Michael Dervan reviews the ConTempo Quartet, St Nicholas's Collegiate, Galway. Gerry Colgan reviews A Splendid Mess, Project Cube, Dublin. Belinda McKeon reviews One - Healing With Theatre The Warehouse, Dublin.

Lovett, ConTempo Quartet, St Nicholas's Collegiate, Galway

Boccherini - Quintet in C; Schubert - Quintet in C

There was a triple disappointment for the second programme in the ConTempo String Quartet's concert series in the Galway Arts Festival - the indisposition of the great viola-player Bruno Giuranna, which led in turn to the loss of Mozart's String Quintet in G minor and Brahms' Sextet in B flat. The substitution, however, was as strong as anyone could wish for. In the place of the Mozart and Brahms, the ConTempos and veteran guest cellist Martin Lovett offered Schubert's sublime Quintet in C.

In view of the difficulties with the acoustics of St Nicholas's Collegiate Church during the opening concert, this time I repaired to the very back. Here the quartet's playing was not so thoroughly swamped by reverberation, and the sound was clearer than it had been when I sat closer.

The ConTempos like a touch of daring in their performances, and in the Schubert they often tended to polarise the musical material. The pools of songful stillness and the often rigidly marshalled and rhythmically edgy passages of higher energy simply did not connect in a cogent way.

There were moments, especially in the first two movements, when their efforts seemed to be aimed at adding layers of intensity and urgency where no special intensity or urgency were needed. Some music just doesn't benefit from the helping hand of exaggeration, and this was a case where they seem to have misjudged the requirements.

Their handling of the Scherzo was persuasively athletic, forceful and sinewy, but the extra pressure returned in the finale, which simply sounded too fast, causing the first violin's elaborate decorations to seem a little hectic.

By contrast, the Boccherini quintet, which opened the concert was a delight, mixing good humour and delicate melancholy with the often cello-led sensuality that is this cello-playing composer's hallmark. The impression was that a good time was had by all, both on and off the stage. Michael Dervan.

Runs until tomorrow

A Splendid Mess, Project Cube, Dublin

This devised theatre piece is inspired by the films of Jacques Tati, who was often compared with his comic peers - Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy - serial bunglers all. He was constantly challenged by the mundane, and his baffled responses were very funny.

Now Locus Theatre Company, in association with Shadowbox Theatre Company, seeks to mine again that seam of absurdity, but elicits only chuckles where their progenitor found rich laughter. If a sense of the ridiculous alone could guarantee success it would be theirs, but the merely nonsensical really doesn't cut it. Neither does slapstick, which finds its way into some of the sketches.

The play follows five characters through random bits of business on a very hot day in Dublin. A young man attempts to cope on his mobile with the voice recognition rituals of a customer service, and gets into a tangle until the call breaks down. A cleaning lady undergoes a surreal test of her techniques on various surfaces, and loses the job. A man makes gooseberry wine, and offers it generously around.

Sound is also used to comic effect. When the wine is poured, a sound like a cataract is heard, and when the cleaning lady sloshes her mop, it is like Niagara. But gags like this are funny just once, and soon become tedious.

The actors (Jim Roche, Gene Rooney, Frieda Hand, Russell Smith and Gemma Gallagher, directed by Caroline Sweeney) are very good indeed, always projecting a satisfying vocal and physical discipline. But, Tati's inspiration notwithstanding, the material is simply too slight. I could whip up a storm of faint praise for the attempt, but even at just under an hour, the show outstays its welcome. Gerry Colgan

Runs until July 30th

One - Healing With Theatre The Warehouse, Dublin

This is, and can only be, one-100th of a review. Or less still, if it accepts the uncomfortable truth that any review of a live performance can hope to capture or to communicate only a greater or lesser fraction of what went into that performance, what was achieved by it, what happened in the now-vanished moment when an audience and an ensemble combined to form an event.

Pan Pan's One is an event on an enormous scale, something that must have seemed exciting but unfeasible when it was first conceived by Gavin Quinn. The notion of casting 100 actors (plus stand-bys) in a single project would surely guarantee months of insomnia to any director, let alone the realisation of a 100-room space, 100 individual performances, and a lavish book and 14-hour film accompaniments. Yet One has come to be, and in its scope and freshness of vision it is like nothing Irish theatre has accomplished before.

Nor does it try to be. The success of the production lies in the matching of its complex architecture with a simple central idea: the story of the actor - that person who in other productions does his/her job best by disappearing into another story, another life. One interrogates the chemistry of the encounter between audience and actor with both warmth and wit, blending clear-eyed knowledge of the acting game with a determination to make something new for those gathered, to meet the gaze of the audience member, to gift them.

In practical terms, this involves each audience member being led, by an assistant in a nursing uniform (part of the healing theme) to a small room in which waits an actor, and listening while the actor tells them the story of how they came to take on their craft, before performing their first audition piece. My actor, Adam Borowski, told me he stumbled into acting in his native Poland at a time when such activity had to remain strictly underground, and he performed two regrettably short excerpts from a 1980s play, No Man's Land, which required me to pose as Stalin for some seconds. The resultant surge in egomania was met by the penultimate part of the experience, a session of colour therapy administered by the actor, after which he escorted me to a communal area, where the actors talked with their individual audience members over a drink before stealing away without explanation.

What does One heal? Not great ailments or sorrows. But, just for a while, it heals monotony, stasis, laziness, boredom, limitation. And that makes it worth 100 of itself. Belinda McKeon

Runs until tomorrow