Reviews

Amon the evnets reviewed are: Cork City Ballet's Nutcracker Suite and Divertissements and Richard Dormer's one-man play The Half.

Nutcracker Suite/ Divertissements, Cork Opera House

Cork City Ballet presented The Nutcracker Suite and Divertissements like elaborately wrapped gifts, where some dances caught more attention than others. The programme passed as quickly as Christmas morning, with favourites from the Nutcracker, Don Quixote and Swan Lake - as well as Krzysztof Pastor's In Light and Shadow, Patricia Crosbie's Sisters and Judith Sibley's Bend Down Low.

Pastor's In Light and Shadow felt like it was danced under moonlight. Marie Lindqvist, guest artist from the Royal Swedish Ballet, and Dragos Mihalcea, from the Dutch National Ballet, alternated between lingering like lovers and whisking each other into quickly changing positions. Bathed in purple light, they moved fluidly to Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Chika Temma and Victor Povavarov excelled in excerpts from Don Quixote. She executed the show-stopping fouette turns with such precision she could have been balancing on the head of a pin, and he provided a grounding force to her energy.

During the Nutcracker Suite, the couples danced with the confidence that comes with having complete trust in your partner, with the rest of the company joining them in front of a backdrop of candy canes and gumdrops, wearing freshly starched tutus. In the Arabian dance, Icleiber Klaus lifted Sibley overhead in a series of provocative upside-down splits, and Lindqvist and Mihalcea sparkled in a well-executed Grand Pas de deux.

The most surprising dancing came during Waltz of the Flowers, the longest divertissement in the Nutcracker, and often the least interesting. Alan Foley and Monica Loughman led the waltz in a series of twists, turns and asymmetrical patterns, until the lengthy dance became an enthusiastic performance. The corps de ballet members masked their uneven technical abilities with a respect for what they were doing so that their hard work and pride made the dancing all the more enjoyable. Ends tomorrow. Christie Taylor

The Half, Helix Space

The title of Richard Dormer's one-man play refers to the name thespians give to the 35 minutes before the start of a play. It opens with an actor, still in vest and shorts in his dressing room, psyching himself for the role to come. This is his big chance, and his whole future turns on it.

He has adapted a version of Hamlet lasting four-and-a-half hours, and deliberately lacking an interval so that the audience can't leave. The production is entirely his own - no other actors, no producer or director, no set or lighting design. He has no money for these, and carries the burden of the project alone.

Here the dread thought strikes him: suppose there are only critics in attendance, waiting to devour him? But he has a fit of defiance, and offers a few colourful epithets to critics in general. He segues into breathing and physical exercises to calm his nerves, and, seeking a cup for a drink of water, finds a bottle of whiskey under the sink.

As the Kafkaesque mood intensifies, he offers more truths to the face in the mirror. Yes, his past work has been undermined by drink, also the cause of his wife leaving him. He knows that he can never be a great actor, and that the present task is quite beyond him. As he helplessly consumes the drink, the unimaginable moment looms.

As performed by Ian Bartholomew, this 60-minute play is hilariously funny, deeply tragic and relevant to all of life's compulsive losers. Perversely, it is itself a runaway winner. Ends tonight. Gerry Colgan

RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, National Gallery, Dublin

Boccherini - Quartet in E flat G243. Bartók - Quartet No 3. Beethoven - Quartet in F Op 59 No 1

This string quartet programme was like a night at the fights with a featherweight bout to warm up the crowd for the heavy-hitters.

Not that Boccherini always weighs as little as he does in this Quartet in E flat, his Op 58 No 2 of 1799, the same year as Haydn's Op 77. Elsewhere among his more than 90 quartets, Boccherini combined a freshness and charm with his on-off interest in writing for four independent lines. The present work, however, features the kind of quartet-writing for solo violin and three-part accompaniment - one or two cello solos notwithstanding - that Haydn made obsolete. That leaves only freshness and charm to commend it, and these were hard to come by in the Vanbrugh's stolid account.

The Vanbrugh have played Boccherini better, as recently as last June in Killruddery House. They have also been a better friend to Bartók, whose virtuosic Third Quartet sounded as though it were on a high-tech assembly line: impressive precision, but clinical.

There was no capture of the work's earthy spirit despite the Vanbrugh's rhythmic cohesion and ready command of all Bartók's special effects. It didn't help that leader Gregory Ellis suffered occasional lapses of pitch above the stave, enough to disrupt chords.

This latter was less of an issue at slow tempos, so that the long, rich slow movement of Beethoven's first Rasumovsky quartet proved the highlight. Michael Dungan