Reviews

The European premier of Bath of Baghdadis the unquestionable highlight of today's reviews.

Bath of Baghdad

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

Homage is an infrequent experience in Irish theatre but was a distinct component of the applause for playwright Jawad al-Assadi when he was called on stage at the end of Bath of Baghdad. The cast of Fayez Kazak and Nidal Sejari were included in the warmth of this response, which in itself was an expression of the excitement of the event, a European premiere of a play about Iraq, with the author in attendance and a triumph for the Cork Midsummer Festival.

Using somewhat erratic surtitles, the play, written and performed in Arabic, makes demands on the audience, for it portrays the ordinariness of a foreign world and gives a compassionate reading of priorities in a culture we are inclined to call alien and to fear. "All men are devils now" might be the sad reflection of two brothers meeting in the only refuge - and that a very vulnerable one - left to them in their city. In the baths, scouring and laving one another, they explore their lives, going back to the early years in which brotherhood was a family matter rather than a political one. They had their differences, which are remembered in the heat of this moment. Now the differences have hardened into allegiances, into questionable loyalties which, accepted rather than embraced, commit them to acts of estrangement, not only from one another but from everything they have believed important.

The disillusionment of the "little people" in any society can be both comic and dangerous and al-Assadi conveys this dichotomy with brilliance. Even in the curt phrasing of the surtitles the language is rich and colloquial; the throaty disparagements of Fayez Kazak as Majiid, the elder brother, are contrasted with the bleating tones of Nidal Sejari, which nonetheless stiffen into anger and self-contempt. Amid intermittent explosions and the shattering rattle of helicopters, as the showers go on or off as they please and the lights blaze or flicker, the brothers recognise themselves as participants in rather than victims of the destruction of the only world they know, change as it might. In the dilemmas of survival, fraternity (sisterhood is not the issue here and in fact the references to the Iraqi sisterhood are bleak indeed) is the only constant, but to this, at least, they can be true.

The direction of this piece, which runs without an interval for little more than an hour, is by al-Assadi himself, working with the Syrian Experimental Theatre. Having found actors of this calibre and a fine composer in Raad Khalaf, he has the sense to leave well alone, although the set painted by Jaber Alwan and the lighting by Bassam Hmeidi bring a glowing visual enhancement to this thrilling production.

Runs until Sat as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival

Mary Leland

Aerosmith

Marlay Park, Dublin

Wrapped around the microphone stand is a scarf, in leopard-skin print, which billows nicely in the breeze. Behind it is a needlessly elaborate stack of Marshall amplifiers already humming with anticipation. Projecting into Marlay Park is a long catwalk lined with strip lighting. Aerosmith, one of the most deliriously excessive rock bands to have ever pranced the earth, have not yet taken to the stage, but the spectacle is already in overdrive.

There is something endlessly pleasurable about cliches delivered without apology. For an audience containing innumerable hard-rock relics - men who, like Steven Tyler, grow their hair long, but who, unlike Steven Tyler, have no expensive stylists to tend to it - an Aerosmith concert offers a safe haven from a world grown intolerant of dudes who look like ladies.

Having drafted the blueprint for over-consumption in the 1970s with their florid, pummelling riffola and legendary feats of substance abuse, the apparently indestructible Aerosmith now seem to align themselves more firmly with their 1980s and 1990s MTV make-over. This is why Tyler, a rail-thin punk dandy, first launches into Love in an Elevator, that dubiously jolly rocker about sex in the workplace, and why the band are frequently accompanied by hulking video clips from an era when Alicia Silverstone and Stephen Dorff were household names.

It's no small point that the marvellously epicene, Jagger-lipped Tyler and the lantern-jawed guitarist Joe Perry still look fantastic. Styled to within an inch of their lives, they share a microphone, throw similar wind-tunnel poses and lavish praise on one another. The other band members have sadly succumbed to the aging process and are roundly ignored, yet the songs require little touching up. Cryin', Eat the Rich, Livin' on the Edge, Sweet Emotionand, eventually, Walk This Wayare just as you remember them; all served with a sugary crunch, a diamond edge and ludicrously enjoyable finger and fretwork.

You might draw the line at Perry's 12-string guitar, or his double guitar, or perhaps his see-through guitar. You might want Tyler to tone down his well-rehearsed collapses, crucifixion poses or wailing harmonica solos. But that's the whole damn point of Aerosmith: to pile on the bombast without a knowing wink and to give us a hard-rock playground where we can really let our hair down.

Peter Crawley

Cooney, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov

NCH, Dublin

French Romantic composers dominated this week's helping of easy lunch-time listening from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Chopin too was admitted, though French only on his father's side, with the Romance from his Piano Concerto No 1 in an arrangement for solo violin.

Soloist Elizabeth Cooney gave the reworked part a somewhat understated reading that tended to equate the decorative twists with the actual melodic fibre. But her dashing and fluent playing of the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso by Saint-Saëns communicated the gratifying sense of an easy and decisive victory over some considerable technical challenges.

Conductor Alexander Anissimov made a rather homogeneous sequence of the ballet music from Gounod's Faust: Les Troyens and the Variations de Miroir were tunefully engaging in their way, but the Danse antique and Danse de Phryne particularly called for more impetus.

A reticent conclusion to the Entr'acte and Waltz from Delibes's Coppélia put the audience in some uncertainty about applauding. The final item in the programme, however, left no such doubt. One of Anissimov's greatest strengths has always been to let the fireworks go off with a bang, and it was with Dukas's vivid tone picture of a backfired magic spell that he at last invested the orchestra's polished sound with a sense of excitement.

Who knows what other works by Dukas might have numbered among today's most popular orchestral treats, had he not burned the majority of his scores? Like his titular sorcerer's apprentice, this composer surely took the house-cleaning too far.

Andrew Johnstone