Reviews

Irish Times writers review a selection of events from the world of arts.

Dialann Ocrais/Diary of a Hunger Strike, Pavilion Theatre, Dublin

"You have to leave the door open for negotiation," Gerry Walsh's plummy British peer tells Paul Kennedy's resolute republican late in Peter Sheridan's 1982 play - now revived in its bilingual version by Belfast's Aisling Ghéar. The history of the republican movement suggests it's not a bad piece of advice.

Sheridan, however, seems more alert to this instruction than the two incarcerated IRA protesters he depicts. Fasting to death in the H Block of Long Kesh, in the pursuit of political status while the world outside takes notice, the hunger strikers are steadily transforming from men into symbols.

And symbols don't negotiate.

Written a year after the death of Bobby Sands, Sheridan's play is scrupulously - sometimes even fretfully - even-handed with that knowledge. His IRA prisoners are certainly not all good, his prison wardens not all bad, even his British peer is not entirely buffoonish. To ensure some distance, perhaps, Sheridan's characters are fictional but their blanket protest, the brown smears caking their cell walls and their political demands are not. Only the names have been changed.

So too has the language. Having translated a number of the play's dialogues into Irish, Gearóid Ó Cairealláin secured the play's eventual Irish premiere (in a Celtic language festival in 1987), while making language in the play another political emblem - a method of resistance.

Sheridan knew the significance and risk of putting real events on the stage, and, on the 25th anniversary of the IRA hunger strikes, you have to remind yourself of his daring. Comparing his prisoners to Beckett's tramps, while also allowing them ample Shakespeare quotation, he sought to transform nationalist politics and raw emotion into theatrical artifice.

Inevitably, though, the symbolism of the hunger strikes cannot be negotiated and Sheridan's balanced drama is overwhelmed. Kennedy's O'Connor, with his long hair, beard and blanket loincloth, couldn't look more Christ-like, and any narrative tension is overridden by the cold facts of history (there is little hope that the peer will return at the eleventh hour with an armful of concessions and Snickers bars). Thus we witness O'Connor's final acts like the stations of the cross. If that sense of pageantry feels uncomfortable in Fiona Leech's accomplished production, it is also the ultimate intention of a hunger strike; a cowing symbol that resonates not just in Long Kesh, but from Calcutta, to Guantánamo Bay, to St Patrick's Cathedral. - Peter Crawley

At Rath Cairn on Friday, then An Cultúrlann, Belfast before a national tour

Hard-Fi, The Ambassador, Dublin

Bands having their songs used in TV adverts is nothing new - step forward, most recently, Jose Gonzalez, of coloured-bouncing- balls-in-the-street fame. But it's still a little depressing that when your writer thinks of Living for the Weekend, Hard-Fi's official Anthem For Disaffected Workaday Youth and the tune most of this jammed venue is here to hear, what leaps to mind is the image of a big white trainer, revolving slowly as if on some kind of microwave turntable, in that ad for a local sportswear chain. Sing it: "I got some money, I just got paid . . ." and wouldn't you like to spend your new-found wedge on a lovely pair of huge white runners? But it's strangely apt: for Staines quartet Hard-Fi have more in common with potential white-trainer-purchasers than with the Dublin hipsterati (largely absent tonight) in their skinny jeans and Urban Outfitters "vintage".

As the title of their debut album Stars of CCTV suggests, these are songs of skint suburban hopelessness: of pointless jobs, kebab-shop fisticuffs and Asbos waiting to happen.

Not that you'd take such downbeat tidings away from this gig. If anything, Hard-Fi's pogoing, hugely melodic mash-up of Clash agit-pop, Television guitars, spooky two-tone melodicas and dub basslines bounding over fizzing disco beats is ultimately about transcendence, and pride, and making magic out of the mundane. As such, the crowd bay along with frontman Richard Archer to even the bleakest numbers, from gritty cinema-verité snapshot Feltham is Singing Out to no-mun-no-fun tirade Cash Machine. Live, they're more incendiary, less polite, than on record, and it's great - particularly during the glorious Hard to Beat, a pounding dancefloor smash involving a more basic kind of social realism: what it is to be young and male and out for the night, the city full of possibility and, not least, hot girls.

They save Living for the Weekend for the encore. "Tomorrow's Wednesday!" Archer reports. "But as far as I'm concerned," he continues, in a hilariously convoluted segue, "tonight's Friday night!" And an Ambassador full of disaffected workaday youths duly go wild. For a moment, we actually forget about the trainers. - Kim V Porcelli

ICO/Boyd, NCH, Dublin

Mendelssohn - String Symphony No 6. Rachel Holstead - (Can't) have your cake and eat it. Bruckner/Boyd - Adagio in G flat. Hindemith - Trauermusik. Janácek/Burghauser/ Boyd - On an Overgrown Path

The danger of having too much lesser music in a programme is that you'll end up with a lesser concert. For his debut with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday James Boyd took on the challenge and fell into the trap.

His programme conformed to the most striking feature of the ICO's current season, the inclusion of unusual arrangements.

Bruckner's Adagio in G flat comes from his mature String Quintet, a work often faulted for the orchestral strivings that the composer appeared unable to contain. It should, then, be more than ripe for orchestral treatment. And indeed it is. But it's the rich-textured warmth and weight of a full symphony orchestra string section that it calls out for, not the lean refinement of a chamber orchestra. Janácek's On an Overgrown Path is a set of miniatures for piano, written in a style that, while not exactly pianistic, perfectly matches the composer's purpose. Tuesday's arrangement sounded at once too different from the original and not different enough. It gave every indication of needing to move further away from piano writing in order to recreate in terms of string sonority the haunting effects Janácek created for just two hands.

Boyd, who cut a kind of puppet-like, almost parodistic figure through the wild gestures of his conducting, secured attractive sonorities and colours in the ICO's performances, as he did in the young Mendelssohn's clearly CPE Bach-influenced String Symphony in E flat. Clarity of line, however, was not one of the strong points in the Mendelssohn performance.

Hindemith's Trauermusik, a work the composer was called upon to write at short notice on the death of King George V, has outlasted in popularity many of his more carefully prepared compositions. Boyd, a viola-player of distinction, was the firm-voiced soloist in this effective elegy.

Kerry-born Rachel Holstead's newly-commissioned (Can't) have your cake and eat it juxtaposes effective, angularly energised sections with passages of more introspective cast. In this performance, the promise of the opening seemed to dissipate, suggesting an at least temporary removal of the parentheses of the title. - Michael Dervan

Repeated at University Concert Hall, Limerick on Sunday