Reviews

Irish Times writers review How To Act Around Cops at the Mill Theatre at Dundrum Town Centre, and Roxy Music at Dublin's Vicar St.

How To Act Around Cops

The Mill Theatre, Dundrum Town Centre

Peter Crawley

Late at night, on a Nevada highway, a car is pulled over by a cop. If the wired and jittery passengers inside aren't breaking the law, they should have nothing to worry about, but Barnum (Dermot Magennis) and Madson (Brendan McDonald) seem very worried indeed. Somebody's handbag is in their backseat - containing cocaine and a gun - while ominous dull thuds emanate from the boot.

"Hide the shit!" says one. "What shit?" asks the other, and, in the implausibly long time it takes Stewart Roche's lone cop to approach, they suspect that "the shit here could be bad shit." These are all good points, cogently argued and amusingly delivered, but like so much of PurpleHeart Theatre Company's enjoyable production, very little of it makes any sense.

Indeed, John O'Brien's direction (and Simon Maxwell murky lighting) seems intent on stringing us along while keeping us in the dark. Not that the characters know much more than we do. Madson has amnesia brought on by a recent epileptic fit; Barnum is "confused and excited" having swallowed a bag of cocaine, and even before we meet Dean (Graham Cruz) and Steph (Katy Davis) in a motel room, who are either a rapist and his victim, or a kinky couple engaging in some role-play, the characters resemble blank slates, more concerned with proposition than exposition. If you can follow the plot, you're not paying attention.

This nicely subverts PurpleHeart's professed fondness for naturalism, the tone of Logan Brown and Matthew Benjamin's script pivoting between the confusion of film noir, the creeping horror of Edgar Allen Poe, the narcotic frenzy of a heist-gone-wrong and the elliptical momentum of Theatre of the Absurd. Swathes of it play out like Quentin Tarantino rewriting Eugene Ionesco, and it's as thrilling and frustrating as that implies.

Interestingly, the subtext is sturdier - at times it seems to be an exploration of the paranoia-guilt dialectic of post 9/11 America, with a mesh of uncertain threats and dark secrets. More often it resembles a meta-theatrical game where nobody onstage has a history before the curtain raised, developing their characters like chaotic improvisers: how to act, indeed.

With the laudable exception of Graham Cruz's nicely judged performance (in his professional stage debut) the performers eventually succumb to a din of hysteria, which serves as a climax. Equally confused and excited, the play itself seems unsure about its appeal. Early on, one character assessed the situation succinctly: "Is this fucked up?" he wondered, "or is it cool?" Our thoughts exactly.

Until July 15

Roxy Music

Vicar St, Dublin

Kevin Courtney

It's a memory we still cherish: Roxy Music on Top of the Pops, resplendent in glittery, space-age teddy-boy gear, thrilling the impressionable teens with their debut single Virginia Plain. Nearly 35 years later, the remaining three members of that first line-up - Bryan Ferry, Phil Manzanera and Andy McKay - are onstage in Vicar St, and, somewhere inside us, that teenager is waiting to be wowed all over again. But we also know deep inside that it just ain't gonna happen.

Old smoothie Ferry exudes vintage sophistication in his suit and shiny shoes, but at 60 he's more like a fine port than a fizzy champagne, and his delivery is suitably reserved and reticent.

The extended band includes backing vocalist Joy Malcom, keyboardist Colin Good, impossibly young guitarist Ollie Thompson and drummer Andy Newark, standing in for original drummer Paul Thompson, who is ill.

Oddly, with so many musicians onstage, it all sounds staid and sedate, and only the odd burst of sax from McKay breaks through the veneer. The band delivers an early highlight with Remake/Remodel, track one side one from their fab, self-titled 1972 debut, and if they'd elected to play the album in its entirety, Dark Side of the Moon-style, we wouldn't have minded at all. But since Roxy long ago abandoned their early avant-garde stance for a cosier, middle-of-the-road pose, this was too much of a thrill to hope for.

They did play Bogus Man, one of the lesser treasures from For Your Pleasure, and Prairie Rose, from Country Life, but it was Song for Europe, from Stranded, with its swelling piano intro and spoken French lyrics, that very nearly captured Roxy's early glory. Then, deciding they'd kept the disco fans waiting long enough, they coasted through their big, shiny hits, including Both Ends Burning, Avalon, More than This, Love is the Drug and the John Lennon song, Jealous Guy, which they've pretty much made their own - after smoothing out the edges, of course.

To keep our teen spirits up, they also threw in Pyjamarama, Editions of You and a gloriously camp Do the Strand, then finished with that very song that started our unrequited love affair with Roxy - Virginia Plain.