Reviews

A round-up of  reviews from the arts world.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

This two-hour version by Frank McGuinness of Brecht's play raises questions of its acceptability for a modern audience. It was written in America in 1943, when the author was possessed of an ideology that time has largely discounted. Who now, for instance, believes that Stalin's drive for collective farming was anything but a disaster for Russians? The play begins with a Prologue in a valley in Georgia, where opposing groups of peasants claim the land, one because they were there first, the other because they can farm it better now. A Storyteller begins to tell of an earlier time, when bloody war broke out in the region. The Governor is thought to have been killed, and his Wife flees, forgetting her baby son. He is rescued by Grusha, a servant, who takes him into the mountains for safety.

There is much activity stitched into Grusha's odyssey, of predatory soldiers, venal peasants and corrupt officials seeking to regain power. The political and human strands are interwoven toward the end when she is confronted by the baby's mother, professing maternal love but really seeking control of the estate. A coarse commoner, Azdak, has fortuitously become a judge, and he solves the question of the baby's true parentage through a variation on the Biblical tale of Solomon in a similar situation.

It all arrives at a conclusion that possessions should go to those best at managing them. There is little here to stimulate the intellect or to engage the audience emotionally. There is, however, a strong element of cogent storytelling enshrined in satirical comedy. As presented by graduating students of the Samuel Beckett School, directed by Dennis Kennedy, that is a fair measure of compensation.

Runs to June 3

Gerry Colgan

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Alice Cooper

Vicar Street, Dublin

Now here's a man who knows how to entertain the troops: fake limbs strewn about the stage, an upright coffin, mannequins that come to life, a portable guillotine, big bouncy balloons that are burst with a thrust of a cutlass, a ballet dancer, mock throat-cutting, a strait-jacket and, in what is surely a first, a whip-wielding vampiric dominatrix. This ridiculous but totally enjoyable show was pretty much the whole enchilada.

Cooper has been blending tongue-in-cheek vaudeville with Rocky Hammer Horror tropes since the early 1970s, and while his cachet has diminished somewhat he's still revered in certain quarters as a heavy metal/hard rock pioneer. And so he takes the pragmatic approach - he surrounds himself with skinny young men dressed in black while he himself remains centre stage at all times, directing the show like the ringmaster in a Circus of Horror. And he plays the hits.

The good songs come thick and fast - School's Out, No More Mr Mister Guy, Billion Dollar Babies, I'm Eighteen, The Ballad of Dwight Fry, I Love The Dead, Elected, Poison; in-between these are the type of standard US rock tunes (Feed My Frankenstein, Lost In America) that exemplify exactly why Cooper's salad days are a wilting memory.

Not that he doesn't realise this - he stalks the stage like an old pro, hamming it up for the curiously mixed, predominantly male audience (teenagers and adults alike sing along to I'm Eighteen, School's Out and, rather worryingly, I Love The Dead), signifying his adherence to the hoary old there's-no-business-like-show-business work ethic.

The saving grace (along with the classic rock songs) is the underlying sense of humour - Cooper knows that his prop-laden show isn't to be taken seriously. He delivers the songs and the silly shock theatrics with a knowing, easy show-me-the-money smile behind the gothic make-up. The man who was awarded "Living Legend" status in 2001 by the International Horror Guild knows only too well that tomorrow afternoon he'll be out on the golf course, challenged more by the tricky approach to the 13th hole than anything he'll be doing on stage the following night.

Tony Clayton-Lea

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Stuart A Staples, with David Kitt, Patrick Freyne And His Bad Intentions

The Sugar Club, Dublin

It is, inadvertently, a Tindersticks theme night. First, the Sugar Club, with its claret drapes, slow-dancey mirrorball and cocktail-ready tables, is dreamed up for a Sticks photo shoot circa 1994. Next, there's Patrick Freyne And His Bad Intentions, a lovechild of early-period Sticks (lanky hair, suitjackets, baritones, yen for Lee Hazlewood) and The Handsome Family (modern complaints involving atheism and the Port Tunnel delivered with cowboy-song foreboding). Scaled down to a fuzzbox-bothering guitarist, a melodica-toting bassist and Freyne himself, the Intentions still manage to make their darkest intentions beautifully plain.

Next is a Small Moment with David Kitt, a longtime Tindersticks friend following tours together and the borrowing of Sticks violinist/arranger Dickon Hinchcliffe for his album, Square 1. His three-song new-album preview is a wonderful reminder of his gift for playing solo, yet evoking whole arrangements with just his dolorous voice draping itself over his folky-modern songs of hope. He recalls his first Tindersticks gig: in the Olympia, accompanied only by a naggin of whiskey. "I just want to thank Stuart, Dave and Neil," he deadpans, "for soundtracking some of the most miserable times of my life."

Misery, however, is decidedly not in our company tonight. Where once Stuart A Staples' Other Band (not together, yet not broken up) looked forward from a vantage point of loss and desolation, ultimately finding a kind of solace in an Al Green-tinted soulfulness, Staples' new songs - Morricone-inflected (to use Stuart's joking phrase) "country-rock" - exude the happiness of finding and being found, accompanied by, thank God, a still-undimmed fire.

With the Sticks Dave Boulter and Neil Fraser marrying their ominous keyboard undertow and mariachi guitars to a new rhythm section, the not-Tindersticks still walk the line between a gentle, waltz-with-your-grandmother gallant romanticism and the bloodiest, most elemental things there are. Few bands, if any, can beat them for pure ebb-and-flow dynamics: Goodbye To Old Friends, from Staples' new album Leaving Songs, swells and subsides like a living thing, his voice still a subterranean swoon, able to evoke entire emotional histories in a single phrase. The tiptoeing Marseilles Sunshine, played ever so quietly along to an old-fashioned metronome, the audience as silent as an empty room, is one of the finest performances we've ever seen.

Given that Staples' other lot used to ram festival tents, it's electrifying to witness such fully realised Cinemascope drama in such a tiny venue, like a spaghetti Western unfurling in your own front room. Nope, no Tindersticks songs; but there was much else.

Kim V Porcelli