Arts Reviews

Tillsonburg at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght is reviewed by Fintan O'Tooleand the performance of Sonique at the Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublinis reviewed by Peter Crawley

Tillsonburg, Civic Theatre, Tallaght

Given how many young Irish people work abroad as students or on their travels, it is remarkable how little the experience has been reflected in writing. The life of Irish Gastarbeiter in Germany was featured in work by Dermot Bolger and Michael O'Loughlin in the 1980s. But there is no Irish Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

After 1990, Tillsonburg, Malachy McKenna's remarkable first play, has the field pretty much to itself. First staged at the Focus in 2000 and produced in Toronto a year later, it is revived now by the Focus for a tour in association with the Irish Touring Company.

Tillsonburg is set on a tobacco farm on the shores of Lake Erie in Ontario, where two young Irishmen work for the summer. Digger, played by McKenna himself, is from a farm in Roscommon, a garrulous, hard-drinking, apparently happy-go-lucky fellow with an open smile and a ready wit. His pal Mac (Charlie Bonner) is quieter and more inward, an anthropology postgrad with all the wariness of a man encountering a lost tribe for the first time.

In the exclusively male environment they enter, there are three Canadians. They work for Jon (Brent Hearne), a farmer whose charm hides, for a while, the torment of failure and loss. They share the bunkhouse with Billy (Paul Roe), a weird, drug-addled loser. And the place is haunted by Pete the Indian, a Native American who has taken Jon's wife and seems to want his land as well.

Tillsonburg works on two levels. As a relatively conventional study of character and situation, it is brilliantly achieved. The structure - establish the characters, suck us in with humour, then gradually darken the palette as the hints of dark revelations gather force - is familiar enough. But McKenna handles it with the skills of a real dramatist.

Liam Heffernan's finely tuned production displays all the virtues of the writing: the light touch of the characterisation, the energy of the dialogue, the controlled shifts of tone and mood. With an excellent cast revelling in the confidence created by these qualities, Tillsonburg keeps its grip with an assurance remarkable for a first play.

There is another level of the play, though, and it is more problematic. It is, as you gradually realise, a Western. If Robert Lane's well-wrought bunkhouse set looks a little familiar, it's because we've seen it, in a slightly more archaic form, in all those meanwhile-back-at- the-ranch scenes.

The prowling, enigmatic Pete the Indian is, well, the archetypal movie Indian - dispossessed, pagan, brooding, threatening. And the dark revelation of what really happened to the Irish boys the previous summer in New York would not be out of place in a cowboy movie. Mac and Digger are haunted by a sense of cowardice, the shame that arises when buddies don't live up to the manly code of looking out for each other.

The core of this back story is in fact much more raw and emotionally honest than the familiar formula would suggest. McKenna is dealing with the tension between the manly code and the reality of humiliation and powerlessness. But the cutting edge of this honesty is blunted by the way it emerges. Mac and Digger confront themselves in the John Wayne way: while fending off a mad, knife-wielding Indian.

There is thus, in the second half of the play, an odd mix of raw, freshly observed reality and second-hand movie cliché. This in itself is not completely inappropriate to the dramatic situation. People do, after all, bring with them on their travels the movie stereotypes that constitute most of what they think they know about the place they are visiting. But instead of playing with these received images, McKenna ends up to some degree imprisoned by them.

For all that, Tillsonburg is a hugely impressive debut. McKenna already knows how to do the hard things that a good play demands, and he delivers all the basics required for an absorbing and enjoyable piece of theatre. The rest will come with time.  Fintan O'Toole

Until Saturday, then tours to Derry, Armagh, Lisburn, Castlebar, Galway, Kildare, Kilkenny and Cork

Sonique

Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin

Caught in the frame of a picture- messaging mobile phone, Sonique appears every millimetre the superstar DJ. But if her likeness is supposed to transmit musical associations to comrades in late-night taxi queues, Sonique's sound shreds expectations.

The erratic journey of the British multitasker has taken in one half of dance-pop duo S'Express, a career as one of the few female DJs to achieve international success and a chart-topping stint as a solo artist.

Such confusing diversity was made more complicated when, two years ago, Sonique announced she was quitting club land for good.

Tonight, though, club land isn't at all sure what to make of Sonique. Attended by flash young dance diehards, who have shelled out for clubbing holidays in Ibiza and, of course, gimmicky mobile phones, the gig finds Sonique keen to peddle a current preoccupation: the heaviest of house beats.

"Hope it's not too hard for you," jokes Sonique at one point, with the witty understatement of a dentist who says this may hurt a bit.

Amid whiplash rhythms, the occasional rubbery backspin and relentless but seamless mixing, Sonique's DJ manner is beaming and engaged, never suffering from the patronising clichés of so many of house's keepers.

She refrains from pointless pointing - to the sky, the crowd, the nearest bus stop - and intelligence-insulting calls and responses. But she also eschews crowd-pleasing flourishes, or even strict "four-to-the-floor" obviousness, in favour of getting through as much obscure vinyl as possible.

Some of the crowd are unimpressed, unused to being challenged on a dance floor where predictability is a virtue. Only the enormous pop hit It Feels So Good comes as expected, but beyond the familiar timbre of her voice its crushing rendition carries the insistence of someone who won't be confined by a single image.  Peter Crawley