Reviews

Cave In: Whelans.  Cave In's avalanche of sound began with screaming, oscillating effects from Adam McGrath's guitar. Drummer John-Robert Connors laid down a beat amid the squall, and bassist Caleb Scofield set the landslide rumbling. Singer/guitarist Stephen Brodsky took his position centre-stage, and all hell broke loose.

Come Into Your Own was a bewildering flurry of oblique riffs, modal scales, swooping vocals and thundering rhythms.

Just when you're working out whether to bang your head or stroke your chin, the band from Methuen, Massachusetts come up with a cerebral pop anthem like Who Inspires You?, with impossibly catchy riffs.

Brain Candle, Anchor, and Dark Driving continued to confound, sometimes spinning off into weird, spaced-out breaks, other times descending into a strange psychotrophic fog. There were moments when it all got too abstruse, but these were soon followed by the immediacy of Jupiter and Stained Silver. Cave In have been together since 1995, and it's easy to see why they're not huge yet; it takes time to sort through the rubble and make some sense of it all.

By Kevin Courtney

My Children! My Africa! Junction Theatre, Clonmel.

Fugard's My Children! My Africa! was first produced in 1989, the year that Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. It is set a few years previous, after the police have massacred black people at Sharpesville and Soweto, and just as the freedom movement is gaining strength. The saeva indignatio that fuels Fugard's best work, his rage at the obscenities of apartheid, is blended with revulsion at the excesses of the revolutionaries. The result is a blazing piece of theatre that assaults the intellect and the emotions.

There is a touch of genius in the sheer simplicity of the play. A black schoolteacher, Mr M, has invited a school for white girls to send a pupil to engage in a debate with a black student about equal rights for women. Isabel turns up to confront the popular Thami, and actually wins on the votes of the black class. The two become friends, and more debates are planned.

But Isabel becomes aware that there are undercurrents. Although Thami respects and likes Mr M, he also sees him as part of a system of brainwashing that has kept his people in subjection. Not for the teacher are the violent demonstrations, the boycotts and other revolutionary stirrings. He believes that his essential task is to educate his pupils to a better life. The clash of intellect is one of theatre's most absorbing and thrilling sounds, and it exists in abundance in this dynamic play. There is passion in the three people's attitude to their lives and situations, and eloquence in their words. It is fascinating to follow them in their love and hostility, to measure their differences.

The acting by Bisi Adigun, Judith Roddy and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, directed by Theresia Guschlbauer, is wholly convincing, a complete delivery of an extraordinary play.

By Gerry Colgan

• Ends in Clonmel Feb 27th, followed by an extensive tour until March 19th.

Finghin Collins (piano): NCH, Dublin.

Fantasy in C minor K475 ........... Mozart Humoreske Schumann Sonata 1.x.1905..Janácek

Appassionata Sonata ........................... Beethoven

It's piano time again, with the next AXA Dublin International Piano Competition starting on May 9th. In advance of that, the AXA Competition promoted Finghin Collins - Collins was a semi-finalist in the Dublin competition before he took the top prize at the Clara Haskil in 1999.

Wednesday's programme was a musical sandwich with an unusual filling, with Mozart and Beethoven enclosing Schumann's wonderful but rarely-heard Humoreske and the two surviving movements of Janácek's 1.x.1905, which is often referred to as a piano sonata.

Musical sandwich or no, from a performance point of view it was a concert of two distinct halves. Collins's handling of the Mozart Fantasy was rather short on what the title promises, and his rubato in the Schumann yielded too frequently to the mannerism of hesitation on the bar-line.

The two works after the interval brought playing of cogency and passion, and the moments of inwardness in the Janácek were handled as persuasively as the outbursts.

Beethoven's Appassionata is a sonata that makes a lot of performers downplay the disruptive storminess that the music so obviously invites. Collins here showed no fear, gave the music its head, and seemed at all times to remain in musical control. I don't think I've ever heard better Beethoven playing from this pianist before.

By Michael Dervan