Reviews

Irish Times critics review Opera Theatre Company/Brophy at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Tom Crean - Antartic Explorer at the New Theatre, Black Taxis at Conway Mill, Sharon's Grave at the Town Hall Theatre and The Rolling Stones at the Point.

Opera Theatre Company/Brophy

Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD, Dublin

Hamelin - Ian Wilson

This new opera by Ian Wilson and Lavinia Greenlaw raises musical theatre's oldest questions. What leads - music or text? What types of verse are suitable? How does music respect drama? What about the tendency for sung text to proceed more slowly than spoken? At a pre-concert talk Greenlaw explained how her libretto, in tight rhyming couplets, realises an idea that has fascinated Wilson - the crippled child left behind after the pied piper stole the children away. Her story is full of pathos, a comment on our readiness to exploit history and people, and on the power of legend.

Although the text is dense by opera's standards, there is no doubt that it is workable.

Hamelin has significant strengths, but they lie closer to spoken theatre with a musical backdrop. One longs for the power of music to reach out unfettered, for this opera respects the words too much. Its detailed attention to accent and meaning, through an impeccably crafted, delicately coloured score, makes the music feel almost-permanently slow, especially in the first of the two acts.

The second act seems faster because it occasionally uses the formulae which opera has devised to answer its old questions. Reworkings of earlier music offer dramatic ciphers, as well as musical structure.

Set-piece ensembles allow music its own space via repetition and development; and their comparative stasis emphasises the dramatic flow of the surrounding material.

In this Opera Theatre Company production, David Brophy's conducting has serious authority. The seven instrumentalists on strings, wind and percussion, and singers Natalie Raybould, John Milne and Eugene Ginty, are consistently excellent. Add this to Gavin Quinn's deft and thoughtful direction, Andrew Clancy's design and Aedín Cosgrove's lighting and costumes, and it is hard to imagine a more-secure performance of a new work.

• Tours to the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast on Sept 12th and 13th

Martin Adams

Tom Crean - Antarctic Explorer

New Theatre, Dublin

A Kerryman served on the three legendary Antarctic expeditions of Scott and Shackleton, and is ennobled for his feats of courage by having a mount and a glacier named after him. As we meet him in Aidan Dooley's stage biography, he is bemoaning the fact that he never kept a diary like his famous leaders.

But fame came his way anyhow. The author-performer eases his way easily into his epic journeys by first talking about the Antarctic and its icy terrors. Clothes are analysed in detail, the material, number of layers and protective quality. Not too much; if you perspire, you freeze to death. Then, quietly and undramatically, the epic challenges begin.

There is drama aplenty before they end. Crean reaches the penultimate stage of Scott's failed and fatal attempt to reach the South Pole, only to be sent back with two others. There is a hair-raising sledge ride down a glacier, and a heroic solo 40-mile marathon by Crean to save his companions. Later, among Shackleton's series of death-defying exploits on the Endurance and after its loss, there is a suicidal ride down a glacier, one of the great stories of exploration and survival.

The story ends with a dying fall as Crean returns to his Kerry home, where his heroism in support of Englishmen is not so well received. He later went back to the UK to serve out the first World War, and on discharge in 1919 returned to his home to marry and raise a family. He died at 61 from the anticlimax of a burst appendix.

Aidan Dooley's embodiment of his subject earned him, a month ago, the award for best solo performance in the New York Fringe Festival. This magnetic revelation of a fascinating character endorses that distinction, and simply compels a standing ovation.

• Runs until Sept 27th, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival

Gerry Colgan

Black Taxis

Conway Mill, Belfast

Hijacked, targeted by Secret Service spooks, attacked by gunmen, driven by lunatics . . . almost everyone in Belfast has a black taxi story. They are part of the urban landscape - the black hackney cabs, crammed with men, women, children, babies, buggies, and shopping, all heading in and out of the city centre, to and from destinations in west Belfast. When, in the early days of the Troubles, public traffic came under severe pressure and bus services to various parts of Belfast and Derry were withdrawn, people power stepped in and a community transport system was born. Over the years, it would grow into a thriving co-operative, providing jobs and cheap passage in some of the worst economic black spots in western Europe.

"It would be a great job, if it weren't for the Brits, the peelers and the passengers," observes the world-weary Mickey. That single sentence encompasses the cynical wit and the occupational hazards of the west Belfast taxi driver, as portrayed in this double-hander, performed in sprightly fashion by Jim Doran and Marc O'Shea. It offers Dubbeljoint the opportunity for yet another canter through the history of the Troubles from a republican perspective, but is no less entertaining for that. Doran plays Mickey, a driver who has served his time inside, in the Kesh, and outside, on the Falls Road. O'Shea is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed wannabee, who hangs onto every syllable of his mentor's illustrated account of how the West Belfast Taxi Association came to be.

In less assured hands, even under Pam Brighton's experienced direction, it could all have become linear and predictable. But Moore's writing is pithy, pacey and packed with tangential anecdotes that lift the story out of the dry facts and into the territory of the surreal. Doran and O'Shea flip effortlessly between characters - a pair of thick-headed City Hall bureaucrats, a British squaddie, an MI5 agent, an excitable American tourist and a never-ending queue of crackpot passengers.

It's an inspiring story of ordinary people empowering themselves towards extraordinary achievements, establishing an organisation, which has taken on semi-mythical symbolism in history books, tourist guides and academic dissertations.

• Tours to Gas Yard, Derry, Sept 11th and 12th, Sarsfield's, Belfast, Sept 13th and An Droichead, Belfast, Sept 14th

Jane Coyle

Sharon's Grave
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
Presiding over the first half of Garry Hynes's coruscating Druid production of John B. Keane's Sharon's Grave is a large and colourful projection of the crucified Christ. It serves to draw our attention to what is not there. The play was written at the end of the 1950s and is set in 1925, when Catholic Ireland was in its triumphant prime. But its world has only the thinnest veneer of Christianity. The prayers at the obsequies of the dead Donal Conlee are drowned out by riotous anarchy. The sacrament of marriage is profaned and subordinated to the sacred hunger for land. Instead of a priest, confession is heard by the shamanic healer Pats Bo Bwee.

The peculiarity of Keane's play is that its 1925 setting is a mere gesture towards specificity. With a few minor textual changes it could be set in 1625 or 1125. With a few more it could be unfolding in 1925 BC. Nothing of substance would be lost by setting it in virtually any time or place between the invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution. It is therefore an astonishing anomaly - a modern work that expresses the ancient mind.

That mind is not a pretty thing. Keane himself once described Sharon's Grave as "a conflict between a physically abnormal, sex-crazed delinquent and a young, upright lad whose heart is pure". And this is essentially what happens; the manic, disabled Dinzie tries to force Donal's daughter Trassie off her land. The itinerant thatcher Peader, who falls in love with her, tries to win and protect her. The implicit identification of physical disability with evil is ugly and offensive. But it is also completely authentic. The traditional story that frames the action of the play makes the same connection. Young Neelus, astray in the head, is obsessed with the tale of the beautiful princess Sharon dragged into a nearby cliff-hole by the ugly and deformed Shiofra. This legend, and the prophecy attached to it, are working their way out in the contemporary action, so that the play happens in two different time-frames - the relatively mundane present and the timeless world of epic narrative.

It is this double-vision which gives the play its psychedelic, hallucinatory quality. It both is and is not realistic. At one level, it has to be presented as a set of events that could conceivably happen in a world comparable to our own. At another, it has to unfold in the outlandish sphere of myth, where forces and archetypes, not mere men and women, tread the Earth.

Hynes has the guts to go all the way with this strange, disruptive logic. She places Catherine Walsh's beautifully honed Trassie and David Herlihy's indefatigably grounded Peader in our world. They are like a couple in a horror movie - decent, solid people thrust into a universe of unruly spirits and wild desires. Everyone else on stage lives on another planet, where the atmosphere and the chemistry are fundamentally different.

This is true in a relatively mild and largely comic sense of the cartoonish neighbours who gather in the wake scene. But it matters most with the four big characters who give the play its extravagance. Tom Hickey's Pats Bo Bwee is a fantastic creation in top hat and tails, not a million miles from his wonderful Club Orange ads. Tom Vaughan-

Lawlor plays Neelus as a version of Poor Tom in King Lear. And Dinzie and his brother Jack, who carries him on his back, are imagined as a version of the Blind Man and the Fool in Yeats's On Baile's Strand. Michael FitzGerald's Jack and Frankie McCafferty's brilliant Dinzie are fused into one bizarre creature with the body of a slow-witted giant and the mind of a fast-talking impresario.

These are immense performances, not least because they inhabit archetypes without becoming mere mystical ciphers. Hynes, with breathtaking boldness, presents this whole side of the play as a circus, with Mary Fay's make-up, Neil Austin's lighting and Kathy Strachan's costumes showing Hickey as a ringmaster, FitzGerald as a strongman and McCafferty as a demented and dangerous clown. And into this visual pattern is injected an extraordinary attention to movement. It is not just the clearly influential presence of choreographer David Bolger as movement director that gives the whole thing the air of a ballet with a far-out story but a sure-footed motion. The sheer physical presence of the play overwhelms its strangeness and makes it, in this production at least, fabulously real.
• Runs until September 20th and then tours to the Dublin Theatre Festival and nationwide

Fintan O'Toole

The Rolling Stones

The Point, Dublin

Whenever old blues guitar players arrive in Ireland to roll out their greatest hits, they are afforded the kind of respect and gratitude that comes with the territory of being a semi-

legendary figure. They are old men (and they are always men) that have been struggling to make a living since their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, and nostalgia, in part, pays their wages.

The Rolling Stones don't need anyone to pay them a weekly wage, yet they still perform; and in the time honoured tradition of the nostalgia circuit and those old blues men (the very same people Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts have been influenced by), the songs they play are their best-known ones. The simple fact is, 8,000 paying customers and a few hundred guests don't leave the comfort of their homes to hear the Rolling Stones play new, or even recent, material. The band know this (they haven't had a Top 10 hit in these parts since 1981) and play as much to their own strengths as to the sturdy weight of their back catalogue.

The beginning of the concert is fabulous: Street Fighting Man, Start Me Up, Wild Horses, You Can't Always Get What You Want. All the mannerisms are there - Jagger's preening, epileptic dance moves, Watts's unobtrusive, thoroughly efficient drumming, Woods's cavalier, couldn't-give-a-damn attitude and Richards's indivisible, mellifluous human/instrument techniques.

An old R&B track from the mid-1960s, Everybody Needs Somebody, is thrown away before the unveiling of a thundering version of Tumbling Dice, which rocks The Point to the roof. Ron 'n' Keith engage in the fine art of weaving guitar lines, Mick grunts, Charlie grimaces, and all is good with the world.

The mid-section sags for a number of reasons; a dragged-out-forever version of Can't You Hear Me Knocking and Keith Richards's solo spot (Slipping Away and Happy, which your correspondent found singularly poignant, but which gave the crowd an easy excuse for a toilet break). The band made an urgent home run with Paint It Black, Honky Tonk Women (still extremely sleazy after all these years), Brown Sugar, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction and a single encore of Jumping Jack Flash.

As a partial display of a brilliant back catalogue (we just wouldn't have the space to list the songs they didn't play, but could have, if they had performed for four hours instead of a value-for-money two), this was a triumphant show. As a display of musical proficiency it was quite amazing; and as a display of credibility - which connects into the hoary old chestnut of rock music being a young person's game - it was, shall we say, highly persuasive.

The band plays The Point again tonight; those who have a ticket should consider themselves very lucky indeed.
Tony Clayton-Lea