Arts Reviews

Coutney's 90-minute play is the culmination of Dublin Youth Theatre's Script Development Programme, selected for production out of eight entries. It concerns itself, appropriately, with problems of youth, but with an unusually bleak perspective.

Some Kind of Beautiful

Project Cube, Dublin

Debbie and Karen are two attractive young women who suffer respectively from anorexia and manic depression. The play has them tell of their slide into these essentially psychiatric ailments in alternating pieces of monologue, voicing their interior thoughts. After puberty, Debbie begins to dislike her body, seeing it as pudgy and unattractive. She thinks of her creator as a sculptor who got it wrong, and determines to create her own image. Karen suffers from severe mood swings.

When diagnosis arrives via the efforts of parents and doctors, they do not take gratefully to it or to the prescribed treatments. Karen resents her psychiatrist as a sort of puppeteer who prises her away from an exciting life into a drug-controlled monotony. Debbie plays manipulative games with her parents. Karen stops taking the lithium, with inevitable consequences.

We leave them frustrating their helpers and resisting cure.

The young author writes impressively, but in a literary rather than dramatic idiom. Her monologues do not fit easily into the mould of spoken thought, leaning rather towards self-conscious imagery at odds with the realism of her characters' situations.

But one can see why her work impressed the competition judges, and it is well interpreted here by two natural actors in Niamh Molloy and Elaine O'Dea. Raymond Keane directs them with balance and sensitivity. - Gerry Colgan

Runs until Nov 9th; Booking: 01-8819613

Massive

Errigle Bar, Belfast

Tinderbox and Maria Connolly go back a long way. As an actress, she was cast in two of its landmark productions, Language Roulette and Convictions, one of the outstanding events of the 2000 Belfast Festival.

Two years on, the company has commissioned her first stage play, a promising tilt at 30 years of the Northern Ireland Troubles, filtered through the irreverent eyes of a couple of young DJs and a club dancer.

Shrewdly seizing upon the continuing need to extend and expand Belfast Festival audiences, Massive is running late night at the Errigle Bar, a popular watering hole on the south side of the city. Its cheeky, zappy content, complete with driving hip-hop/garage soundtrack by Jules Maxwell, vinyl-lined record shop set by Stuart Marshall, and energetic young cast, is certainly attracting a gratifyingly mixed clientele, determined to enjoy a few drinks and a lot of laughs.

It is impossible not to be fired up by Packy Lee's irrepressible Phelim - stage name DJ Good Friday Agreement - who has had the brainwave of adapting the familiar litany of Troubles tragedies to a dance album, which he believes will make his fortune. Come on, he says, let's put the past behind us and make a few bob out of it in the process. So far, so good.

But, under Simon Magill's direction, the early momentum peters out, with newcomers Ruairi Tohill and Bronagh Taggart as, respectively, DJ H Block 007 and dancer Snake being given insufficient script opportunities to do much except vocalise the old familiar mantra about Belfast children growing up in mean streets.

The arrival of Drew Thompson's promoter Tarrot, briefly, raises the tension, but, again, it is neither sustained nor substantiated.

All of which is a pity, as Massive has a great starting point and achieves two surreally funny set pieces - Taggart's balaclava clad, boot stomping take on Riverdance, and Lee's pathetically manic microphone routine, bellowing his head off as five minutes of fame fleetingly beckon's. - Jane Coyle

Massive is at the Errigle Bar until November 10th. Bookings from Festival box office, on Belfast, 90665577

Nikolai Demidenko

Elmwood Hall, Belfast

Praeludium and Fugue in C K394.......Mozart

Adagio in B minor K540.............Mozart

Andante in F K616........Mozart

Allegro in B flat (Sophie and Constanze) K410.......Mozart

Sonata in A minor K310.......Mozart

The island beyond the world..........Philip Hammond

Sonata quasi una fantasia Op 20............Vorísek

Sonata in A minor D 784..........Schubert

Written for Demidenko's 2001 Irish tour, Philip Hammond's The Island beyond the world is to be played with very careful, subtle expression. As an atmospheric study which relies on nuance for its effect, it found its ideal exponent in Demidenko; as a piece which explores pedal sonorities and the deeper reaches of the piano it contrasted well with the rest of the programme.

Demidenko's touch was as beautiful and even as ever in the Mozart group, and if the Andante in F never went beyond its exquisite surface, one shouldn't expect hidden depths to a piece written for mechanical organ.

There was a certain superficiality about the B flat Allegro, and even the first movement of the A minor Sonata, as if Demidenko was showing off his effortless technique; but he was happier in the turbulent finale, and in the emotional depths of the Adagio in B minor and the extraordinary (and neglected) Praeludium and Fugue in C, where a Baroque-inspired, but not academic fugue follows a dazzling, improvisatory Prelude, whose style and spirit looks forward to the romantic era.

The B flat minor sonata by Vorísek, a younger contemporary of Beethoven, is another extraordinary work, full of robust Beethovenian energy and burgeoning romanticism.

But, inevitably, it was the late Schubert A minor Sonata, with its "Unfinished" style outbursts and violent contrasts of volume and dynamic, which demanded - and got - the greatest interpretative commitment, the driving finale being particularly impressive.

Field's Nocturne No 9 in E flat made an attractive encore. - Dermot Gault