Reviews

The Three Tenors are back. Not collectively, of course, because they never performed collectively in Ireland in the first place.

But Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras all sang at The Point between December 1991 and July 1992, and all three are returning to the same venue over the next couple of months. Domingo appeared last Wednesday. Carreras is due at the end of April. And Pavarotti arrives for two sold-out nights at the end of May.

The three men are getting on in years. Pavarotti will be 70 in October. Domingo is 64. And Carreras will turn 60 next year. Age and wear and tear can be expected to be exerting a toll on the voices. The skills of the sound engineer and the mastery of microphone technique in live performance can be expected to minimise the revelation of flaws. Yet, whatever you put it down to - and it could simply be careful nurturing through a strenuous career - Domingo showed himself on Wednesday to be in remarkable vocal shape.

His programme with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Eugene Kohn was anything but hackneyed. He sang Massenet, Wagner, Cilea and Verdi in the first half, Lehár, Bernstein, and Spanish zarzuela in the second. His vocal partner for the evening, the radiant Puerto Rican soprano Ana Maria Martinez, added Gounod and Rossini to the list of composers, as well as participating in duets, and the orchestra performed pieces by Berlioz, Verdi and Bernstein.

For my money, the best of the singing came at the evening's end. Lehár, Bernstein and Wagner are not Domingo's most natural ambit. And the French and Italian opera items were done with a care which seemed to inhibit elasticity of response. Cleanness and security of delivery were given precedence over the finer print of the expressive message.

But the music of his native Spain was judiciously placed at the evening's end when stamina was less of a concern, and was delivered with a new freedom. Perhaps he was fired up also by that proselytising spirit which still has him exploring new roles in his sixties.

Martinez was at her best here, too, carrying off the vocal twirls in "D'España vengo" from Pablo Luna's El niñjo judio with the flamboyance of a Spanish dancer, and there was a fresh ardency and headlong spirit in Domingo's handling of "No puede ser" from Sorozábal's La taberna del puerto.

The evening's amplification was a lot kinder to the voices than to the members of the orchestra, whose playing, through no fault of their own, was tainted by effects not unlike those of a supercharged ghettoblaster in a swimming pool acoustic. Happily the balance engineer was able to ensure that the voices rode safely above the orchestral wash. - Michael Dervan

Enlightenment - Peacock Theatre, Dublin

Large subjects demand large-scale artistry. Shelagh Stephenson's new play, commissioned by the Abbey and given its premiere at the Peacock, announces its intentions to take on a big theme almost from the start. In the first scene, Lia, an English historian whose son seems to have gone missing in Indonesia, announces that "Half the world's full of chaos and fury. They keep people in pits full of scorpions and then leave their heads on the side of the road. They cut their throats and send you the video."

In the next scene, as Lia discusses her fears with her father, a former Labour Party Minister, she hints that "they" are Islamic terrorists: "they killed him because he's white and Western and they hated him." This is, then, to be a zeitgeist play, a journey into the West's fearful state of mind. "They" have come into the safe, well-meaning world of the comfortable English intelligentsia.

Lia and her husband Nick, a literary academic, have discovered in the most terrifying way that their smug decency is insufficient for the times. They sent their son out into a world that they, with their blithe comforts, have helped to shape, and they have paid the price for their naivety.

So now we are going to get a serious reflection on the tensions and contradictions of our post-September 11th times. Our complacency, too, will be tested and shattered.

But there is no reflection, no testing. The promise remains undelivered. The play sinks back into the same enclosed world that it was supposed to challenge. The high ambitions declared at the start serve merely to mock the rather formulaic pot-boiler that Enlightenment becomes. Even the title, with its suggestion of bringing clarity to a murky subject, comes to seem hollow and pretentious.

The problem is essentially one of form. A large subject such as the intertwining of complacency and terrorism demands a sense of scale. This need not come from having a large cast and a multiplicity of sets, but it has to come from somewhere - from poetry, from invention, from imagination, from language, from ideas, from theatricality. Enlightenment never has enough of these things to go around.

Stephenson does try to set up some functioning metaphors. An experiment that the missing son, Adam, devised to show the workings of chaos theory is one.

A vague parallel between Lia's state of mind and that of a woman in a story she is researching about the Indian Mutiny is another. But both are half-hearted, sporadic and poorly integrated into the rest of the play.

Long stretches of the action are thus like nothing so much as a Radio Four afternoon drama. Much of it, indeed, would be better on radio, where the thinness of the characters and the static nature of the action might be less obvious.

For the most part, the characters are reducible to one-line descriptions: nice middle-class lady whose world has been turned upside-down; stolid, emotionally inadequate husband; charmingly eccentric spiritualist; idiotic and duplicitous TV presenter.

The one potentially interesting character, the young man who turns up out of the blue claiming to be Lia's missing son, is soon sucked into the even more predictable role of psychotic stranger in a lurid psychodrama.

With these materials, it is perhaps inevitable that Stephenson abandons the grand ambitions announced at the start and shifts into a sub-Hitchcock thriller of amnesia and identity.

The result, though, is merely that we get two half-baked ideas - an intellectual exploration of contemporary geopolitics and a sensational mystery - yoked together with neither of them given the space to flourish.

Strong actors like Ingrid Craigie as Lia and Mark Lambert as Nick are given nothing to test their strength. And Ben Barnes's rather flat production doesn't help much. Seeing no clear line through the play (perhaps because it isn't there), he clings on to a basic realism that merely heightens the many improbabilities of the plot. All in all, Enlightenment leaves us none the wiser. - Fintan O'Toole

Runs until April 16th

Brendan Benson - Doyle's, Dublin

Forget Pharrell Williams or André 3000 - the best pop songs are being written by Detroit's Brendan Benson, who fitted in an intimate acoustic gig in Doyle's on College Green between support slots for Mercury Rev in Vicar Street. Benson has been building up a cult following since the release of 2002's delicious Lapalco album, and the upstairs room at Doyle's was crammed with fans. From the moment Benson kicked into Between Us, from the forthcoming Alternative to Love, it was apparent that this was going to be good.

Benson's music is usually performed with a full band. This time, it was just him, his guitar, and a guitarist-cum-keyboard player. Fans of his bitter-sweet pop albums might have worried that the songs might not work in these stripped-down acoustic versions. Yet somehow Benson and his accomplice managed to reinvent them.

The audience were captivated. There was an almost awestruck hush while Benson was performing; at one stage the performer himself seemed a little taken aback by the reverence. But he took requests from the crowd - even for songs he hadn't played for a while, such as Crosseyed, which, despite his alleged rustiness, was one of the night's best performances. - Anna Carey