Reviews

Reviewed today: Dido, The Country, The Pirates Of Penzance and Bad Girls

Dido

Marlay Park, Dublin

Elitists might dismiss Dido as a bland chanteuse for the nine-to-five world, assuaging the daily agonies of 21 million secretaries, but they need only look around Marlay Park to broaden their horizons. Here they will see not only secretaries but also a rich panoply of sales assistants, customer-service operatives and team leaders.

Earlier there were even hipsters. But after the sublime disco kitsch of Scissor Sisters they trickled away like rivulets of cool. So what is it about this apple-cheeked dusty blonde that delights and deters audiences in completely disproportionate measure? Well, Dido's appeal is based on something that, in contemporary music, is quite extraordinary: a defiant ordinariness.

Fleeing the magnificent curlicues of her real name, Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, for the prosaic thuds of Dido (classical scholars are free to disagree), she apparently favours the bushel over the light. So it is with her music. On record Stoned sounds as milky as any sophisti-pop, all attenuated dance beats and lyrics about holding "this fire down". In concert it arrives bivouacked in pugilistic electro-beats but steadily loses its bite.

Elsewhere Dido must point out the teeth marks. See You When You're 40 is a direct attack on another human being - "an abuse of what I do". Don't Leave Home is not a love song. It's about heroin. But who could find razor blades in these apples? Both songs have the emotional wallop of discovering you're out of cornflakes.

If her best song, the sexual-predator anthem Hunter, is undercut by the stage presence of a gazelle, her music is never less than competent and always studiously inoffensive. In short, nothing to get worked up about.

With Thank You and White Flag trilled out before the set concludes, even her fans leave in hordes. Skipping the encore to beat the traffic, they embrace a life no less ordinary. - Peter Crawley

The Country

Project Cube, Dublin

Martin Crimp's four-year-old play is out of Agatha Christie by Harold Pinter, a whodunnit without a crime. It tells a story for some 90 minutes, leaving us uncertain of what we have learned and with a denouement that puzzles as it chills.

Richard, a doctor, and his wife, Corinne, have moved with their children from city to country to live in a converted granary. Bucolic bliss is their goal, and with Richard in partnership with a local Virgil-quoting GP they seem to have attained it. Then, one night, he comes home with a 25-year-old American woman, Rebecca, whom he claims to have found unconscious at the side of the road. As the play opens she is sleeping while the couple are talking.

The conversation begins to prise layers off their relationship, increasingly revealing their limited understanding of one another. Corinne presses her points and becomes aware that she has been lied to. He is called out to a patient, and the two women begin to talk in their turn, exchanging revelations.

Rebecca knew Richard before the move to the country, but who followed whom, and who has been exploited? The plot twists and turns.

This is a tip-of-the-iceberg play, in which the little one is shown invites an imaginative exploration of unfathomed depths. It looks sardonically at the notion of rural serenity, introducing into its Eden serpents of sexual power play, of sophisticated ruthlessness and, finally, of cold-blooded subjugation.

Most of this is engaging, but with the qualification that it is less than thrilling. The general tone is rather too muted and restrained for that, in what is still a serious and provocative work.

The actors are excellent, with Fiona Bell quite brilliant as the wife, and Declan Conlon and Fiona O'Shaughnessy both mood-making as doctor and . . . victim? Paul O'Mahony's design - just a table and chairs in the centre of the theatre, with the audience seated on two sides - might have aimed for more atmosphere.

But director Annabelle Comyn has chosen to concentrate attention on her cast, and that certainly has its compensations.

Runs until September 11th - Gerry Colgan

The Pirates Of Penzance

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Ever since the expiry of the original copyright on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, in the early 1960s, theatre companies have been reinventing

them with varying degrees of success. The Pirates Of Penzance has had

many facelifts, most notably in Joseph Papp's outrageously camp 1981 production.

Festival Productions' staging at the National Concert Hall is very much in the spirit of that Broadway production, but it leaves Sullivan's music intact. Indeed, we even get to hear part of the original 1879 finale that isn't in the published score. And Aidan Faughey conducts it all with élan, enhancing his control of stage and pit with judiciously chosen speeds and firm rhythmical pointing.

The opera is colourfully costumed, and director Tony Finnegan has devised some telling stage pictures. But his production suffers from a surfeit of ideas, with gags often slowing down the action. The chorus movements that he devised with choreographer Siobhán McQuillan are overly fussy, and the added shrieks and raucous laughter upstage the music too often. It is further upstaged, even sabotaged, by the over-the-top antics and unco-ordinated slapstick routines of the policemen in the second act.

More sabotage is perpetrated by the crude sound amplification, which distorts the singing voices and renders much of the spoken text unintelligible. But the strong cast impresses in spite of the aural handicaps. There are good acting and vocal performances from Sandra Oman and Paul Byrom as the romantic pair Mabel and Frederic. She occasionally drops under the note, but the tenor is in splendid voice throughout. Both are at their best in their tender second-act love duet.

Jimmy Dixon shines as a glib Major-General Stanley, and he has worthy comic counterparts in Karl Daymond, a sometimes manic and always camp Pirate King, and Jackie Curran-Olohan as Ruth, W. S. Gilbert's mandatory lady of a certain age.

Ends tomorrow - John Allen

Bad Girls

The Helix, Dublin

Adapting a children's book for the stage is a challenging task - and one that the English touring theatre group

Watershed Productions has previously done with great flourish and individuality.

Vicky Ireland's adaptation of Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson's best-selling story about identical twins, was a roaring success last year, and the company's beautiful and clever adaptation of Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White, last Christmas was also wonderful. This version of Wilson's

Bad Girls doesn't quite have the same effervescence, however.

Taking the lead role as Mandy, the sheltered only child, Susan Harrison is a little unconvincing in her gaucheness, and the vulnerability of bad girl Tanya (Luanna Priestman) seems only skin deep.

The friendship between the two does, however, have the desired effect of unsettling the school bully - superbly acted by Alison Thea-Skot - and forcing Mandy's parents (Sally Armstrong and Peter Sowerbutts) to understand her changing needs and expectations.

The show is at its best in Mandy's richly coloured dreams-turned- nightmares and in the clever flexibility of the actors as they take on different roles as department-store staff, city commuters and characters in Mandy's dreams.

The home-baking bonding moments between mother and daughter and a quirky swimming trip are also clever and amusing.

As the story is somewhat dragged to a happy ending for Mandy and her family, you feel the fault line lies in the original material, whose gritty realism about foster children being the difficult ones, while cherished and much-loved children of two-parent families are good examples to society, is simply too clichéd.

Runs until Sunday - Sylvia Thompson