Reviews

Irish Times writers review the latest goings on at the Galway Arts Festival as well as Ulick O'Connor's short play Submarine and Buck 65

Galway Arts Festival: Hairdresser in the House, Bank of Ireland Theatre, NUI Galway

Hairdressing, the delicate skill of matching individual expression to broad fashion trends, is the profession that Raymond Keane left behind to become a performer.

Having delved into his personal history last year, albeit obliquely, for his one-clown show, . . . tanks a lot!, Keane now revisits his days as an internationally successful stylist. Taking one brave volunteer from the audience to demonstrate his talents, he invites us to consider the follicular follies of the past - whole eras of bad-hair days.

The mullet, for instance, was a bizarre experiment in mismatched styles - simple in concept, but needlessly long in the end - which appears cringe-makingly ill-conceived in practice.

Sadly, you could say much the same thing about Hairdresser in the House.

With a store of gentle, insubstantial anecdotes, Keane moves from the basin of his 1950s upbringing in Dungarvan, Waterford, through the tentative first snips of his time in Dublin and London in the 1970s, to the signature creations of styling models in Amsterdam.

Between the spiel, however, he must tend to his volunteer's new "do".

Anyone who agrees to a haircut, with a stranger, before an audience, is unlikely to suffer from introversion. On my viewing, the ease and chatter of the young woman in Keane's chair served only to highlight his hesitancy with improvised banter.

There are cute, fleeting set pieces, but the haircut leaves Keane with little room to clown around.

Too occupied for witty conversation, comic fillips or physical performance, the experiment proves to us something Keane seemed to realise long ago: that his two careers were incompatible.

More astonishingly, neither he nor director Veronica Coburn seem to have anticipated just how tedious a spectacle this is - watching wet hair dry.

Our interest is occasionally sparked by delicately involving personal monologue ("I met my wife when I cut her boyfriend's hair") and occasionally Keane floats an interesting idea (the spiral of a natural hairline, the reason monks shave their crowns).

Without a ready store of such allusions, however, or even enough music to cover the interminable stretches of silent hair-care, the sympathy and patience of the audience is quickly sheared away.

When the "client" eventually emerges from Keane's chair, looking not especially different, he explains, "I played it a bit safe."

With two more appointments in Edinburgh and Dublin to go - fringe festivals, appropriately - Barabbas have played it anything but. You'd suggest a few cuts, were that not the problem. - Peter Crawley

Runs until Sunday

Project 06: The Fairgreen Slaughterhouse, St Nicholas School, Galway

As Fairgreen Slaughterhouse begins, Diarmuid de Faoite steps to the front of the stage and tells us that he's so hungry he'd eat "anything that moves". He greedily eyes up the audience, licks his lips, and smiles. The people in the front row discreetly move their chairs back a little. This sets a delightfully sinister tone for Colm Corless's new one-man show about love, social class and cannibalism in contemporary Galway.

De Faoite plays George, a lawyer who falls in with a group of local high-fliers who meet every weekend in an exclusive city club. They sip brandy, listen to music, gossip - and then murder, cook and eat a homeless person, kindly provided by the city's police sergeant. Afraid that someone will eventually notice the dwindling numbers of homeless in Galway, the sergeant proposes a new source of food: why don't the club members eat their wives? George must choose between his partner and his hobby: a moral dilemma indeed.

This plot draws on the many stories that use cannibalism to satirise the upper classes, from Swift's Modest Proposal to American Psycho. Yet it avoids seeming derivative because of the quality of the writing and de Faoite's performance. Corless's script blends the violent with the sentimental, using language that's often poetic: George tells us how, making love with his wife after they'd feasted on a corpse, their house "shook on its foundations like a kitten"; later, he describes a thought dancing on the tip of his tongue like a "gothic ballerina". Such similes are both gentle and dark, nicely revealing George's character - as well as Corless's confidence.

However, as directed by Paul Brennan, the show's success is largely due to what de Faoite brings to it himself: his use of gesture and silence, his rapport with the audience and his ability to make everyday objects seem full of menace. His performance is both gruesome and moving, ridiculous yet oddly sympathetic. This results in a grimly comic production that leaves the audience feeling much like the play's protagonist - queasy but eager for more. - Patrick Lonergan

Ends Saturday

Submarine, Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin

Roger Casement was executed in August 1916, and this revival of Ulick O'Connor's short play, first seen in 1978, is in honour of the man and the occasion. The author was interested in Japanese Noh theatre at the time of its creation, and used its classical format as a vehicle for his work.

The play opens with two post-Casement patriots, Frank Ryan (Sean Murphy) and Sean Russell (Sean O'Neill), sailing back from the continent to Ireland in 1941 to organise resistance to British rule in Northern Ireland. They are accompanied by a chorus of two (Geraldine Plunkett and Mal Whyte) who, in the prescribed Noh manner, tell us what we need to know. There is no explicit plot as such.

As the two passengers sleep, they are visited by the spirit of Casement (Steve Blount in a full-size face mask), who speaks of his motives and destiny, now in a cycle of reincarnation. He leaves, the chorus wraps up and the play ends.

In the spirit of Noh, there is not a lot of substance here. It is an evanescent, mood-creation piece of some 25 minutes' duration. The writing is in a formal, lyrical style that has not worn too well; who would now refer to the English as "the accursed intruder"? And, with due respect for Japanese culture, Noh must punch its own weight with Irish audiences, who may find this exercise precious rather than aesthetic.

Caroline Fitzgerald directs, and the actors deliver their roles with measured competence. They have so little to do that more than that is hardly an option. - Gerry Colgan

Runs to Aug 12

Joan as Police Woman, Crawdaddy, Dublin

Joan Wasser is something close to rock aristocracy. As a session musician, backing singer and arranger, she played violin with Nirvana, was one of Antony's Johnsons, played with Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, was a member of Rufus Wainwright's band, and above all, she was dating Jeff Buckley at the time of his tragic drowning. The fact that she turned 36 on the day of this performance makes it all the more remarkable that she is only just beginning to make a name for herself as a solo artist under the name Joan as Police Woman.

It is for performances like this that the intimate Crawdaddy seems designed. After a strong support slot from Nina Hynes, Wasser bounds on stage with a huge arrangement of plastic flowers, and smiles her huge smile, before taking her place behind her vintage Wurlitzer organ and launching into The Ride from her irresistible album Real Life. Wasser is a big presence, effortlessly flowing from heartfelt torch songs such as Save Me or Anyone to funny, almost goofy banter with the audience.

Without the rest of her band, drummer Ben Perowsky and bassist Rainy Orteca, and the sweet production of her album, many of her songs are musically unremarkable, driven instead by her often searing vocals and charismatic performance. She is in turns reminiscent of Canadian singer Leslie Feist, PJ Harvey, Chrissie Hynde and, yes, Antony, her delivery sometimes achingly vulnerable, sometimes defiantly strong.

She switches from Wurlitzer to guitar for the up-tempo numbers, with Eternal Flame (thankfully recalling Buckley rather than the Bangles song of the same name) translating best from her record. Some new songs hinted at even better things to come, especially Are You Furious? and Hard White Wall.

When someone in the crowd shouts out "Happy birthday, Joan," her broad smile stretches even further across her face, prompting a spirited rendition of Happy Birthday from the crowd. "Birthdays are emotional," a somewhat bashful Wasser replies, "I'm just glad I made it this far."  - Davin O'Dwyer

Buck 65, Whelans, Dublin

Buck 65, sporting a Star Trek communicator badge, wears his nerdiness on his sleeve. His attitude is novel in a hip-hop community so obsessed with braggadocio, and his rhymes are off-kilter to match.

He stood on stage and a hundred thousand thoughts bubbled into a random stream of consciousness. He sang, he rapped, he scratched some records. He even did the twist. But mostly, Buck told stories.

From prison lovin' to small-town wrestling, the Nova Scotia native jumped from the innocuous to the obscure. But this no-nonsense white boy can't fool us with his weirdness. Buck's serious about music, handling all his own production, lyrics and DJing. It's not really surprising that he once played a character on Sesame Street. But despite a tentative move into the mainstream, Buck remains a firm underground favourite, where he's hailed as Mr Authentic. But in other circles, they call him Mr Depressing. He ponders life's uncertainties and his outlook is bleak but starkly vivid. Buck has several albums under his belt and any of them could be the soundtrack to my suicide.

On stage though, he cracks jokes and passes on nuggets of Buck-wisdom. His beat creations veer all over the place from country twangs to blues to straight-up boom-bap. Some say he's ahead of his time, others maintain that his obscure originality means he doesn't have to be good - the weirder the better for some folks. The man himself says he'll make music until he runs out of new things to do. And by the way, it's music, not hip-hop, that's his bag. And although he might not like it, hip-hop needs Buck. But he famously rejected what he calls his one true love in 2004 with this biting quip: "I now hate hip-hop - the more I've educated myself about music, the more I've grown to hate it. I don't use that word lightly, either." Ouch. - Ali Bracken