky media criticism, has a bracing restlessness and stop-start rhythm, but when Anderson leads her quartet into more pleasingly mystifying pieces rooted in the personal rather than the political, the violin, cello, saxophone and keyboards become more dangerous and unrestrained; still blowing things to hell, but actually ringing freedom's bell. -

Peter Crawley



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Kebab

Project Cube

A man and a woman sit suspended in mid-air, their legs dangling in the freefall vacuum of black space around them. In this opening image of Kebab , her Irish debut, Gianina Carbunariu deliberately sets her characters adrift. Kebab is about rootlessness, the quest for a new life, and the fluidity of identity. It is that familiar story of the homelessness of home, and inescapable tribal relationships. But this is a play about a new generation of emigrants.

The opening scene, of course, takes place on an aircraft, that short-hand signifier for globalisation. Maddy is travelling to Ireland to meet her boyfriend, Voicu, who has "actually been Irish for over a year". She is moving there to a better life, a life where if "you work hard and stuff, they really appreciate you". Maddy is willing to work hard. In fact, she's willing to put up with anything as long as she doesn't have to go home: be that working in a kebab shop, prostituting herself, being beaten by her boyfriend and her new lover, or having it filmed for a porn site that specialises in sexploitation.

Unfolding on Simon Daw's tiny constructed stage space, Orla O'Loughlin's production is all overlapping limbs and intermingling bodies, forcing the characters, sandwiched together on a tiny couch, into an uncomfortable, inescapable intimacy. Philip Gladwell's stripped lighting design gives a seedy air to the atmosphere, which darkens and darkens as the play moves along.

Carbunariu's use of bite-sized scenes lends an immediacy to the fast-paced unfolding of events. Yet while this flash-form might be an appropriate structure for the fast-food generation, it allows little room for the characters to develop, or for the actors (Sam Crane, Matti Houghton and Laurence Spellman) to develop their characters.

Kebab's real problem, however, is its sexual politics, which pit the teenage Maddy against two domineering men who routinely abuse her. Perhaps Maddy's casual acceptance of this hierarchy is supposed to draw our attention to the exploitation of women, but instead the audience is asked to be complicit in it; to accept, like the half-naked Maddy on stage, that the power games are all part of what a woman (though she's still a girl, really, isn't she?) has to put up with in order to get on in life. - Sara Keating

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Reggie Watts

The New Theatre

What connects the tamed chaos of jazz, the nerve-fraying uncertainty of the extemporary speaker and the enthralling speed of a lightning wit? The answer is, surely, Reggie Watts.

A gentle bear of a man with sympathetic features, the comedian and musician operates from somewhere beneath an enormous afro that resembles an explosion in freeze-frame. Combined with the extraordinary freefall of his imagination, it reminds you of that line about hair being our antennae to the cosmos - although Watts is so off the wall you imagine he's hooked up to the thing by Ethernet.

Anyone born in Germany to a French mother and brought up, peripatetically, through jazz programmes and various musical groups across the US, knows the potential and pitfalls of language. The consequence is that Watts has become fluent in both music and nonsense."I'd like to begin," he says, in a seductive voice of smooth authority, "by starting . . ."

Presenting this night as though it were a college lecture, a poetry recital or a product launch, he will improvise ceaselessly under the comic gambit that everything is going according to plan. It isn't. There are few things funnier or fizzier than someone pretending to be in control while everything around collapses, but the old cliche - "you had to be there" - has never been so apt. Watts's comedy is borne of the moment. It dies on record or in print.

What is most troubling about him, though, is his music. Created a cappella on a looping station, with which he layers beatbox, soulful warbles, raps, ragas or, in one inspired moment, the sounds of hard-shoe tap dancing, Watts's instant compositions are throwaway gags - as dispensable as his surreal, capricious riffs on the Dublin Theatre Festival or the menu of a video projector. The thing is, they also happen to be great.

I've paid good money to TV on The Radio, The Roots and even Prince for similar pleasures, although none of the above ever sent me spinning into the night singing the oddly consoling chorus of Pterodactyl of Dublin , a song as special and unrepeatable as the show, warping in memory, never to be heard again.

Peter Crawley

Wannabe Deise

Wednesday's reviews


James, Son of James

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

Following the extraordinary - and almost wordless - Giselle, a darkly twisted, yet spectacularly beautiful Irish reworking of the classic ballet, and then The Bull, a splenetic and crude updating of An Táin, it has become hard to second-guess the eclectic and erratic work of director Michael Keegan Dolan.

Now comes the final part of his Midlands Trilogy for Fabulous Beast, one that is coy with its textual allusions, grasping occasionally at the thematic threads of the previous productions, but more recognisable for the dance theatre company's wayward idiosyncrasies than any satisfying display of its capabilities. Relying heavily on a dialogue drained of nuance and a less-than-subtle scenario ("plot" doesn't seem quite right) which could have been improvised to illustrate a Sunday school lesson, it largely neglects the transcendent powers of movement and thickens the suspicion that the company has thrown the dance out with the bathwater.

Following a long absence, James (Emmanuel Obeya) returns to Rathmore for his father's funeral, finding a town which - to judge from the white pine housing facade of Merle Hensel's design and the choreographed slapstick of an amusing opening scene - is currently under construction. What is buried in the community's foundations comes in gentle suggestions: a local politician resembles a ventriloquist's dummy for his iron-willed wife; a possibly suicidal young girl lives a possibly unhealthy life with her comically bandaged father; a policeman and his wife cannot conceive; a doctor smells funny, and so on.

This Anytown panoply of quirks and kooks, brightly costumed and lit with store-display brightness, may seek to widen the definitions of Irish society (something the international cast already do neatly), but it ends up looking like imported American schmaltz. The music, in which characters routinely sing the music-box melodies and sweetly depressive lyrics of Californian band the Eels (to the extent that the play resembles a jukebox musical), clinches it: We're not in the midlands anymore.

Within this community, an otherworldly, beatific figure resurrects the dead, performs miracles and immeasurably improves the lot of the female population, but is ultimately persecuted for the failings of a community. James is, then, an allusion to either the story of Christ or Edward Scissorhands. Whatever the archetype, the play (written by the company) still lacks a sturdy framework - as though the carpentry of the set would lend it some structure - and moves to an abrupt conclusion without foreshadowing or tragic momentum.

When it occasionally resorts to dance - measured out in duets of sometimes exquisite, sometimes ribald sexually- charged duets - you get a glimmer of the physical strength of the company. To have relegated such talents in favour of misfiring semiotics (the climax, with its religious persecution/lynch mob overtones, is less provocative than troublingly misconceived), meandering plot and confused social comment leaves us instead with just a fitful musical and a garbled message. Until Oct 13

Peter Crawley

Traces

******* Theatre, Dublin

Circus has left the tent, acquired the word "new" and now slaps it out on stage with more traditional theatrical forms. Some shows have retained the virtuosity and immediacy of the ring and metamorphosed into riveting theatrical experiences. Traces isn't one of them.

It tries hard. It offers the affected drama of a countdown towards impending doom, get-to-know-us personal stats and a self-consciously junk-strewn stage. But behind the stylising, the show is just about tricks.

The five acrobats arrive in a tumble and begin throwing themselves around the stage, spinning off another's crouched back or stepping on to clenched hands before being thrown into a somersault. Although the staging and the physicality aspires to fringe more than mainstream, there is no real edge, and it feels like middle-class kids trying to act tough. After this frenetic and physical opening, the pace is slowed by a series of set-pieces with skateboards, vertical poles and giant hoops, all loosely stitched together by a reflection on how we can make our mark on society. These traces range from the dull - a cringing mock TV quiz show - to the exhilarating, such as a breathtaking series of stunts on two vertical poles where gravity is truly defied as bodies leap one-handed and stop their descents inches from the floor.

At these times, Traces adopts a more presentational style. It's what the five performers seem happiest performing and, judging by the Pavlovian applause, what the audience want most. The finale is a series of hoop-jumping stunts, where the tension is built up by a recorded heartbeat rather than rolling drum. Hoops are piled higher on other hoops rather like a puissance, but unfortunately came tumbling down as quickly.

As this final set of tricks began to go awry, there was at last some real drama: one trick didn't work and another made it on the third attempt. Ironically, it was as this gloss faded that the audience most bonded with the performers, and we cheered loudest when success followed failure. Until Oct 6

Michael Seaver





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Yesterday's reviews.

Uncle Vanya

Gate Theatre

Great playwrights don't always make the best adaptors of great plays. They tend to translate the work as if they had written it themselves: Brecht's version of Riders to the Sea, for instance, reads as if Synge had written a Brecht play. But Brian Friel, in his version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, first produced at the Gate in 1998, did something startlingly different. He wrote it as if it were not a Chekhov play or a Friel play, but a Samuel Beckett play. Such is Friel's unerring touch that this bold move seems not just proper but utterly inevitable.

The reach from Beckett back to Chekhov is not so far, after all. Both give us people enduring in an entropic universe where politics and religion have lost their power to provide meaning. And Friel makes the connection, not through any radical changes in the mechanics of the play, but through his superb control of mood and tone. He pares the language down and cuts away all the fusty classicism that clings to literal translations. Where, for example, Vanya, in a standard translation, tells Elena that the blood of water nymphs runs through her veins, Friel has him call her a mermaid and urge her to take the plunge. But Friel also uses Beckett's tone to give us a humour that does not descend into farce and a sorrow that is not mere melancholy.

Staging Friel's version demands a certain reticence on a director's part, a recognition that the work of interpretation has already been done in the language and that the job at hand is to fully inhabit its nuances. Robin Lefevre's elegant production does just that. It is brilliantly cast, from Stella McCusker's serenely resigned Marina to Anthony Calf's perfect blend of charisma and self-loathing as Astrov, from Tom Hickey's touchingly absurd Telegin to Catherine Walker's icy Elena, and from John Kavanagh's pompous, self-pitying Serebryakov to Cathy Belton's movingly yearning Sonya. And at its core it has a career-defining performance from Owen Roe as Vanya, who uses his bear-like physicality to prise open a tender fragility, making each quality hold the other in check.

It would be interesting to see the stringency of Friel's text given a less opulently beautiful setting than Liz Ascroft creates. And it is possible to quibble with some decisions in the production: Astrov's lusty embrace of Elena in the last act, for example, is at odds with the resigned mood that Chekhov and Friel create. But this is in general an enthralling production that melts away the century that separates us from Uncle Vanya and gives us both its poise and its immediacy.

Until Oct 13

Fintan O'Toole


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BLACKland

O'Reilly Theatre

BLACKland is a metaphor for the modern world, a world full of corruption, murder, child abuse, suicide, violence, pollution and war. It is a world where the ridiculous is real and real life is absurd. The Krétakör company's uncompromising vision is as uncomfortable and as compelling as such a paradox will allow.

BLACKland was devised by the Hungarian company from a series of news headlines received by director Árpád Schilling on his mobile phone over the course of six months. These headlines are displayed to the audience on a screen as text messages. They encompass statistics about Hungarian poverty, the rate of abortion, state-sanctioned neo-Nazi activities, and the actions of Hungary's army in Iraq. These headlines prompt and structure the chaotic scenes that unfold in the 90-minute performance.

In the clinical white light of a maternity ward (designed by Márton Ágh) the 13 elegantly dressed actors give birth to a world that burns visceral images on the brain. Many of these scenes are difficult to watch: the humiliation of naked men; the torture of prisoners; the violence that women will perpetrate against themselves before it is visited upon them.

Punctuating the often-disturbing scenes are choral harmonies, catchy rap rhythms, and popular songs, whose familiar upbeat tempos create a jarring juxtaposition that goes some way towards deflating an audience's discomfort, even with the dark, rewritten lyrics.

For some, this constant assault upon their senses and sensibilities might be disquieting, gratuitous, even offensive. For others, it is strangely hilarious. However, there is a particular moment towards the end of the play when the profound political purpose behind BLACKland reaches out to the audience on a personal level. But it is not when a cast member brings up the lights and proceeds to explain and interpret the "random dramaturgy" for the audience (and most especially, one has to laugh, for the critic).

It is when one of the ensemble asks an audience member to film him torturing three men, while a musician singing a rousing nursery rhyme asks us to join in. It is in this uncomfortable moment that the audience is forced to recognise its own complicity: its willingness to sit back and laugh at humanity's cruelty, to applaud violence, to clap along as a man is castrated. It is for this forced recognition that BLACKland is a truly remarkable and profoundly political piece of theatre. It is difficult but essential viewing. Until Sun

Sara Keating


******************************

Radio Macbeth

Project Arts Centre

Some plays stay with you, their memories growing both more vivid and distended, yet never loosening their hold. For Anne Bogart, director of New York's SITI, one suspects that Macbeth is such a play. "The experience was frightening but compelling," she once wrote of seeing it as a school kid. "I didn't understand the play, but I knew instantly that I would spend my life in pursuit of this remarkable universe." Why that journey has led her ensemble to an American radio studio, circa 1940, for what seems to be a rehearsal of the play (without a director), materialising in the semi-darkness, is not immediately apparent. But if life is a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing, the acute silence that begins this production - charging the atmosphere rather than deadening the air - sharpens our attention for what's to come.

As the actors take the space, clattering from backstage, locating their prompt books and rehearsing their own tensions, the universe of Macbeth is suggested not through specifics of the stage - which is almost bare - but in the wide-open space. Every Shakespeare play is a palimpsest, its performances inscribed and roughly erased in our minds, but in its sepia tones and self-reflexive wiliness, Radio Macbeth encourages us to mingle our memories with our present, watching both like a double exposure.

Bogart is clearly playing games with the theatre: her actors are playing actors playing characters. The squabbling, competition and ambitions that flare between the members of the radio troupe not only refract the concerns of Macbeth, but also, you suspect, those of SITI's ensemble. That might seem dreadfully self-involved, were it not for the fact that, following last week's bobrauschenbergamerica, festival junkies may already feel a relationship with these fine performers.

Ellen Lauren assays both her lead actress and Lady Macbeth roles with icy composure and gradually fraying nerves, while Will Bond, playing a boozy ham with his eye on the lead role, underscores the politics of the text. Stephen Webber is solid and still as Macbeth, often held in a frozen spotlight, delivering his speeches with clarity but not conviction. Intriguingly, in a production of artifice, it is Kelly Maurer as all three witches, stirring a coffee cup rather than a cauldron, who seems truly in command.

For an experimental theatre company, SITI actually treats the text (edited down to 90 minutes or so) with more reverence than the production. The stage devices, for instance, are inconsistent: if the actors produce all sound effects, from tolling bells to clashing swords, Darron L West's soundtrack is a distraction.

Bogart never maps out the universe of Macbeth, but she opens our ears to its echoes. In a radio studio, at least, sound and fury signify everything. Until Sat

Peter Crawley

******************************

Minor Matters

The Ark

By choosing to have the audience seated behind the stage curtain just inches from the performance space, Junges Ensemble Stuttgart from Germany created an intimate setting for the second show in the family season of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Right from the start, the Swiss actor and musician Peter Rinderknecht engaged his young audience with the same superb subtlety that he displayed in Portofino Ballade, his wonderful show about a father and son performed in the Ark in 2004.

This time, the story is about a farmer, and Rinderknecht asks the children in the audience to help him decide what animals and tools he needs for the unsophisticated farm he creates inside his accordion box. Rinderknecht continues to engage the children admirably as he asks them to make animal sounds and then later chooses names of children in the audience for his wife and the three children they have. The real beauty of Minor Matters comes both from Rinderknecht's skills as a storyteller and his slightly disrespectful way of connecting with the children in the audience.

The story ends sadly, as the farmer's wife and children leave him to go to live in the town, and the farmhouse is destroyed in a fire. Rinderknecht himself becomes the homeless man and we realise that's who he was at the start of the play. "Is that story about you?," one child asks in astonishment, so convinced is he by the tale. But rather than leaving the young audience depressed, this talented and sensitive actor manages to invoke in this sophisticated young audience a sense of sympathy towards others.

Sylvia Thompson

Wannabe Deise

Friday's review:

The Playboy of the Western World at Abbey Theatre is reviewed by Peter Crawley

The Playboy of the Western World

Abbey Theatre

Spot the difference: "Didn't I know rightly I was handsome, though it was the divil's own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow".

Now this: "I always knew it - there was something wrong with that mirror back home. It was cursed." The first quote, of course, comes from Christy Mahon, bitterly erasing his past with the intoxication of a new image, created with stories and fine words. The second is Christopher Malomo, a Nigerian asylum seeker in present-day Dublin, whose story and transformation - though relocated from a shebeen in the wilds of Mayo to a grimy gangland pub - are essentially the same, but whose words fall with the dull thud of a literal translation.

Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun's adaptation of JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, energetically directed by Jimmy Fay, makes for a hugely entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny and superbly acted piece of theatre. I really think you'd like it. And yet it should be more.

The updating, designed one suspects to make the story more accessible, actually makes the play feel less limber. Every new feature comes weighted with explanation: Christopher's refugee status, the political situation of Nigeria, what a pestle is, Michael's criminality, the Widow Quin's mystery, how one buries a story in the age of Google. And such is Playboy's familiarity that this production's emphasis on the alien other and celebrity culture don't compare well to recent investigations by Pan Pan or Druid. The sacrifice of lyricism for funny yet disposable punch lines, however, holds greater consequences.

There is, however, a complete poetry in performance. For all the sweet command of Giles Terera's Christopher, Lawrence Kinlan's timorous Shawneen, the edgy comedy of Liam Carney's Michael (flanked by the excellent Joe Hanley and Phelim Drew), or the shrieking excitement of the girls (Kate Brennan, Aoife Duffin and Charlene Gleeson, whose camera phones supply one of the adaptation's wittiest updates) the play, like Christopher, will always be fought over by Pegeen and the Widow Quin.

Angeline Ball, all hips and lips in a velour tracksuit, plays Quin like a black widow, two parts pin-up to one part Catherine Nevin, and now that she's finally back on the stage, nobody should let her leave it. The peerless Eileen Walsh, with a perfectly horrible dye job, approaches Pegeen with such deft consideration she makes every line sound better than it is.

But, more consumer than commander, her part - and the play - are diminished.

The stunning moment that forces Christopher's parricidal admission is simply missing. Her pivotal, brutal leg-burning attack becomes a cigarette burn to the ass. Her last line is a total cop-out. "Well, the heart's a wonder," she says in one lovely echo of the original, but the writers again lose their nerve: "My granny used to say that." There's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed, as my granny used to say, and without that music we are left with an entertaining and enjoyable story, but one that never grows in the retelling.

Until November 24th

© 2007 The Irish Times

Wannabe Deise

Yesterday's reviews:


Small metal objects

Mayor Square, IFSC

"I want people to see me," says Steve. "I want to feel like a full human being." That his words come during the archly involving and deftly moving small metal objects, a show that conspires to keep him concealed from view (for the longest stretch imaginable) in the lunchtime bustle of the IFSC, raises questions about visibility and value in a world of conspicuous consumption.

We could call this performance a piece of street theatre, without serious contradiction, partly because it has a guerrilla approach of planting its action, unnoticed, in a public space - but mainly because it makes that space seem as elegant and considered as a stage. Given that this space is the IFSC, which could not look more impermanent if its buildings were inflatable, that's no small achievement.

But if there is a voyeuristic frisson in this arrangement, where you spend at least half the time shamelessly watching passers-by, there is a satisfying feeling that the audience itself is also a public spectacle, sitting in a temporary auditorium, plugged into headphones, which relay the devised dialogue over Hugh Covil's atmospheric sound design, while receiving myriad double-takes and bemused stares from loitering students and transiting financiers.

The brilliance of director Bruce Gladwin's deceptively simple piece for Back to Back Theatre is that this context actually reinforces, rather than distracts from, the play. Within an almost Beckettian situation of gently absurd dialogue and comfortable silences, Gary (Sonia Teuben) and Steve (Simon Laherty) pass the time discussing roast chicken, relationships, fear, and that old Australian staple, mateship. They could be straight out of Waiting for Godot - had Beckett's tramps also been drug dealers.

When Steve has a "metaphysical meltdown", a deal sours with a narcotic-needy legal executive (Jim Russell) and, later, his hectoring superior, a drippingly insincere corporate psychologist (Genevieve Picot). Gary's refusal to budge, to capitulate, to deal with the couple, underscores the lingering and affecting paradox of this riveting show.

Gary and Steve may seem otherworldly, but not for their stillness amid freneticism, or for the fact that they are played by two actors with intellectual disabilities, but rather because, in a world where everything has its market value, their friendship proves non-negotiable.

Until Fri

Peter Crawley

Private Peaceful

The Ark

Tommo Peaceful, an exuberant, sweetly passionate and lovelorn 16-year-old Devon lad, goes into town one day on an errand for his employer, a local farmer, and meets his fate: scarlet-coated soldiers, a brass band and a persuasive recruitment sergeant.

It is 1916, and within this bloody and sorrowful year Tommo would meet his death. Courtmartialled for cowardice, the boy would die by a dawn firing squad for refusing to obey an order that would have meant certain and futile death, and for refusing to leave his dying brother on the battle field.

Based on the award-winning book of the same name by the third British children's laureate, Michael Morpurgo, this was a heartbreaking tale convincingly and beautifully rendered by Scamp Theatre, in association with Bristol Old Vic, and featured a physically dynamic and moving solo performance from Alexander Campbell as the eponymous Peaceful.

The Ark's young audience (the play is correctly recommended for nine-year-olds and upwards) appeared wholly engaged for the 75 minutes of this emotionally demanding show - one that, refreshingly, did not spoon-feed its viewers or sweeten its intent.

A lively adaptation by the show's director, Simon Reade, enabled Morpurgo's lyricism and delicacy to shine through, while never allowing the story to loosen its grip, or Campbell's immense energy to slacken. The haunting descriptions of sodden, rat-infested trenches, of body lice and corrosive gases, of corpses flailed by wire and the bitter, casual cruelties of the young recruits' superiors, seemed to pull its young audience in by their trainer laces. And, as the desperate futility of the Great War pounded down like relentless rain on a pitted field in France, one felt The Ark and her cargo of young minds lifted in a rising tide of understanding and empathy. This solidly intelligent, decisive, and slickly uncompromising piece of work is just what a young theatre audience needs and deserves. The only disappointment is that the show ran for a mere two performances.

Hilary Fannin

© 2007 The Irish Times

Wannabe Deise

Yesterday's reviews ...

The Seagull

Project Cube

Rules were made to be broken, but what if they were already kaput to begin with? "I am writing it with some pleasure," Chekhov confessed of his most nakedly autobiographical work, "although I do awful things to the laws of the stage." Árpád Schilling's shockingly - and uncharacteristically - bare production of The Seagull , then, may seem unconventional, performed in plain clothes with no set, while a harsh light illuminates both the actors and audience, obliterating the distance between us. But if this is deconstruction, Chekhov is the deconstructionist. His play is as much a portrait of lives and loves unfulfilled as it is a mordant comment on the theatre, where new forms are constantly demanded, while old forms continue to crush them.

It would be nice to report that Krétakör's bold approach had thus brought The Seagull back to itself. But for all the bracing intensity and intimacy of the experience, and for all the dividends that its rigorous ensemble work yields in the evocation of characters, it comes off as a triumph of dramaturgy over drama.

When the characters convene for the ill-fated staging of the experimental play of young writer Trepliov (Zsolt Nagy), for instance - which here literally goes up in smoke - the isolation of a rural estate is supplanted by the airlessness of an actors' studio. The seagull, always a rather clunky symbol, now becomes an unapologetic prop, flung around in feathery eruptions. But although the actors sit among us, regarding and responding to each other's performances, their private tragedies are still more affecting for their minute details. Emotions are registered with a dart of the eye or a sideways glance, as though this was more like camera acting than a meta-theatrical device.

As Masha, who we first meet "in mourning" for her life, Lilla Sárosdi is all the more tragic for her tamped-down delivery. Eszter Csákányi is balanced on the edge of hysteria as her monstrous prima donna, Arkadina, slowly unravels. And though each character essentially operates in their own little bubble, Annamária Láng's Nina is particularly striking in her transition from ingenue to fallen woman.

A neurotic, self-critical look at the act of artistic creation, the play can make a production seem bleakly fretful, particularly when Schilling forfeits the counter-balance of absurd comedy. "Never a single living character," scoffs one character about another's writing, but that sums up everyone in the play. The pistol shot of Chekhov's ending may never come, but, wearing as it can be, the production recognises that it never needs to. - Peter Crawley

• Finishes Sun.

Fragments

Tivoli Theatre

The coming together of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett brings to mind the meeting of the immovable force and the irresistible object. Though they share much - Brook's famous "empty space" is that inhabited by Beckett's characters - they also represent in some respects opposite ends of a spectrum of late 20th-century theatre. Beckett's is the ultimate writer's theatre - his texts make meticulous demands for performance, lighting, design, tone, mood, pace. Brook, on the other hand, is the great figurehead of the actor's and director's theatre, in which everything must emerge from the rehearsal process. Yet, as so often in the theatre, friction generates electricity.

Brook works here with three of the key figures from the great London-based physical theatre company Complicite: Jos Houben, Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni. They perform five short Beckett pieces: Rough for Theatre I; Rockaby ; the mime play Act Without Words II ; the very short text Neither , handwritten by Beckett on the back of a postcard; and the "dramaticule" Come and Go . All, significantly, are plays of movement and gesture, allowing Brook and the actors to explore the physical hinterland of the texts.

Even so, these are not faithful renditions of the master's intentions. The texts are followed, but the accompanying actions are changed, sometimes radically. In Act Without Words II , Brook adds jokes that are not in Beckett's text (each of the waking men spits into the sack in which the other man sleeps, for example) and plays up the contrast between the first man's miserable nature and the second's sunny disposition.

In Rough for Theatre I , Brook's interventions are as much about subtraction as addition. The suggestion in the stage directions that the set is "ruins" is pretty much ignored. The crippled man's wheelchair is suggested rather than clearly visible.

But there are also more jokes: the blind man's feeling of the crippled man's "torso" is much more explicitly directed towards his genitals. And there is more stage business: the blind man's wanderings take him off the stage at one point. The final image is much more explicit, and more violent, than Beckett's text seems to suggest.

Yet each of these versions crackles with theatrical life. Houben and Magni are wonderfully forceful and witty performers, and Brook's open approach allows them to fully inhabit the texts. Neither's status as a non-theatrical text allows Brook to imagine it virtually from scratch, which he, Hunter, and the brilliant lighting of Philippe Vialatte achieve with utter conviction.

The other two plays, however, give us the extremes of success and failure in Brook's approach to Beckett. His version of Come and Go , with Magni and Houben dressed as women, completely loses the hypnotic rhythm and strange beauty of the piece.

On the other hand, Hunter's mesmerising Rockaby is, in its way, no less radically interventionist, but is searingly effective. Brook completely changes the look and movement of the piece. There is no old lady in anachronistic evening gown and head-dress. There is, astonishingly, no rocker, just an ordinary kitchen chair. There is no recorded voice. Hunter stands and walks, playing out what is merely spoken in the text. It is all wrong, and all utterly, intensely moving. It is like Glenn Gould deciding that Mozart got his tempo wrong in some pieces, and playing it his own way instead. You have to be a genius to get away with it. As anyone lucky enough to see this show will be reminded, Brook is. - Fintan O'Toole

• Finishes Sun

The History Boys

******* Theatre

Alan Bennett's The History Boys comes to Dublin saturated in international tributes and awards, and it is easy to see why. It entertains and absorbs on many levels. On one it is a challenging analysis of the crudities and limitations of the conventional educational system; on another it is a sparkling collection of intellectual witticisms and duels. Its dialogue celebrates the colour and diversity of language; and there's much more.

The eight eponymous boys have just passed their A-levels in a public school, and are seeking admission to Oxford or Cambridge. To prepare for this they have three teachers: Hector, who teaches them to think and to hell with the syllabus; Mrs Lintott, a pragmatic, low-lying feminist; and Irwin, versed in the thought processes of their next examiners, which he teaches them to subvert. Above these there reigns a conservative, self-serving headmaster, who just wants results.

The surprising (to Irish ears and minds) sophistication of the boys leads them into witty and brash confrontation with their mentors. A current of homosexuality runs through it all, between the boys themselves and with their teachers. This often leads to deplorably hilarious exchanges and situations, a kind of leaven in the mix.

Hector, who makes routine passes at the boys, is discovered by the headmaster, who tries to use the situation to get rid of him. Irwin is drawn into a similar situation with one of his pupils, but is saved by the bell, or rather by a motorcycle accident. All the boys make it to Oxbridge, and a kind of coda tells how little difference it makes to their future lives. It is a credible note on which to close this brilliant, effervescent comedy, an exploration of a closed world prised open, and a metaphor for the larger world of which it is a subset.

Although the play's ambience and characters are quintessentially British, its multiple themes pass effortlessly across national borders to entertain and challenge. Brilliance such as this carries its own passport. - Gerry Colgan

• Ends Sat

Wannabe Deise

Gorgeous Morons. The New Theatre

Neither as gorgeous nor as moronic as you might have been led to believe, Bradford Scobie and Julie Atlas Muz's shambolic mini-burlesque represents the last wheeze of the "East of East Village" strand of the Dublin Theatre Festival's dalliance with alternative cabaret.

On paper the whole thing looked so promising, daring to ask just what does it for knowing and jaded New York hipsters these days?

With the exception of Reggie Watts though, it has prompted the reply: surely not this.

Irony makes almost anything permissible, from an unpalatable political opinion to a deliberately weak gag, and that partly explains the vogue for throwback burlesque, a phenomenon which was surely exhausted when Dita Von Teese became a cover-girl or The Pussycat Dolls released a clothing line.

Here Atlas Muz will don any number of different scanty costumes in order to whip them off in precisely the same way (the strip tease, for all its implied raciness, is as formally staid as a funeral rite), while the night moves haphazardly along with the stand-up shtick of Scobie, whose genuine wits only shine though in his adlibs. He also strips, but, unlike Muz - whose body we come to know better than our own - he holds a little something back.

The performance clearly has a specific audience in mind, something Scobie acknowledges, with good sense, by early explaining any US-specific references in his gags to come (thus killing those gags). But the show trades heavily on a twin fascination with, and revulsion from, the female form. At one point Atlas Muz appears on stage as a cow, marigold gloves dangling from her chest like udders, while at several stages a video shows her in extreme close-up, lip-syncing with campy songs - just not with her mouth.

Vaginal karaoke is a new one on me, and I can understand the walkouts from The New Theatre, but it was telling that Scobie seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction.

Maybe this never happens among the unshockable patrons of the Slipper Room. Here, however, as an over reliance on body shocks became indistinguishable from a lack of fresh ideas, it was hard to tell whether the fleeing punters were morally outraged or simply bored stupid. - Peter Crawley

Ends tonight (Saturday)

The Giraffe's Journey, The Ark

It may be true that a giraffe travelled from Africa to Paris in 1824, but it is only marginally relevant to this Italian comedy for children, by Roberto Abbiati. It takes place in a large black plastic tent, with a working wall at one end facing the audience. It is made of wood, and incorporates shelves, doors, ornaments and bric-a-brac.

These are required by the troupe of three eccentric comics led by Sir, a Groucho Marx specimen, with one henchman on the lines of Stan Laurel and the other a bulky, choleric individual.

They speak in a mixture of Italian and English, easy to understand. Sir is dressed in a dark suit, lacking undergarments beneath the jacket.

His helpers are in orange tops and bottoms, rather like unruly chef assistants.

We are told, mostly by Sir, of the giraffe's journey from Sudan via the Nile, Alexandria, Marseille and Paris. The real focus is, however, on the kind of slapstick enacted by the trio. They have a mock-break in the middle during which Sir goes in search of a shirt, and the burly chap tries to take up a personal collection for cigarettes, drink, etc.

Following that, a book goes on fire in the Alexandria Library, and just as Sir has beaten the flame out, the Laurel guy arrives and throws water over him; a hoary gag, but one that the young audience revelled in.

Towards the end, a little confusion ensues. Sir tells of the giraffe's death in Paris, but adds that it (she) has been mummified and may be seen by generations. But then the giraffe is revealed in a fridge, plaintively asking to be brought back to Africa.

It ends as the trio and their charge begin the journey in reverse.

More fun than faction, it is a novel entertainment for those aged over seven, which is really all that is required. - Gerry Colgan

Wannabe Deise

Woman and Scarecrow, Peacock Theatre

At bottom, nobody believes in their own death. Or, as Freud elaborated, in the unconscious everyone is convinced of their own immortality. This is why considerations of death on stage, in art, and even in thought, are something of an act, one where the person dying may still envisage the attendance at their funeral, say, or imagine the effect of their absence, rather than resign themselves to the void.

Death in Marina Carr's most recent play, which opened more than a year ago in the Royal Court and finally receives its Irish premiere under Selina Cartmell's striking direction, is an almost narcissistic conceit, where Woman, a mother of eight from a mythically sketched west of Ireland, separated from her home by her ill-fated, self-sacrificing love for a man, lies on her bed and views her impending demise as, variously, a chance to become epic, a form of revenge, or a killer look.

"There's not much about this century I'd go on bended knee to, but to its ideal of beauty I will," says Olwen Fouéré as Woman, admiring her self-image: emaciated, raven-haired, and dressed in sacrificial white. "I am graveyard chic." This, a rather good summation of the production, is imparted to Scarecrow, her polarised alter-ego played by Barbara Brennan, who just about saves this from becoming a monologue play. Costumed in gothic black, hair acid-blonde, her eyes concealed by enormous wraparound sunglasses, Scarecrow seems to divide her time between Conor Murphy's abstract, icy antechamber, and, I'm guessing, crowd scenes in The Matrix.

Woman's potential, we understand, has been suffocated by her domesticity and devotion to an adulterous husband, and her fondness for Mediterranean warbler Demis Roussos is clearly not her only connection to a Greek tragedy.

But, beyond the expected shades of Medea, Carr underscores Woman's banalities: only in death will she become "epic", and even that is a bitterly defined in reaction to Him. (Simon O'Gorman's Him, as fleshed out as a punching bag, is not only admonished continually from on high but forced to wear a mustard-yellow suit, presumably as an act of contrition.) Cartmell's production is certainly alive to Carr's dark vein of comedy, while Fouéré and Brennan are both excellent with their barbed interplay, but Bríd Ní Neachtain is so good as Auntie Ah, a stout, no-nonsense visitor who will not tolerate "this wilfull jaunt to your doom" that she almost threatens to derail the whole conceit.

Cartmell's real challenge here is to afford a tragic beauty to this self-absorbed prelude to death, and this she attempts with sly references to dance, visual art and opera. Her images, facilitated by Paul Keogan's sombre lights and reinforced by Denis Clohessy's unsettling sound compositions, are often extraordinary. But the final icon, though painstakingly realised, never quite connects with the play, and in its borrowed majesty there seems to be a tacit admission: that death is better represented elsewhere . - Peter Crawley

• Runs until November 10th

The Grand Inquisitor, Tivoli Theatre

Though it is embedded in a novel, the Grand Inquisitor section of Feodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has strongly dramatic elements. It is shaped, in a double sense, as an act of speech. The tale is told by Ivan, the religious doubter, to Aloysha, the trainee priest. And it consists very largely of a harangue delivered in 16th-century Seville by the head of the Spanish Inquisition to one of his prisoners - no less a figure than Christ himself, who has returned to disturb the settled order. Christ functions in the tale almost as a theatrical audience, silently watching and listening, a passive spectator until the very end, when he kisses the ancient cardinal on the lips and departs without speaking.

Making this passage into a convincing piece of theatre is, nevertheless, no easy task. Taken out of context, it lacks the resonance with the lives of the characters that it has in the novel. That other dimension has to be supplied from somewhere else. In the theatre, which happens in the here-and-now, that context is always the present. The Inquisitor's speech has to be brought alive in our own moment of time. And that comes down above all to performance. In Peter Brook's masterly production of Marie Helene Estienne's tight and pointed adaptation, Brook's long-time collaborator Bruce Myers achieves a clarity and an urgency that make the tale seem utterly contemporary while at the same time preserving its status as a highly wrought fable.

The key, as so often with Brook, is simplicity. One straightforward but crucial decision sets the tone: Christ is placed onstage. Played by Joachim Zuber, he is for almost the entire hour of the performance an inert presence. But that presence creates a theatrical tension on the bare, starkly lit stage. The governing aesthetic of the piece is that less is more. Christ's very silence, as the Inquisitor informs him that mankind is too weak for the freedom he tried to thrust upon it and that the Church has long since shifted its allegiance to Satan, says more than the torrent of words.

The same minimalist method shapes Myers's mesmeric performance. He is a master of economy. He shifts from narrator to cardinal by the simple gesture of buttoning up his long black coat, transforming it instantly into a robe. His gaunt, grey-bearded face allows him to become the 90-year-old Inquisitor without the slightest hint of "old man" acting. He has a serenity in repose that magnifies even the smallest expressions of emotion. His voice has an utterly controlled tone that makes any rise in pitch seem monumental. He moves with such calm precision that any large gestures acquire a cinematic scale. Unlike so many one-actor performances, there is no self-conscious attempt to deliver a tour-de-force. - Fintan O'Toole

Road to Nowhere, O'Reilly Theatre

They drift on to the stage around the starting time, 28 American veterans of song aged between 72 and 93. They have no costumes, just an eclectic mix of cast-ons, and give an impression of being spirited rather than spry. An early number consists of an oldie, The Second Time Around by a solo baritone while the group back it up by speaking the lines of My Way. You couldn't really call it instant excitement.

Some 75 minutes later, the first impressions were thoroughly debunked. As the group, the Young@Heart Chorus, get into their stride, backed by a 5-piece band and whipped along by an energetic conductor, they bring their listeners with them through a programme of song interpretations that lull and rock. At times, given the potency of music, the age thing adds a dimension to the performance. To listen to an old woman sing Ruby Tuesday is to hear a different song; and so with others.

A few of the singers are exceptional anyway. The baritone who sings I Didn't Mean to Hurt You has an international voice, the kind that gives instant pleasure. A black lady sings a bluesy number that stills the house. The best singers are still worth their solo keep, and many of the chorus were clearly experienced vocalists in their day. If the full power of their vocal chords has been diminished, they still have that most precious element in song interpretation - know-how.

About half way through the show, the chorus don grey coats, giving them the appearance as well as the sound of their on-stage harmony. They rock through the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads and many others in an unexpectedly diverse programme and, like true troupers, save some of the best for the last. The finale or encore, whatever, embraces several toe-tapping numbers that really fly the flag for age. If the corn is as high as an elephant's eye, so what? The authentic musical experience is, like gold, where you find it. - Gerry Colgan


The Idiots, Project

Pan Pan Theatre's production of The Idiots is not really a play. It is more like a social experiment. Not just in the subversive scenario that it explores in the production's fiction, but in the very act of offering it for an audience to accept. In the very first scene, 36 faces stare out at the audience, their hardened gaze an invitation to rise to the challenge that the unfolding scenes will set up. From the very beginning, The Idiots will not be easy to watch.

Based upon the infamous Lars von Trier film Idiotenne, which remains banned in Ireland 10 years after its release, Pan Pan's stage version is immediately radical, providing Irish audiences with first-hand access to the controversial content of von Trier's film.

The story follows the fate of a group of social dissidents who pretend that they are intellectually disabled in order to exploit state benefits, expose social prejudices, and liberate themselves from society's rigorous codes of behaviour.

Andrew Clancy's moveable set is a clinical laboratory, in which sliding doors and panels constantly alter perspectives under Aedin Cosgrove's equally microscopic lighting. The performers - eight professional actors and 28 non-actors - segue in and out of the scenes like spectres: the world that the "idiots" are trying to free themselves from is a world deadened by convention and class hierarchies (as references to Killiney and Fingal County Council make clear).

In an additional programme note, director Gavin Quinn contextualises his casting choices, drawing particular attention to the intellectually disabled cast members, perhaps as a means of diffusing any objections that they are taking advantage of the circumstances of a real, disenfranchised community for the purposes of "bourgeois" entertainment. However, ultimately, it is up to the audience to decide whether or not they believe that Pan Pan have fallen prey to what their specimen "idiots" must be accused of: exploitation.

It is that constant reference back to the audience's own assumptions, prejudices, tolerance for political incorrectness, gratuitous nudity and blatant offence that makes The Idiots a seriously challenging piece of theatre. Whether it is worth rising to that challenge or not is a matter for one's inner idiot to decide. Sara Keating