Reviews

Which is more important to a musical, the words or the music? Neither, actually - it's the story. Without it, even the most brilliant collection of songs is a concert. And that's why musicals are so hard to write.

The demands of a story - interesting characters, twists in the plot, credibility - don't sit easily in a context where, at any moment, someone has to break into song. So, while a musical can be made from any kind of story - Sherman Edwards's and Peter Stone's wonderful 1776, for example, is about the drafting of the American Declaration of Independence - the balance between drama and music is hard to strike. It should be no surprise, then, that Shay Healy's first venture into the form fails to hit the high notes.

As might be expected from a show produced by the Riverdance team of John McColgan and Moya Doherty, The Wiremen has some fancy footwork. But the dance is one step forward and two steps back.

The progress lies in the fact that Healy's tale of the arrival of electricity at a north Mayo village in the 1950s takes the Irish musical to a new level of professionalism. Its 25-strong cast is moved around with precision by director Matt Ryan. The leading singers - Alex Sharpe, Michael Sands and Rory Nolan - could easily hold their own on Broadway. The production values - Jimmy Smyth's arrangements for the voices and for the tight little orchestra, Paul Keogan's lighting, Alan Farquharson's sets, Monica Ennis's costumes - are from the top drawer. No original Irish musical has ever had this kind of lavish attention.

But the backward steps are even more striking. All this confident theatrical savvy is trained on a show that would have seemed naively old-fashioned in the north Mayo of the 1950s. In a weird irony, this story of modernisation is told as if modernity had never happened in Irish culture. In a programme note Healy describes The Wiremen as "a snapshot of the last era of innocence". And for innocence you can read, in practice, gormlessness.

You would never know that in the very decade in which The Wiremen is set, Irish theatre was engaged in an exploration of the clash between tradition and modernity that was vastly more sophisticated than anything we get here, or that the kind of people we meet in Healy's Kilnacree were flocking to touring productions of Sive.

The plot of The Wiremen is, essentially, Oklahoma meets The Field. The farmers and the wiremen should be friends, but The Bull McCabe, sorry Paidí Foley, won't let them put up a pole in his sacred field, thus threatening his sister Kate's romance with the nice engineer Charlie. But Healy's vision of rural society - a calm little Eden presided over by a jolly priest - is so shallow that he is hard put to explain why a young man like Paidí is so dead set against progress. He has to resort to an increasingly overwrought psychodrama so unconvincing that he himself doesn't believe in it. We know this because, in an unintentionally hilarious crescendo, Paidí, like Frankenstein, is transformed by a dose of electricity and the nation marches on to its brightly-lit future.

The basic weakness of the storytelling undermines the music. The songs are pleasant enough, especially when Healy develops his tunes from a broadly traditional idiom. But the dialogue and the lyrics are the sort of the thing that the old Shay Healy, a brilliant parodist in his day, would have mocked with relish. Cliches abound. Charlie, the Dublin engineer, is twice referred to by the locals as "silver- tongued". Meanwhile, his own heart is, as he sings, "like a stag running free". Stock characters from Abbey plays of the 1930s - the Mammy, the priest, the matchmaker, the ageing bachelor farmer - are exhumed in a night of the not-quite-living dead.

The bizarre backwardness of all of this is embodied in the forlorn figure of Lisa Lambe. In Improbable Frequency, Lambe was the future of the Irish musical: smart, sexy, witty, funny, with the ability to act, sing and move all at the same time. Here, there's nothing for this terrific young talent to do except prance around like a refugee from the hop-skip-and-lep school of Irish performance that died with Dev. The knowledge that with talents like hers, and the many others on display here, the Irish musical is capable of an electrifying future, makes The Wiremen's failure to connect with it a sad waste of energy. - Fintan O'Toole

Until Jun 4

Tallaght Choral Society & Orchestra/Armstrong - NCH, Dublin

Bach - Cantata 192. Mozart - Symphony No 36 (Linz). Mozart - Mass in C minor

Sadly, the Tallaght Choral Society as heard in Bach's Cantata No. 192, Nun danket alle Gott (Now all thank God) on Wednesday was quite unrecognisable as the same body which sang Mendelssohn's Elijah so memorably at the start of last year.

The choral contributions were both strained and weak, the orchestral playing was scrappy and poorly focused, and the solo singing by Franzita Whelan (soprano) and Owen Gilhooly (bass) did not shine in a way that could have rescued the performance. Conductor Mark Armstrong's handling of Mozart's Linz Symphony was placid and uneventful. He gave an anaemic reading of a rich and powerful work. Happily, however, both choir and orchestra were scarcely recognisable in Mozart's Mass in C minor as being the same individuals who had performed so disappointingly before the interval.

Armstrong here had clear and sometimes forceful ideas about the shaping of the music. He allowed his choir to dwell expressively on sonorities of dissonance as well as on the sweeter sounds. He achieved effective contrasts of dynamic, and drew much more purposeful responses from the orchestral players. The choir may have suffered from uncertain entries, but the spirit of the endeavour always seemed apt.

Lynda Lee, who sang second soprano, was the most pleasing of the soloists. Her tone was light, her manner agile. Franzita Whelan seemed set on a more consistently pressured delivery, with a heaviness of vibrato that was sometimes difficult to distinguish from a trill. Yet when the pacing suited her voice, she sounded first rate, and the two soprano voices worked well together. The two male soloists (the tenor was Eamonn Mulhall), given much less to do by Mozart, blended in well. - Michael Dervan

Naked Will - Andrews Lane Studio, Dublin

In the film Shakespeare in Love, the Bard writes his famous sonnet Shall I Compare Thee for Gwyneth Paltrow's Viola. In fact, it was among those written to a fair-haired, wealthy young man, possibly Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who in turn may or not be the "Mr W.H." to whom the published version was dedicated. The suppression, even in so recent and knowing a film, of the homoerotic elements of Shakespeare's inspiration is a striking example of how hard it remains for mainstream culture to acknowledge the contribution of sexual diversity to artistic creativity. It is, in its own way, a neat justification for the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, which runs until May 15th.

Yet the opening play in the festival, the European premiere of Blair Fell's Naked Will, is also a reminder of the dangers of adopting writers as gay icons. Naked Will is a stage version of Oscar Wilde's 1887 fable - really an essay in the form of a story - The Portrait of Mr W.H. Wilde's story is fascinating and disturbing, not for what it has to say about Shakespeare, but for its portrait of Wilde himself. It is, like most Victorian biographical speculation about Shakespeare, a projection of the writer's own fantasies onto the convenient blankness of a mysterious life. And what Wilde projects is not merely his first public hint at his own homoerotic impulses, but a desire that is, or ought to be, unsettling to a 21st-century audience. For the W.H. Wilde imagines as the source of Shakespeare's inspiration is not a man at all but a boy.

The irony of Wilde's martyrdom by a loathsomely hypocritical Establishment is that it has, in recent times, created a sexual saint from a man who was, at times, a sex tourist with a strong attraction to adolescent boys. When, for example, the appalling Jonathan King was released from prison recently, he compared himself to Wilde. The moment was deeply uncomfortable, not just because of King's blind self-justification, but because he had more of a point than those who worship Saint Oscar might like to acknowledge.

All of this means that an adaptation of The Portrait of Mr W.H. could be a genuinely brave and fascinating exploration of the murky borderlands between art, fantasy, and morality. Naked Will, however, chickens out almost completely. It is in some ways even more morally comprised than Wilde's fable, for there is a big difference between prose speculations and the physical realities of theatre. The enactment of Shakespeare's seduction of an adolescent boy is made all the more repellent by the fact that no one seems to notice how repellent it is. Fell does have Wilde, at the last moment, pull back from the implications of his own fantasies, but it is a half-hearted and belated acknowledgement that he has dipped into waters far too deep for his imagination to plumb.

It is not, in truth, an especially impressive imagination. His tenuous grasp on history and his preference for convenient cliches over concrete realities is evident almost from the start, when it is announced that Bernard Shaw, who was teetotal, is "drunk as usual". He has Oscar Wilde in the 1880s using phrases like " a dime a dozen" and "happy camper". What Fell does do well, though, is his handling of the Russian doll structure of Wilde's almost Borgesian fable.

And Sharon Sexton and Cillian O' Donnachadha's production for their Biscuits for Breakfast company is faithful to the play. Like Fell, it pretty much ignores the obvious moral questions, and concentrates on the structure of the story. Though it is much more energetic than graceful, the energy at least drives that story forward with an efficient, and sometimes entertaining, relish. This is, perhaps, the one advantage of not thinking much about what you're saying. - Fintan O'Toole

Ends tomorrow