Going out: the best of what's on this week

Monday

Slipknot
SSE Arena, Belfast 6pm £43.50
ssearenabelfast.com

Is it really 20 years since this US metal band first donned masks and scared the bejeebers out of everyone? From their 1996 debut album, Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat., Slipknot have established themselves as one of the most controversial (and popular) metal acts in the genre's history. Support act is Suicidal Tendencies.

The Kings of the Kilburn Highroad
Ramor Theatre, Virginia. Ends Feb 16
ramortheatre.com

“Jobs for the boys, what?” asks one character in Jimmy Murphy’s lugubrious play from 2000, set among the London- Irish exiles of the building trade. It’s more a prayer than a stroke for the men who have gathered in a London bar to wake the death of one of their own, nursing hopes of returning to Ireland as successes, when the truth is more complicated, defeated and bitter. Murphy’s play has been restaged numerous times, filmed in Irish, and once performed by an African cast. Livin’ Dred’s touring production takes a more traditional route with Phelim Drew, Malcolm Adams, Arthur Riordan, Seamus O’Rourke and Charlie Bonner performing for director Padraic McIntyre. Jobs for the boys, what?

Tuesday

All Time Low
3Arena Dublin 8pm €37
ticketmaster.ie

From playing high school gigs to performing at 3Arena, Baltimore’s All Time Low have come a long way. Expect a rake of infectious – if formulaic – punk/pop. Special guests are Good Charlotte.

Helen O'Sullivan Tyrrell 
Solomon Fine Art, Balfe St, Dublin, until March 5
solomonfineart.ie

Tyrrell considers the formation of tribal identity in relation to Irish Catholicism. Her paintings draw on and distil the visual language of a family photograph album.

Wednesday

Julia Holter
Button Factory Dublin 7.30pm €18.50
buttonfactory.ie

Four albums under her belt, and still Julia Holter’s music reigns supreme. Her most recent album – last year’s Have You in My Wilderness –appeared in many end-of-year Top Albums lists, and remains as delicate and jazzy-folky an item as it was five months ago. Gig of the week?

Jon Pickow
The Clé Club, Cois Life Bar, Liberty Hall 8pm €5
087-2387015

Jean Ritchie was a Kentucky song collector and singer who did us all a great service when she collected so many of our songs, back in the 1950s, while a Fulbright scholar. Now, her son, Jon Pickow returns to celebrate the release of Mary McPartlan’s tribute album to his mother, From Mountain to Mountain, this month. Expect Appalachia and Cúl Aodha to coalesce and collide, not to mention many points in between, from both sides of the Atlantic.

My Own Unknown
Photography and video work by Dragana Jurisic.
Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford Until March 12
wexfordartscentre.ie

Emerging Visual Artist Award winner 2014 Dragana Jurisic, working mainly with documentary photography, tells a personal story involving Jurisic, her aunt’s mysterious personal history and a young woman who died in the late 19th century, l’Inconnue de la Seine, whose body was allegedly recovered from the river Seine and whose death mask was cast in a bid to identify her.

Thursday

Shuggie Otis
Sugar Club, Dublin 8pm €27.50
thesugarclub.com

We love people that have extricated themselves from the less appealing aspects of the business that drives their career, deciding instead to do what they do well and in relative seclusion. Otis’s 1974 album, Inspiration Information (and its subsequent re-issue decades later) has increased the man’s profile, but he still takes his time getting here and there, which makes this rare Irish gig all the more special. TCL

There Are Little Kingdoms
Adrian Duncan, Sabina MacMahon, Eamon O'Kane and Kathy Tynan curated by Emma Dwyer. 
Mermaid Arts Centre, Main St, Bray, Co Wicklow. Until March 19
mermaidartscentre.ie

Borrowing its title from Kevin Barry’s collection of short stories, this show features four artists, Adrian Duncan, Sabina Mac Mahon, Eamon O’Kane and Kathy Tynan, each of whom has a surprising take on the world, from the absurd to the unbelievable, the factual to the fictional.

All That Fall
Abbey Theatre. Ends Feb 20 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm & 9pm (Feb 11 7pm & 9pm only) €25/€20
abbeytheatre.ie

You enter a transformed space where mist hangs in the air and light bulbs drip down from above. The ground beneath you is covered by a carpet which might have been borrowed from a playschool. But your seat, an inviting rocking chair cushioned with the image of a skull, looks like the last thing you’ll ever see. Pan Pan’s bold installation performance of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play, first staged in 2011 and lauded at several international appointments since, now comes to the stage of the Abbey Theatre to create a listening chamber, sensationally designed by Aedín Cosgrove.

Beckett’s play mingles sardonic wit with lacerating notes of despair as it follows the aged Maddy Rooney (voiced by Áine Ní Mhuirí) who walks to Boghill station (in the thinly disguised Foxrock of Beckett’s childhood) to collect her blind, cantankerous husband (Andrew Bennett). Along the way, and through Beckett’s deliberately musical structure, she encounters polite and assisting villagers whose good nature deflates as quickly as their bike tyres. Director Gavin Quinn captures the play’s mordancy and stark agnosticism with absolute precision, and sound designer Jimmy Eadie envelops us with its staggering clarity. Beckett, vigorously alive to the potential of each medium, was acutely aware of how to position his audience, and here Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove use the space to give us a sense of radio’s disembodiment while putting us – giddyingly and disconcertingly – directly in Maddy’s head.