REVIEWS

Irish Times writes review a selection of recent events

Robin Hood

Waterfront Hall, Belfast,

Robin Hood comes riding through the glen with his merry band of men in Simon Magill's festive caper at the Waterfront Hall. But wide-eyed and well-meaning though Patrick J O'Reilly's little hood may be, he can't hold a candle to Dan Gordon's muscular, rasping Nanny McGee, unreliable guardian of Maid Marion (Michaela McCloskey) and role-model for noisy children.

Aided and abetted by Christina Nelson's subversive guzzler, Fryer Tuck, the show is a vehicle for Gordon's peroxide version of Mrs Doubtfire, leading the Sheriff of Snottingham (Chris Robinson) and his leering rodent Pat the Rat (Bernadette Brown) up the garden path and through the leafy glades of Sherwood Forest.

Magill does not detain himself for too long with the do-gooder capers of Robin Co, preferring to give his audiences more than their money's worth with a three-in-one deal of panto, circus and magic show. The pace is kicked into overdrive by Liz Keller's up-tempo original score and Paul Bosco McEneaney's dazzling illusions. In between shouting their heads off in time-honoured fashion, the young audience's imagination and attention are captured by Hugh Brown's stilt-walking antics as a dim-witted Little John and Maryke Del Castillo's heart-stopping aerial acrobatics. Great fun all round. Runs until Jan 10. JANE COYLE

The Santaland Diaries

Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin

David Sedaris, the essayist, outsider and professional wit, was never a likely candidate to play a Christmas elf. But through a combination of financial desperation and suitably small stature, he found himself in Macy's department store, filling in application forms, weathering interviews and somehow passing the required drugs test ("My urine had stems and roaches floating in it"). These are the humiliations a man in his 30s must endure if he is ever to win the honour of wearing candy-cane striped tights and a green velvet bobble hat.

Clawing back some dignity in his first book, Sedaris aloofly detailed his experiences of elf training, herding families, photographing distraught children and monitoring the developing psychoses of his co-helpers.

For all the episodic pith of the essay, it doesn't adapt easily into a stage show. Partly because there is little structure in Sedaris's dispatches from the ninth circle of holiday cheer, and mainly because Sedaris's persona - deadpan, bemused, oddly sympathetic - is too idiosyncratic to replicate.

In Purple Heart's appropriately sardonic production, delivering a seasonal dose of anti-schmaltz which is now as much a Christmas tradition as the regular brand, Patrick O'Donnell offers both an impersonation and extrapolation of Sedaris. Giving his reluctant elf, Crumpet, a similarly high-pitched, adenoidal cadence, O'Donnell must be considerably more animated, slipping between roles and painting scenes with more gusto than a self-described "low-key elf".

This necessarily alters the tone - an essay can be as dry as it likes, but a performance must be something moister - and while Joe Mantello's adaptation expands certain passages and reorders others, it sacrifices some of its nuance.

The encouraging words of former elves made good, for instance ("You are not Santa's slave!"), here become a pumped-up punchline, while comments on the intellectually sub-par sound more contemptuous than airy.

Director Stewart Roche brings some things handsomely to life, though, such as O'Donnell carrying his costume like a prison uniform or the onslaught of Christmas Eve presented with the rosy joy of Oliver Stone's Platoon.

Offering a portrait of American excess and the grubby reality of Yuletide commercialism, the Sedaris character isn't as incisive as he might be (and the show is weakened by its desire to see his heart, if not warmed, at least partially thawed). Just refraining from sentimentality, though, for a cheering display of wry misanthropy, it restores the grot to Santa's grotto. 'Tis the season, after all. At 1pm until Dec 20. Also at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum, at 8pm on Dec 19 and 20. PETER CRAWLEY