Reviews

Irish Times critics review Drive-By Truckers and The Sleeping Beauty.

Drive-By Truckers Whelan's Dublin

The world done gone crazy. While those fancy New York city types have recently adopted country music, the US capital of hip hop has been relocated to Houston, Texas. Well, Alabama's Drive-By Truckers don't take kindly to dispossession.

Among a heaving, rowdy, predominantly male and resolutely flannel-shirted crowd in Whelan's, the whiskey flows, the beer stays frosty and cups of camomile tea are not immediately forthcoming. In fact, the crowd is so fist pumping, gosh-darned serious, that for a while I think I'm in the wrong place.

Since their formation, 10 years ago, there always been something almost parodic about the Drive-By Truckers' blue-collar roots music. Southern rock tends to be associated with red-neck defiance, not college humour, but it's hard to release albums entitled Gangstabilly, Southern Rock Opera or - my favourite - Pizza Deliverance, without seeming slyly subversive.

Guitars don't wink, however, and in the delirious excess of stomping rhythm work, frequent three-chord punches, or the unsteady wobble of a howling lead guitar, it's a brave listener who chooses not to take them seriously.

Not that they always make it easy. Women Without Whiskey blares out in a boozy slur over brawling guitars. Decoration Day is a dirge of chewed up emotion: "I've a mind to roll a stone on his grave. But what would he say? 'Keeping me down, boy, won't keep me away'." And Goddamn Lonely Love proves that the Truckers' muse comes in only two flavours: bellicose and morose.

Playing up the mythology of hard living and much harder drinking, they invoke whiskey, tequila, vodka and either "your daddy" or "my daddy" so frequently they seem like regular characters in a soap opera.

The Drive-By Truckers' show surges with such high spirits and tense intimacy. It's a boozy bonhomie that could spill so easily into an ocean of tears, or, at the very least, one heck of a bar fight. - Peter Crawley

The Sleeping Beauty Cork Opera House

It is an astonishing truth that The Sleeping Beauty, that story of evil and rescue, has little drama as a ballet. Even assisted by Tchaikovsky's occasionally seductive score it is most often presented - and this Ellen Kent touring production featuring the Chisinau State Ballet is no exception - as a succession of displays of technical brilliance.

That absence of character or personality can be forgiven when, again as in this case, the gap is filled by visual enchantment.

The costumes by Viacheslav Okunev and Irina Press are in the grand style of the court of Louis XIV and setting after setting is draped with vistas and arches and noble garden terraces. Dancing Petipa's original and challenging choreography with elan the principals - Kristina Terentieva, Alexei Terentiev, Natalia Korotkova, Rada Duminika and Arkadii Nazarenko - are of unvarying excellence and are supported by an accomplished corps.

Conducted by Svetlana Popova the orchestra of the Chisinau National Ballet is a welcome if somewhat tentative presence, although despite such bravura pleasures as the Rose Adagio and the fairy-tale divertissements, the major solo of this performance comes from the orchestra pit and leader Olga Vlaicu.

Ends tonight; Swan Lake opens tomorrow - Mary Leland