Reviews

Irish Times writers review Branwen, Coraline and Holding Hands at Paschendale.

Branwen

Project, Dublin

Branwen, a co-production between Welsh and Irish partners, tells the story of Branwen, a deeply troubled co-production between Welsh and Irish partners. For the sake of North Wales Stage and Project Arts Centre, who last year collaborated on the similarly tri-lingual Frongoch, let's hope their working relationship was less fraught than that of the romantically compromised characters depicted here.

Tempestuous Welshwoman Mari (Ffion Dafis) and sanctimonious Irishman Seán (Stephen Darcy), have an unresolved history - one that originated and abruptly terminated 15 years before in Wales. They now find themselves thrown back together by a cross-cultural funding opportunity.

Commissioned to write a screenplay of Branwen, a medieval Welsh myth that takes place largely in Ireland (itself an out-sized fable about cultural friction), their situation has rich potential for self-aware humour. Sadly, Ifor ap Glyn and Darach Ó Scolaí's script tamps down such opportunities. Just as Seán suggests that a Welsh myth should be told through Irish eyes, but rendered in the guise of a Japanese Manga cartoon, so co-directors Ian Rowlands and Darach Mac Con Iomaire invest more effort in a fun but arbitrary aesthetic.

Consequently English translations of Irish and Welsh dialogue surge and roll around the space in roaming projections, while Tom Rack's multimedia design projects cutesy backdrops for each scene, like a pop-up book brought to life. The script is less agile, its leadenness undisguised by the play's brisk motion from Connemara to Aberystwyth to Wicklow, and dialogue that persists from a restaurant table to a moving car.

Seizing Branwen's slain child as their central metaphor, ap Glyn and Ó Scolaí heavily prefigure Mari's revelations, their overwrought reiterations stranding her in bathos. Meanwhile Brídín Nic Dhonncha (as Seán's shrill wife) and Dafydd Dafis (as a duplicitous producer) are left with little to do other than represent the difficulties of starting and sustaining families.

In the absence of clear political or historical associations - the strengths of Frongoch - this play instead resorts to a melodrama of jilted lovers locked in bathrooms and the clash of cultural stereotypes: the insecure Welsh, the honey-tongued (and apparently alcoholic) Irish. Setting the story of Branwen to one side, the play eventually declares a Celtic kinship between Wales and Ireland founded on second languages, seemingly abandoning one myth for the creation of another. Peter Crawley

Ends tomorrow

Coraline

Project Cube, Dublin

Púca Puppets have come up with a remarkable fusion of Neil Gaiman's much-praised novel for children and their own finely-honed skills in puppetry. The result is a show that entertains adults as much as the 10+-year-olds it is aimed at, a macabre fairytale that patronises neither group.

Caroline and her parents live in part of a huge old house, with eccentric neighbours upstairs and in the basement. Her parents are busy people, and one afternoon the girl goes exploring. She meets an old man who trains mice, and two brisk ladies retired from the theatre. In her own living room she finds a locked door that has been bricked up.

Our enterprising heroine finds the key to unlock the door, which mysteriously now leads to another flat. There she meets two people who claim to be her parents, and who resemble them except for their button eyes and robotic postures. In fact, there is a parallel world behind the door, with red-eyed rats instead of mice - "we are small, but we are many" - and other perversions.

Caroline cannot find her real parents, but eventually discovers them trapped in a mirror. The spirits of dead children are similarly imprisoned, and our heroine must undergo many trials before good triumphs over evil.

Three puppeteers (Margot Jones, Niamh Lawlor and Joseph Moyan) animate the story with a blend of stagecraft, excellent lighting and sound effects, directed by Sue Mythen. There is a balance in the blend of all these elements that stays on the right side of scary, retaining an imaginative grip throughout this impressive creation. Gerry Colgan

Runs to Oct 28; then Nov 1 at Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray

Belfast Festival: Holding Hands at Paschendale

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

The British Government has announced the news the Shot at Dawn campaign had worked toward for 15 years - that posthumous pardons were to be granted to 306 young soldiers executed as deserters in the first World War. This is the fate awaiting Private Mo Coutts, a none-too-bright Cockney lad, whose involuntary arrest by a fellow soldier, Gunner Willie Harvey, is the turning point of Martin Lynch's powerful new double-hander.

Harvey and Coutts make a dramatic arrival into the squalor of Mike Lees's true-to-life tumbledown barn in a muddy field in war-torn Flanders. After days and nights of bombardment, Harvey has seen boy soldiers dying terrible deaths and himself responsible for the slaughter of many of the enemy, caught in the firing line of his massive Howitzer.

Coutts has endured unspeakable horrors in the trenches, fighting alongside his kid brother Charlie. But something has happened which has caused Coutts to crack up and say "No more". As a result of his perceived cowardice in the heat of battle, he has found himself handcuffed to this dour, tough-talking Belfast squaddie, the two of them forced to spend every hour until the court marshall shackled together.

There can be nothing but praise for the outstanding performances of Ciaran McMenamin as Harvey and Freddy White as Coutts, both deeply damaged young men, each nursing private pain but handling it in very different ways. Lynch's writing is rich, pithy, funny and goes acutely to the point of their shared anguish. They have no choice but to become two sides of the same coin, witnessing the most intimate moments of each other's daily routine and slowly finding unsuspected common ground.

Hannah Eidinow's sensitive direction plots a subtle crossing of story arcs, as Harvey's swagger drops away to reveal the vulnerability beneath and Coutts rids himself of his emotional baggage to square up boldly to the inevitable. A ghastly Golgotha-like landscape hovers outside, reminding us of the evil atrocity of the killing fields, wherever and whenever they may be. Jane Coyle

Runs until Nov 4, then touring to Newry, Shankill, Maghaberry Prison, Cushendall, Derry, Carrickmore, Bangor, Cookstown, Newtownabbey, Lisburn and Downpatrick