Reviews

Bach, rock and a classic of Irish theatre in today's reviews.

The Shadow of a Gunman

New Theatre, Temple Bar

After a two-year closure for reconstruction, New Theatre has reopened with the first play in Sean O'Casey's classic trilogy of Dublin life in the 1920s. It is a good choice, as rich in comedy as ever, and still a barbed commentary on the impact of militant nationalism on ordinary people.

At the heart of the play is Donal Davoren, an aesthetic drop-out sharing a tenement room with the low-life pedlar Seamus Shields. Davoren just wants to write poetry, but is thought by his neighbours to be an IRA man on the run. His vanity leads him to collaborate with the error, seduced by the glamour it brings with it. Young Minnie Powell falls for him, and later dies protecting him from British soldiers.

A parade of colourful and hilarious tenement dwellers passes through Davoren's room. Adolphus Grigson and his wife (Daniel Riordon and Mags O Dalaigh) bring a Northern Orange flavour to their scenes. The prolix Mrs Henderson (Yvonne Ussher) escorts the supplicant Mr Gallagher (Robert Harrington) to Donal for assistance with noisy neighbours in a highly amusing interlude. A landlord (Terence Orr) vainly tries to collect the rent.

These and others keep the laughter and the tension flowing until the play reaches its downbeat ending. Sean Stewart is a naive Donal, learning too late the difference between poetic ideals and cowardice, a convincing blend of immature ego and insecurity. His room-mate Shields is played by Nick Devlin as a practical parasite whose main aim is survival, a comic creation of a high order. And, in the small but crucial role of Minnie, Vanessa M Fahy is appealing and convincing. Ronan Wilmot directs with a real feeling for the play.

Gerry Colgan

Until Apr 13

Dublin Bach Singers, OSC/MacKay

St Ann's Church, Dublin

Bach - Cantatas 45, 136, 178

There's a special ethos to the Orchestra of St Cecilia's epic series of Bach's church cantatas - and not just because 200 or so works are all being presented in 60 concerts spread over 10 years. Each week, regular instrumentalists and vocal soloists are joined by a different choir and conductor, so the series involves a wide cross-section of choral participants.

The visitors here were the Dublin Bach Singers, a chamber choir now in its fifth season. The choir's tone qualities worked from the top down: diction and cantabile were concentrated in the airy soprano line, while the lower voices were audible and well balanced.

Conductor Brian MacKay (who was the choir's guest as well as the orchestra's) rested his baton in the arias, and shaped the instrumental obbligatos with a coaxing right hand. His thoughtful approach to the orchestral motifs had its rewards in buoyant opening choruses, and in a spirited, almost tango-like insistency to tenor Robin Tritschler's much-syncopated aria in cantata 178.

Yet in spite of all these good ideas, the orchestra wasn't to be rescued from occasionally lapsing into a quite arithmetic delivery of the quavers and semiquavers.

Making one of its comparatively rare appearances in a Bach score, the solo horn turned out some smart passage-work for cantata 136, although its placement an octave below the choral soprano part in cantata 178 seemed an unlikely interpretation of the master's intentions. But this cantata has more than the usual quota of original touches, and an aria depicting a storm at sea was sung with Neptune-like command by bass Nigel Williams.

Andrew Johnstone

The last concert of this year's season is on Sunday (01-6778571)

The Killers

RDS, Dublin

There's something anti-climactic about a rescheduled gig, a sense that this is merely an action replay. The Killers had to postpone their December show at the Point after singer Brandon Flowers came down with bronchitis, but though we had to wait a mere two months, it feels like two years in rock 'n' roll time.

While the Las Vegas outfit fulfil their commitments in Ballsbridge, the rock cognoscenti are already flocking to the Temple Bar Music Centre to catch America's next big thing, the Hold Steady, another band who unashamedly emulate the epic sound of Bruce Springsteen.

With their second album, Sam's Town, the Killers took the big risk of alienating fans who loved their Anglo-centric take on the 1980s sounds of Depeche Mode and Morrissey, and their assimilation of early U2.

With cover photos shot in the desert by Anton Corbijn, and widescreen songs such as Bones and When You Were Young, Sam's Town plainly wanted to be The Joshua Tree; that it's closer to the flawed but brave Unforgettable Fire is no shame, and when the Killers open with the album's symphonic title track, Flowers striking a Bono-like pose atop the drum riser, they prove they have the power to play alongside the big guns.

When You Were Young dispels all doubt that Sam's Town may have gone too far into the pop wilderness, and the band blast through such tunes as Bones, Uncle Jonny and another sure-fire pop anthem, new single Read My Mind. Just when we're beginning to suspect they're going to play the album in its entirety, the band switches to Hot Fuss mode, delivering Somebody Told Me, Smile Like You Mean It and Mr Brightside with freshly bolstered confidence.

Despite the slightly cheesy Sam's Town sign, suggesting a small-town fete, the Killers are looking well beyond the picayune, and their cover of Joy Division's Shadowplay shows they're not always willing to play the crowd-pleasing clowns. So far, the gamble has paid off for the Vegas band, and they're still holding steady.

Kevin Courtney

The Hold Steady

Temple Bar Music Centre

What is Craig Finn so happy about? This beaming, bearish man certainly has some reason to be pleased: with Boys and Girls in America, the Hold Steady's third album (but first European release), his ferociously good band is finally getting the attention it deserves. But the songs - stentorian narratives of dopers, boozers and losers, hollered out over a fist-pumping throb of blue-collar rock'n'roll - ain't exactly smiley.

Take Stuck Between Stations. Between the shlangs of guitar and piano chords it siphons off a quote from Kerouac ("boys and girls in America have such a sad time together"), delivers an appropriately slurred elegy for the poet John Berryman and concludes with a boozy, sing-along epitaph: "We drink, we dry up, we crumble into dust." Throughout, the group's frontman smiles, points and shakes his limbs like an excited toddler.

Formed in the Bronx, but finding a spiritual home for their crisp, clean hard-rock in New Jersey, the group endlessly evoke Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Berryman is actually the better comparison, though, his verses once described as "more tearful and funny than we can easily bear". So it is with Hot Soft Light, a tale of drug abuse with the deliciously wry couplet, "It started recreational. It ended kinda medical." Or You Can Make Him Like You ("let your boyfriend deal with the dealers"). It's lyrics like these that set the band apart, while the music is an unwavering, solid and unadventurous recreation of 1970s-80s rock - which is to say it is almost always exciting.

Best of all, though, are the bitter, wistful remembrances of Stevie Nix and Your Little Hoodrat Friend, skirting the borders between jocose and lachrymose, while Finn sucks down beer between the verses (not all of which finds his mouth).

It is a heady, endearing performance, and the crowd is so fondly hecklesome that Finn is finally moved to announce, "There is so much joy in what we do up here." On an intoxicating night like this, it is easy to forget the sorrow and regret of his songs and agree - however we might feel in the morning.

Peter Crawley