Reviews

A look at what is happening in the world of the arts

Mouth at the Project Cube, Dublin

About 25 years ago, when Irish theatre began to experiment with new forms of physical performance, the point of the exercise was not to suggest that writing was unimportant. It was simply to acknowledge that audiences have eyes as well as ears. Irish theatre had been so utterly dominated by the text that it had, ironically, served its writers badly. The physical and visual elements of performance had been so neglected that even the classics of the literary theatre - Synge, Yeats, O'Casey - could not be presented with any real conviction.

The new attention to these elements has meant that, at its best, Irish theatre can fly on both wings, bringing sophisticated performance skills to bear on richly complex texts. But there are also times when the pendulum seems to have swung so far that the 1970s have simply been turned on their head. We have moved from good texts and bad performance to bad texts and good performance.

Mouth is the first original piece presented by the physical theatre company Articulate Anatomy, after a version of Ubu Roi in 2003 and Peter Handke's My Foot, My Tutor last year. Written by John Dawson and director Andy Crook, it is, rather paradoxically, concerned with verbal constructs. Opening with a class on Greek mythology by the snappy, self-admiring professor, Cindy Riding, it switches to an abandoned sweet factory where a small group of oddballs meets to concoct the stories that become urban legends.

A kind of cross between Bernard Farrell's I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell and Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, it attempts to combine a psychological thriller with a reflection on the nature of narratives. These ambitions are to be realised through an array of forms: conventional dialogue, storytelling, mime, dance, dumbshow, clowning, Grand Guignol, projections and a soundtrack combining music with concrete sounds.

However wide the range of techniques and languages, though, a text is never going to be just one element among many, especially when it is as wordy and self-conscious as it is here. It determines the shape of the performance, in this case fatally so. For the text of Mouth is gauche and laboured. It feels essentially like a cut-and-paste job in which a few broad theories of mythology are stitched together with excerpts from a collection of urban myths, and the whole thing is given a crude narrative drive by the old device of an avenging angel. The ill-judged mixture of half-digested theory and old hokum means that neither can be given its due.

The biggest problem is with the inability to transform the basic material of the urban myths whose telling occupies the central passages of the play. Writers take such material and turn it into something else. Here, there is no something else. The most egregious example is the longest, a yarn about a labourer hauling a barrel of bricks. This is taken directly from Gerard Hoffnung's speech at the Oxford Union in 1958, a recording of which seems to be played every second week on Brendan Balfe's radio show on RTÉ. Sticking it in here is like performing Monty Python's parrot sketch without attribution - most people have heard it all before, and those who haven't are being misled into thinking that this is an original piece of work.

The pity is that the dumbshows that accompany these stories are often the most interesting aspects of the piece. As realistic characters, the roles are too thin and implausible to give the five actors (Gillian McCarthy, Jody O'Neill, Mal Whyte, Anthony Morris and Mark D'Aughton) anything much to hold on to. But the purely physical passages, where they enact stories using a ladder, a cable wheel and a few simple props, are vastly more expressive, and display Crook's skills as a director to far greater effect. With a text worth dissecting, Articulate Anatomy might not have to conduct an autopsy next time. Fintan O'Toole

Runs until May 7

The Hired Man at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

Howard Goodall's musical, with book by Melvyn Bragg, has just reached its 21st birthday. The dramatic story, and superior music and songs, vindicate the many awards that attended its birth. Quality is slow to fade away.

It opens at a hiring fair in England toward the close of the 19th century, presented in the liveliest of choral numbers. A young husband, John, obtains employment, and settles in a rundown cottage with his new wife, Emily. But working the land does not pay much, less than the alternative of the coalmines. John must labour to the neglect of Emily. Jackson, the handsome son of a farmer, fills the vacuum created, and trouble brews. But the young couple stay together, and have two children, a boy and a girl. The first World War arrives, and the men answer the call. Jackson and the boy die in the trenches, and John returns, this time to work in the mines. He survives a cave-in, but Emily dies of lung disease and he goes, alone, to work again as a hired hand.

This colourful progression is studded with songs, presented by Gerry Connolly's musical direction in harmony with the words and action of the play content. Here the love songs stand out, quite beautifully sung. This production is by the Glencullen Musical and Dramatic Society, now in its 32nd year, and is cast with very experienced amateurs leavened with professional talents. They make for a strong team.

Top honours must go to Shane Morgan as John, a singer of exceptional quality and stage presence. Others to shine, vocally and dramatically, are Peter Óg O'Brien, Carmel Tubbert, Deirdre McCabe and Cathal Sheehan, and the large cast of 26 are generally tuneful and disciplined. They offer a rewarding evening in the theatre. Gerry Colgan

Runs until Sat