Reviews

Maybe it's the bright summer evening, maybe it's the festival atmosphere, maybe it's the remembered thrill of holiday trains from this very platform, maybe it's just the sense of expectation which makes the gathering for the take-off of The Train Show on the Cobh line at Kent Station seem linked by a sense of lively good humour.

But maybe, too, it's the recollection that Tom Creed, director of this show for Once Off Productions and Playgroup, usually delivers the goods, theatrically speaking.

Except this isn't a theatre. This is a train, caught by three harried commuters, whose personal space is invaded by passengers boarding at each stop. The line winds along the edge of the inner harbour and at Dunkettle a choir - "Take the last train to Clarksville" natch! - comes on, at Glounthaune, it's a band of protesters: "Seats are for feet!", "Don't mind the gap!". At Fota it's a menagerie of simian instrumentalists - The Monkees, natch! - at Carrigaloe it's a group of in-your-face lovers whose orgy creates enough steam to power the train itself.

In all this the commuters, propped by mobile phones, ear-plugs, lap-tops, yoga-mats and newspapers, try to isolate themselves from their fellow passengers. It's all a bit frenetic, a good laugh, a bit surreal. Except, as Cobh swings into view and its expanse of harbour activity announces another world entirely, the fact that this is cruelly real, this is how we live now, becomes poignant and unarguable.

Crowded and fast-moving as the action may be, its narrative is held together by Hilary O'Shaughnessy, Siobhan McSweeney and Paul Mulcahy, and the train, the regular passenger train from Cork to Cobh and also carrying regular commuters, was kept on track by Donal Tobin of Iarnród Éireann.

Moving the action from public to private transport, the second Once Off production of the festival is Drive-By, written by Tom Swift, directed by Jo Mangan and performed against the pleated towers of the grain silos which once dominated Cork's port industry.

Exploring the lure of fast cars for young men, this keeps the audience locked - windows closed, lights off, radios on - in their own vehicles parked according to torch-lit directions. At first austere ("Oh, God, not another abandoned warehouse/factory/wharf/ siding!"), the setting has a majesty of its own, dwarfing the cast (Tadhg Murphy, Ailish Symons and Aidan Turner) and illuminating the conflict between the permanent and the perishable through lively performances, some very fast acceleration and Arno Nauwels' lighting. - Mary Leland

The Train Show at Kent Station to July 1st, 8pm and 9.30pm. Drive-By at Kennedy Quay to July 1, 11pm and midnight. (1890-200555)

A Well Worn Tale - Mill Theatre, Dundrum

In a profession not known for its mercy, the poet and author Dorothy Parker stood out as an unforgiving theatre critic. Many critics after her have been as sardonic, but none, to my mind, ever claimed to have shot themselves during a performance. "It was, unhappily, a nothing," she wrote, "a mere scratch."

What Parker might have made of White Feather Theatre Company's tribute to her, a lunchtime dramatisation of two of her short stories, is anyone's guess. The first tale, Here We Are, forms a natural dialogue between two newly-weds aboard a train. It also has an irresistible line. Upon hearing that they have been married for two hours and 26 minutes, the wife responds, "My, it seems like longer."

That tells you all you need to know about Parker's view of marriage, where rowing quickly becomes a substitute for another activity. But if Parker's story has the pursed-lipped detachment of a conversation wryly overheard, it is not a luxury afforded to Anne O'Gorman's production. As Jason Healy and Olga Conway prove, performing these characters is a thankless task; Parker is too aloof with her subjects to have granted them any humanity.

Instead she has given them the slang of the 1920s, the "aw, swell", "darn well", and screwball twists of double negatives: "Well, I'm not so sure I'm not sorry I didn't!" Healy and Conway may have learned these words, but sadly they've abandoned the necessary voice. In their thin south Dublin tones, the roaring 20s ring out with a contemporary whimper.

This is a greater problem in Diary of a New York Lady, performed by Conway as a monologue, in which the ironic emphasis of a terminally addled debutante ("He is the wittiest number in the entire world; he couldn't be more perfect.") attains the sing-song banality of a phone conversation on the back of the 46A. Nor does a perfunctory arc into pathos ring true (this woman's life is empty, we are made to understand). Parker, however, seemed perfectly content to abandon this creature to her own vapidity. Clearly attracted by Parker's wit, White Feather's production can't delve below its glittering surface. It is, unhappily, a nothing; a mere scratch. - Peter Crawley

Until July 2, at 1pm (lunch included)

West Cork Chamber Music Festival - Bantry House, Co Cork

The highlights of Tuesday's concerts were vocal. Soprano Aylish Tynan's recital was like a master class, not only in the creation of a well-balanced programme and the stylish vocal delivery of it, but also in the altogether rarer skills of personal presentation and homely-seeming but unerringly effective audience management.

There were omissions in the printed texts of the opening group of seven songs by Richard Strauss, so Tynan introduced them herself, telling them as stories and often adopting a tone of wide-eyed innocence that had the audience in fits of laughter. The laughter served a deeper purpose, too, since some of the songs are what you might call high-class musical confectionery, and Tynan's introductions lightened the air to set a perfect mood for the music.

Vocally, the young soprano was scarcely recognisable as the performer who sang some of these same songs as recently as the Vogler Spring Festival in May. This time around the intimacy and the chatter as well as the surging lines and sudden contrasts of Strauss's writing were entirely at her command. The same depth of vocal and musical artistry was lavished on four songs by Duparc and a selection from Aaron Copland's Old American Songs. Julius Drake was her imaginative partner at the sometimes stressed-sounding small grand in Bantry House's Gobelin Drawing Room.

Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry of 1948 is a cycle that would, I suspect, be heard a lot more frequently save for the fact that it requires three singers. Its title tells a lot about its musical nature, and Shostakovich was stimulated by the fact that "A cheerful melody is built here on sad intonations . . . Why does he sing a cheerful song? Because he is sad at heart." Shostakovich's settings, with texts modified for Soviet sensibilities ("collective farms"), have a heart-tugging directness, in spite of the paradoxes, and soprano Charlotte Riedijk, mezzo soprano Lyudmila Shkirtil, and tenor Artjom Korotkov, with Yuri Serov at the piano, brought these sometimes spare, sometimes luscious settings fully to life.

Dmitri Smirnov's Seventh Quartet (Homage to Shostakovich) proved the most interesting of this year's commissioned works, with, at its core in the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's performance, a slow, sustained, keening melody that meanders affectingly, and a perky Shostakovich quotation (from the Third Quartet), which is made to unwind and deform.

The day's performances also included a lively account of Mozart's Piano and Wind Quintet (pianist Julius Drake with Nicholas Daniel, oboe, Paul Meyer, clarinet, Premysl Vojta, horn, and Sarah Burnett, bassoon), and Shostakovich's stark, uncompromising 1968 Violin Sonata, a 60th birthday present for the great violinist David Oistrakh, played with gritty determination by Patrycja Piekutoswska (violin) and Konstantin Lifschitz (piano). - Michael Dervan