For much of the last 50 years, Ireland has been conducting an argument between tradition and modernity. The row is over now. Looking back, we can see how crude these terms are, how inadequate such a simple opposition has always been.
Sive
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
Irish culture has always had the ability to be more than one thing at any one time. John B. Keane's extraordinary 1959 play, Sive, is a case in point. We can see it as an almost mediaeval work, whose story of the sale of a poor young girl to a rich old man could be set, with few changes, in almost any part of the world at any time in the last 700 years. Or we can see it as a sharp, realistic response to the exhaustion of the Ireland of de Valera and the birth of the Ireland of Lemass.
And now, thanks to Garry Hynes's fierce yet poetic production for Druid, we can see it as both. As the first posthumous staging of Keane's greatest play, this one has the feeling of a retrospective view that can take in the entire landscape he travelled.
Roughly speaking, Sive's history has had two chapters. In its early days, when it welled up from the very roots of rural Ireland with an unstoppable force, it was seen as a folk drama - powerful but primitive. Then, in 1985, Ben Barnes's superb production at the Abbey humanised it into a realistic social drama, with the central character, Mena Glavin, becoming less a wicked witch and more a tragic heroine.
Hynes has now added a third chapter, which is a synthesis of the other two. The core of Sive, she suggests, is that it unfolds in a world that has layers of reality.
There is a social and economic reality: Mena desperately trying to escape from poverty, to establish a modern nuclear family, to be part of the new Ireland that is struggling to be born.
And there is a spiritual reality: a world of curses and blessings, of pure goodness and pure evil, of paganism fused with Christianity.
The trick, of course, is to make these two realities cohere on the stage. Hynes, her terrific design team and her outstanding cast achieve this by following a rather neglected aspect of Keane's achievement: his language.
Keane's language is realistic, in the sense that it uses a recognisable version of the Hiberno-English of north Co Kerry. But in the mouth of the magnificent Derbhle Crotty as Mena, and the wonderfully mad Eamon Morrissey as greedy matchmaker Thomasheen Sean Rua, we remember that Keane must also have been reading Shakespeare and Synge.
All the actors use thick rural accents, so that Keane's language becomes as viscous as clotted cream. And the rich strangeness of what we hear is matched by what we see. Francis O'Connor's long, hollow rectangular set is like an old Abbey box set that has scorched in a fire. Its dirty grey tones are lit by Davy Cunningham in glimmers and afterglows that place us in the perpetual gloom of a world before electricity.
These inspired designs have the effect of pushing every streak of colour that enters the frame to the limits of visual intensity. When Ruth Bradley's sparkling Sive enters in the last act, decked out for the sacrifice in a garish red dress, the effect is genuinely shocking. Her abandoned red high-heeled shoes, sitting towards the front of the stage, have all the power of the strange portents that presage doom in a Greek tragedy.
What Hynes is doing here is placing Keane in an Irish Gothic tradition that hovers between the real and fantastic. She reinforces this shift through brilliant use of the minor characters. Liam Scuab, often a too-good-to-be-true drip, is played by Barry Ward as a kind of village Christ. The men of the roads, Pats Bocock and Carthalawn, become, in Frank O'Sullivan and Peter Halpin's trance-like performances, ghostly emanations from an otherworldly realm. Noel O'Donovan plays the rich old farmer, Sean Dota, as a sinister compound of childish idiocy and monstrous lust.
Yet all of this poetic stylisation is applied with enough restraint to allow for the more recognisable social and psychological realities to be given their due. Crotty's performance as Mena, Gary Lydon's as her husband, Mike, and Anna Manahan's as his mother, Nana, are all beautifully attuned to the human truths of people trying to achieve decent goals in an indecent world.
Held in a masterful balance, these forces create a sumptuous drama that could not tackle harder or drive on more relentlessly if it had been written by Roy rather than the late, great John B. - Fintan O'Toole
Runs until September 21st (box office: 091- 569 777), then tours in Cork and Ennis before returning to Dublin at the Olympia Theatre from October 8th to 26th.
Cinerama
Spirit, Dublin
Gedge is a textbook indie-rock milksop. In the early 1990s, he fronted The Wedding Present, an introverted guitar-pop act that racked up an unlikely string of chart hits. Gedge's new group, Cinerama, delves even deeper into his seemingly inexhaustible well of melancholy, peddling stark odes to unrequited loved and suburban disaffection.
In concert, Gedge did little to belie his über-nerd persona. Sporting an unruly fringe and a horrendous orange sweatshirt, he could have passed as Morrissey's geeky younger brother. Yet his tone was arch and wry, and when facing down hecklers he displayed the casual aplomb of a seasoned showman.
Opening with a squall of distortion-showered fretwork , Gedge delivered a robust, hook-laden set; a blithe greatest hits package received deliriously by an audience comprised almost uniformly of sweaty, scowling blokes shuffling diffidently towards their mid-30s.
Stifled ambitions hobbled much of the material. Gedge and his fans know what they like - straitlaced verse/chorus guitar anthemia - and are loathe to dabble in unexplored territory. Thus, numbers which might have benefited from an overtly experimental tilt came unstuck as Gedge imposed an inflexible generic framework.
Wavering somewhere between a misfiring foghorn and a drunken slur, Gedge's singing voice also troubled the uncommitted listener. Commendably bereft of affectation it may be, but his gravelly yodel clings to his songs like wet clay, preventing them from transcending their linear bedrock.
However, Gedge devotees treasure him as much for his limitations as for his flair for lovelorn songcraft. Rock's current crop of miserabilists - Coldplay, JJ72 et al - are fey, unearthly propositions , unsullied and difficult to warm to. Gedge couldn't be more different. He is resolutely down-to-earth, rooted in the same banalities as his audience.
"This is our last song tonight. We don't play encores," he mumbled towards the end. The quartet plunged into a cacophonic, sample-laden dirge. They sloped off immediately afterwards, ignoring a chorus of pleas to return. In a world bubbling over with cynical contrivance, Gedge's unaffected bloody-mindedness is a rare and precious commodity. - Edward Power
Antje Weithaas (violin), Michael Dussek (piano)
Sonata for solo violin in G minor...............Schubert
Nocturne ....................................................... Ysaÿe
Tarantella Op 28 No 1........................Szymanowski
NTL Studio, Waterfront, Belfast
German violinist, Antje Weithaas, has made an international career since winning the 1991 Joseph Joachim Competition. The Ysaÿe and Szymanowski works, written, respectively, by and for virtuoso violinists, are notable for their technical demands.
Ysaÿe's solo sonata, one of a batch of six written in 1924 and inspired by the Bach solo sonata in the same key, combines a Bach-like love of double- and triple-stopping with a harmonic idiom which reflects the musical cross-currents of its time. The Szymanowski features the same double harmonics that violinists dread in the same composer's Mythes. Both works also demand a great deal in the way of bravura and agility.
While Weithaas is able to surmount the technical challenge without strain, her playing is most notable for its artistry. In a relatively intimate venue such as the NTL Studio, she is not afraid of playing quietly. These qualities combined in a freshand charmingly inflected performance of the Schubert sonata (originally a grand duo).
While one couldn't fault pianist Michael Dussek's playing as such, a feeling remained that, in this venue at least, an instrument equipped with a sustaining pedal can too easily dominate in terms of tonal size, if not in volume. The violinist's tone, while fine, was slightly small in the Schubert and Szymanowski works, but there was no suspicion of this in the Ysaÿe. It might have been better, therefore, if the piano lid had not been fully open. -Dermot Gault
Bill Bailey
Olympia, Dublin
Comedy is a tricky game - you've got to pitch it exactly right, or you'll sound like just another busker with a smartarse attitude. Bill Bailey has it down to a fine art, using music not just as a vehicle for funny lyrics, but also to deliver wordless punchlines of its own. The West Country boy has emerged as one of Britain's finest, most inventive comics, mixing musical mischief, intellectual idiocy and playful paranoia to create some devastatingly funny routines. You'll recognise his mullet, beard and pop-eyed stare from that fine comedy series, Black Books, and you can see him on the new series of TV pop quiz show, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, replacing Sean Hughes as team captain.
One of the comedian's biggest fears is facing an away crowd: things may get lost in the translation, with less than hilarious results. During the first half of his show at the Olympia, Bailey seemed tentative, unsure if his gags on hunting horns, French ambulance sirens, and foreign phrasebooks were getting through to Irish funny bones. Early in the second half, however, a misheard heckle sent things tumbling headlong into madcap brilliance. One minute, Bailey was talking about the Taliban and the US war on terrorism; next thing, he was doing an improvised rendition of a brass band from Tallaght.
Bailey's main prop, as usual, is an electronic synthesiser, on which he displays virtuoso musicianship, moving deftly from Beethoven to Eastenders, dark gothic organ sounds to tinkling music-hall piano, and closing with a daft drum-'n'- bass parody of George Bush.
Matching his musical complexity is a mind tuned to such lofty concepts as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Stephen Hawking's dense prose, and the Holy Trinity's local pub. Bill Bailey - turning the Chablis of everyday life into a complex Shiraz of comedic genius. - Kevin Courtney
