Reviewed: Alice Trilogy and Everyday

Alice Trilogy Peacock Theatre

If Tom Murphy has come to be regarded as a writer of operatic range, affording dialogue the grace of arias while achieving emotional finales of almost unbearable potency, his most recent work, Alice Trilogy, is a different type of music. Fractured but focused, these three plays about one woman vary in tone and style, together forming an elliptical suite. Its movements evince a lifetime.

Premiered nearly a year ago in the Royal Court, and finally reaching home shores in a revised version under Murphy's own assured direction, Alice Trilogy turns away from the unity of time and space in many of the writer's works. There is little sense here of the bruising journeys made in The Sanctuary Lamp, Bailegangaire or The Gigli Concert, plays that stagger through long dark nights of the soul, finally glimpsing the daylight.

Alice Trilogy is at once more expansive - chronicling Jane Brennan's stymied Alice across 25 years - and more restricted: the drama here is essentially limited to the mind of the character.

The first play, In The Apiary, set in the 1980s, finds a 25-year-old Alice taking stock of her life and her mental well-being. Given that the mother of three has snuck up to the roof with a picnic, a whiskey bottle and a strange, interrogating apparition (Mary Murray), that stock appears to be depreciating. "There's a strange, savage, beautiful and mysterious country inside me," Alice says, and in her depression, sardonic self-loathing and unnervingly bleak laughter, flow the dark undercurrents of an Ireland springing into affluence.

In the second play, By The Gasworks Wall, set some 15 years later, she meets her childhood sweetheart, now a media celebrity - played by Robert O'Mahoney as part-idealist, part-narcissist, obsessed with reclaiming the "authenticity" of lost innocence. Alice, aware that it is a fable, insists instead on pursuing reality, but the sequence is still shrouded in fantasy - a point nicely accentuated by designer Johanna Connor, whose set has the solid texture of concrete but the curling contours of a dream.

At The Airport, the final play, is more formally ambitious, yet less involving. Retreating into a monologue while the world around her becomes muted, a 50-year-old Alice becomes entombed in third-person narration.

"Looking at it rationally, the worst has happened," she tells herself, the loss of a child moving her towards a surge of Beckettian disembodiment.

Murphy ultimately ruptures her solipsism in a moment of profound connection with a minor character. But the gesture feels forced: Alice's mind has become such a dark cloud and Brennan's performance so commanding that it obliterates all around her. Until Nov 4 - Peter Crawley

Everyday Samuel Beckett Theatre

One day in the life of the city of Dublin - taking up the challenge set by James Joyce, writer Michael West and Corn Exchange theatre company present a composite portrait of everyday life in Dublin 2006, seeking the epic in the ordinary. Anxiety and a sense of loss permeate the disparate lives presented by the ensemble, as characters attempt to adapt to social change and the unkindness of strangers. Moving through the city - as immigrant workers, mothers, widowers, singletons - their lives overlap occasionally, but each is presented in isolation. Only in the supermarket and the superpub do they converge, united briefly as consumers.

With complex choreography on a bare stage, delicately backlit by a changing cloudscape, this is a typically ambitious undertaking by the company, which, under Annie Ryan's direction, continues its exploration of performance styles and theatrical form. Here her customary Commedia dell'Arte mode - with actors in mask make-up performing to a strict staccato rhythm - is softened by the addition of interior monologues and third-person narration, losing considerable impact by the dilution.

Intricate but sometimes opaque mime sequences provide detail, as, without props or set, each member of the excellent cast - Derbhle Crotty, Janet Moran, Andrew Bennett, Mark O'Halloran, Tom Murphy, Louise Lewis and Simon Rice - conveys the characters' stories. Humorous in-jokes are interwoven - from references to Lolita, staged by the company in 2002, to the reuniting of Mark O'Halloran and Tom Murphy in a fleeting Adam and Paul moment.

Other cinematic influences are evident too, from the Italian neo-realists and Wim Wenders to more recent American ensemble films. The resulting sense of fluidity is impressive, but the impression remains that more attention has been paid here to form than content. Memorably rich moments such as the beautiful opening tableau, recurring half-way through, with all the characters clustered, almost connecting, are outweighed by the overextended series of cartoonish vignettes, especially in the opening sequences, where characters are established in broad brushstrokes.

Some are too cliched or stereotyped to sustain our interest over 90 minutes; the Ukrainian barmaid/au pair comes across as a tokenistic attempt to incorporate immigration. The life-stories, developed through workshops, seem too generic to have a real impact, while the reconciliations and hints of new possibilities at the end feel unearned. In depicting the transformation of Dublin into a simulacrum of every other Western city, a sense of universality might have been better conveyed by delving more deeply into its particularity, rather than setting this "everyday" in an "everywhere".

Until Oct 28 - Helen Meany