REVIEWS

PETER CRAWLEYreviews Ages of the Moon, Peacock Theatre, Dublin and MICHAEL DUNGANreviews Sextets in the Cityat City Hall, Dublin

Early on in Sam Shepard’s new play, one of the two characters announces a discomfort with metaphor. “I’m not used to that,” says Seán McGinley’s Byron, in a chewed-up drawl. “Something meaning something else. I’m used to things being what they are.” Where Byron stands on Romantic poetry or literary allusion we can only guess, but his words here serve as a sly, self-reflexive joke.

Look no further, the playwright instructs anyone plumbing for a meaning deeper than the play’s handsome surface. Stephen Rea’s philandering Ames has been banished from home by his wife, and is reunited with his old friend to drink, unload, reminisce, argue, reload, and wait for a scheduled eclipse of the moon. We will look deeper, though: theatre audiences are accustomed to things being what they aren’t.

This intriguing dance continues through both the play and the production, where Brien Vahey’s design seems both realistically detailed and contentedly artificial, and even a tetchy ceiling fan may be possessed. Written specifically for Rea and McGinley, the parts are both tailor-made and nicely challenging. Responding gamely to these ageing men whose libidos either flare or flag, whose eyes sink within “fleshy masks”, Rea and McGinley also seize a rich vein of comedy in their synchronised swiggers, letting long-held tensions simmer into explosive set-pieces when a shot hits the fan.

Everyone familiar with Rea's solemn screen close-ups will marvel at his unbridled physicality here. As the prissy Ames, he collapses and contorts when tormented, springs upright when offended, and finds several unique ways to sit in a chair, none of them comfortable. McGinley performs with a compensating stillness, more listener than speaker, and in his rational, faithful and ultimately vulnerable friend, he resembles an extreme counterbalance, the other side of a split psyche. "He thinks we're the same person," one brother tells the other dismissively in Shepard's True West, and you get a similar sensation here, much like the mirrored tramps in Waiting For Godot, those other ailing souls guided by the moon.

Jimmy Fay’s unforced production allows echoes of a Beckettian inheritance, where behaviour is similarly clownish and poignant, and strikes an intelligent balance between a nameless American frontier and a more identifiably Irish stage tradition. But Shepard’s figures are his own, their memories and experiences embroidered with the distinctive detail of airless greyhound bus rides and religious pilgrims in Chimayó.

Eventually huddled together beneath a blanket, quietly in thrall to the night sky, they feel the emotional and gravitational pull of nature. "That's us up there," says Byron, with his face raised to the darkening moon and his mind on the great beyond. But now Ames smells a metaphor: "Oh, the earth, you mean." Like them, the play has it both ways, where life's mistakes and consolations are variously low-key and mythic in a charming work full of comedy and meaning, things being what they are. Until April 4

Sextets in the City

City Hall, Dublin

This was the fourth and final concert in the nicely named Sextets in the City series, mainly featuring players from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. It was the only one of the four to take place in Dublin City Hall, temporary home to the Sunday at Noon series of free weekly concerts while the Hugh Lane gallery is unavailable. It is a beautiful performing space: circular and airy, beneath a towering, decorated cupola, huge surrounding windows filling the space with natural light.

And a massive acoustic. Every note blooms spectacularly and lives for ages. And while this creates serious issues of definition, there is something wonderful about being more or less completely submerged in sound.

Parts of the main work – the Brahms Sextet No 2 in G – were enhanced by the acoustical luxury in which they were played. The opening's ostinato of alternating semitones acquired an additional edge of mystery. And while a proper, biting scherzowould have been swamped, Brahms here included what has been described as an "anti-scherzo", because of its unconventional gentleness, and the flowering acoustic emphasised its warmth.

The opening item was the slow movement from Tchaikovsky's string sextet, Souvenir de Florence. Driving to the concert, I had listened masochistically to a maddening, depressing radio conversation about our dying economy and corruption in the banks. If music has the power to lift us out of reality, even just for an hour, it happens with events like this one, with the passing back and forth of Tchaikovsky's affectionate solos between violin (leader Sebastian Liebig) and cello (Niall O'Loughlin) proffering a calm oasis and a conversation – a wordless, musical one – that was optimistic and wholly different from the one on the radio.