Reviews

Reviewed today are Trad and Beat Box Bingo.

'Trad

Druid Lane Theatre

Unsurprisingly, the first full-length play from former stand-up comedian Mark Doherty is funny. Marvellously, achingly funny, in fact; and certainly, this much owes something to the fact that Doherty, during his own time on the stage, pioneered that style of delivery which has since become so ubiquitous in Irish comedy that it seems always to have been around - that nervy, dazed, but stunningly accurate manner of observing the fundamental absurdities of everyday existence.

In Trad, Doherty bequeaths this voice to two characters dredged from the sediment of a century of Irish theatre, and drenched with a heady mixture of irreverence, bitterness and bewilderment; Da, an ancient widower who has lived longer than any man should, and his 100-year-old son, Thomas. Da (Frankie McCafferty) hates the English, doesn't want to talk about his dead wife, and is disappointed in his son for failing to become a father himself. Thomas (Peter Gowen), meanwhile, has news for him; some 70 years ago, during a wordless encounter with a girl known to him only as "Mary", he did his bit to further the family line, and there's a son of his out there, somewhere.

It's no accident that this sounds like a mouldy stew of every miserable cliché of Irishness ever to grace the stage. Doherty is looking askance at the tradition, at the way Ireland has written itself, and defined itself, at the recurring themes of family, poverty, land-hunger, religion, resentment, and he is making us double over with laughter at it all. The knowing touch of director Mikel Murfi is apparent.

Yet if we merely wanted to laugh at ourselves, an evening with the DVD of Father Ted would be sufficient, and moments of Trad do come uncomfortably close to settling for sheer comic absurdity. But it pulls back just in time; Doherty has strengthened his characters with the uniqueness and the vulnerability that is the mark of a human relationship; they are on a journey with each other, father and son, in a place which has ceased to make a great deal of sense to them. At the heart of this play is not a skit on Irishness, but a real question about faith: about what, and who, we can believe in when the stories we are told cease to fit with the reality we face. Intelligent and imaginative, this is richly pleasurable theatre.

Belinda McKeon

Beat Box Bingo

Space Upstairs, Project

There were some staff changes at the office. Dancer Nanette Kincaid had to be replaced by choreographer Rebecca Walters in the corporate environment on stage in Beat Box Bingo three days before opening night. Everything seemed to go smoothly, which was hardly surprising since the creative springboard is a sound recording of a corporate team exercise in co-operation and self-enhancement.

Two bespectacled, collar-and-tie musicians (Justin Carroll and Eric Biondo) are set on a circular platform cluttered with filing cabinets, trailing plants and an interrupting telephone. Dressed casually, Walters, Fergus Ó Conchúir and Katherine O'Malley are set up as the freer spirits in possession of a generous dance floor. As they clump together their first twitchy movements jolt a leg forward, lurch, then step into a freely moving phrase with straight slicing arms.

At once an overhead projector begins to set goals - "Complete a simple task together" or "Let every team member have their say" - prompting a series of short set-pieces between musician and dancer. Ó Conchúir coaxes sound out of Biondo's muted trumpet and O'Malley distracts Carroll as he plays a simple air controlled keyboard, squeezing his breath from his torso or forcing him to jump as she rolls beneath him.

Walters has a strong visual sense and, along with Aideen Cosgrove's shrewd lighting and Lian Bell's simple set, her creative intentions are clear. But the "heated performance debate" concept behind Beat Box Bingo sets demands on choreographic invention as well as image. A quick snap to side-lighting signals the ending as the music pushes tempo and dancers career across the stage. Co-workers seem at last united but the journey that took them there was uncertain. In some ways it's like the earlier bonding team exercises: the goal is reached in spite of the process.

Michael Seaver