Final Destination

As the 50th Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival begins its final weekend, our reviewers evaluate the latest stage action

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

• Ends Saturday