Reviews

Music from a magical Malian duo and a nervous start to the acclaimed Frank McGuinness adaptation of Rebecca in Belfast.

Amadou & Miriam

The Village, Dublin

Bone-rattling, joint-crunching music is good for the soul - as well as the body. Amadou & Miriam put us through a workout this week that would do many a personal trainer proud. Their heady mix of West African polyrhythms, cross-fertilised by a primal blues sensibility, and all of it delivered with a certain French-influenced nonchalance was enough to lure the most rhythmically challenged to their feet.

Having shifted their gig from Whelan's to the Village, due to the huge demand for tickets, the Malian couple made themselves right at home. Backed by a tight quartet of drums, bass, keyboards and glorious percussion (with the odd backing track creeping in), they struck a powerful pose as they bounded through a set taken largely from their latest recording, Dimanche à Bamako.

La Réalité, fuelled by an opening siren and a deliciously tranced intro, was the perfect showcase for the couple's interweaving vocals, drums and bass ratcheting themselves on to the voices as if they'd been joined together from birth. Camions Sauvages and La Paix were paired reflections of both the pulse and the space of their genetically diverse music: producer Manu Chao's influence all pervasive in the sheer energy and high spirits of the performance.

Amadou & Miriam make dance music that wends its way not just to the pelvis and backbone, but to the soul as well. Amadou's ferocious lead guitar could find a welcoming home as readily in a shotgun shack in Mississippi as in the thriving streets of Mali's Bamako.

Chances are they would be equally at home in the depths of Manhattan's caverns where indie producers vie for the attention of musicians whose appetites for experimentation are limitless.

And in Wexford Street, they looked like a pair who would relish airing their repertoire on this temporary home turf for as long as there would be dancers to respond to their superb rhythms.

Siobhán Long

Rebecca

Grand Opera House, Belfast

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." It is one of the most evocative opening lines of any novel written in the English language. In his new stage adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Frank McGuinness is so taken with it that he uses it twice - at the beginning and at the end.

The device enables director Patrick Mason to frame the classic gothic thriller within the world of dreams, enclosed in the sheeny blankness of Robert Jones's minimal staging - blackened brick walls surround a bank of pebbles sloping up to a massive gauze, behind which the cruel sea crashes, ghostly apparitions appear and fade and tall flames lick up and engulf a tale of murder, seduction and psychological control.

As one might expect, McGuinness's take on du Maurier's cool, elegant style introduces splashes of earthy, muscular observation - as well as some superfluous additions, such as an assertion that the enigmatic Mrs de Winter comes from an Anglo-Irish Cork family and is called Darragh. While upping the ante on the three-way struggle for possession of the memory of the dead Rebecca, a number of crucial moments of surprise and suspense are sacrificed, skewing the delicate unravelling process of the original.

For a production that has gained considerable commercial success, this first night in Belfast felt tense and forced, with some disappointingly two-dimensional performances. Nigel Havers is as handsome and suave as usual, but one does not feel he has quite penetrated the skin of the brittle, unpredictable Maxim. Maureen Beattie's Mrs Danvers is severe without being sinister, while Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh handles sensitively the abrupt transition from submissive wife to assertive young woman, supporting her husband in his hour of sin. The moral ambiguity of the final outcome remains intact, but the signposting towards it feels strange and the impact diluted by its dream-world setting.

Until Sat

Jane Coyle