Reviews

Today's reviews include The Plough and the Stars in the Abbey and Ani DiFranco in Vicar Street.

The Plough and the Stars

Abbey Theatre

Gerry Colgan

The current Abbey production of Sean O'Casey's classic is purportedly a revival of the one that ended last February; and, in terms of overall shape and style, it is.

But many of the original cast, whose performances established this version as one of the best to have been seen in years, have been replaced. The onus on their successors to grasp the batons and maintain the momentum is an intimidating one, and it must be said that they have succeeded magnificently.

This is, in general, a traditional production by Ben Barnes, focusing primarily on script and characters and keeping directorial innovation to a minimum, albeit an effective one. From the array of colourful characters, that of Fluther Good is the one most associated with the play's immortality, and anyone attempting the role must contend with shades of past giants. Now Eamon Morrissey steps into the limelight; and he is indisputably their equal, but with his own brilliant difference. He makes you want to laugh, cry and cheer in a landmark interpretation.

Catherine Byrne makes a telling return to the Abbey as Bessie Burgess, the bitter anti-republican finally undone by her innate unselfishness. Cathy Belton, who previously appeared as the prostitute Rosie Redmond, moves here to the role of Nora Clitheroe, the young wife trapped between slum life and national violence, and brings to the difficult, distraught character a tragic intensity.

Rosie is now played by Amelia Crowley with comic flair. Another peak is scaled by Olwen Fouere as Mrs Gogan, the Cassandra of the tenements. She is here a quintessential Dubliner, a compendium of dire prophecies and feisty survival mechanisms, a joy to watch and listen to. And just to show that absolute perfection is not required, Barry McGovern is somewhat miscast as Uncle Peter, and gets away with it. He is very tall, with an authoritative appearance and voice, whereas Peter is a whining weasel of a man - but the actor's psyche takes over, and the part rings true. This is one for the memory bank. Runs to July 12th

Bedbound

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

Jane Coyle

In the hands of Asylum Productions co-founder and director Donal Gallagher, Enda Walsh's Bedbound is one of the most disturbing, emotionally draining and completely brilliant theatrical experiences imaginable. It presents images one would prefer to pass swiftly by, yet amongst the filth and squalor and cruelty of a polio-stricken teenage girl and her volatile, unpredictable father, Walsh somehow manages to strike a final note of calm and, yes, beauty.

Nothing has come easily to Maxie, a man driven by ambition and materialism, since his early working days as a storeman at a Cork furniture emporium. Through sheer graft and contrived superficial charm, he works his way up to the big time - to the hated capital city that is Dublin, where, on the same day, he opens no less than three furniture superstores. He has arrived.

But at home, all is not well. His gentle, compliant wife and young daughter have a day out at the beach - the daughter's last day as a healthy girl, before she falls headlong into what she describes as the stinking cesspool that is polio. Maxie, for all his professional success, suffers a mental and physical breakdown and commits a succession of terrible crimes.

The most sadistic of them all is against his own family, culminating in the death of his wife and the incarceration of his crippled daughter in a claustrophobic, fetid bed. Dominic Moore and Julie Sharkey are, at times, almost unwatchable as father and daughter, slobbering, jabbering and squabbling every waking hour, nattering endlessly about anything, everything, just to fill the awful silence.

Olan Wyrnn's nightmarish set is dramatically moulded by John F. Cumiskey's lighting, which fleshes out and distorts the changing shape of this prison existence. Walsh's astonishing, salty prose illuminates the darkest corners of the human condition, allowing us an unrelenting glimpse of what goes on in private, behind the closed doors of an outwardly respectable, materially successful self-made man. Not a pretty sight.

Ani DiFranco

Vicar Street

Peter Crawley

Not for Ani DiFranco the humourless disposition of the political dissident. Sure, New York's 'Righteous Babe' (as her fiercely independent label has it) may hit all the right-on buttons of the anti-capitalist/globalisation machine, but filtered through subtlety, wit and emotional truths, her message sidesteps the quicksand of useless platitudes. Boasting non-conformist politics and haircuts, Vicar Street's hippie-hipster axis would have forgiven Ani DiFranco for not trying too hard. What a relief it was, then, that armed with no more than a microphone and a steady supply of enormous guitars, her energy could electrify the greater Dublin area. Introducing the sweltering Evolve as "good-time protest music", DiFranco accurately sums up the tone of her set, one that sees her almost buckling beneath guitars twice her size, dreadlocks billowing with each purposeful stomp.

Between numbers she goofs with the locals about every political and personal topic from no-smoking laws to how a sunny Stephen's Green is no place "for the lonely and despondent".

A magnificently sparse Serpentine could be the musical accompaniment to any Moore, Palast or Klein manifesto, but with turns of phrase like "the democrans and the republicrats/ are flashing their toothy smiles," DiFranco has perfected a lyrical shorthand as effective as a Chomsky lecture tour. Beguiling, engaging and inspiring stuff. But is that the dull beat of liberal fists against a brick wall?

Camerata Kilkenny

St Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle

Michael Dervan

Purcell - Sonata No 10. Castello - Violin Sonata in A minor. Marais - Suite in D minor. Barry Guy - Celebration. Purcell - Sonata No 6. Scarlatti - Sonatas in D K490-2. Couperin - L'Espagnole.

The second of this year's Music in Great Irish Houses Festival featured members of the period-instruments ensemble Camerata Kilkenny - violinists Maya Homburger and Claire Duff, viol player Sarah Cunningham and harpsichordist Malcolm Proud - offered a mostly baroque programme that reached out to the end of the 20th century for just a single piece, Celebration by Barry Guy, which was written with the baroque playing of Maya Homburger in mind.

It was good to hear two of Henry Purcell's imaginatively turned Sonatas in Four Parts (like the earlier Sonatas of Three Parts, these are trio sonatas, in spite of the name), and it's always a pleasure to hear the solo viol skills of Sarah Cunningham (in the suite by Marais) and the rigorously probing harpsichord playing of Malcolm Proud, who offered three of Scarlatti's finest keyboard sonatas.

Claire Duff showed a sure grasp of the often idiosyncratic writing of Castello's A minor Sonata. In spite of the obvious quality of the playing, it would have to be admitted that the expressive communication of these performances was somewhat muted, the limitations most likely imposed by the scale and acoustic of the venue. The pieces which most successfully transcended those limitations were Guy's Celebration, and L'Espagnole from François Couperin's Les Nations where the dance rhythms sounded fresh and lively.