The Irish Timesreviews The Lonesome West, Kearns, RTÉ NSO/Rophé and Camerata Ireland/Douglas

The Lonesome West

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Has Martin McDonagh's Lonesome Westbecome dated? Set in a rural cottage, it enacts a conflict between two middle-aged brothers, which is spiced up by a subplot about a teenager who falls for the local priest. As many observed when it premiered in 1997, the play might have been written decades earlier by John B. Keane.

What gave it a contemporary edge was McDonagh’s treatment of Catholicism – his willingness not only to make jokes about clerical child abuse, but also to portray a sympathetic priest at a time when the tendency was to vilify or ridicule the Irish clergy.

Twelve years on, that critique no longer seems transgressive – and the play’s many references to 1990s culture are rather stale. So there’s a need to make it seem urgent again, while retaining the features that made it so funny first time around.

Director Andrew Flynn addresses this challenge imaginatively, starting with the design. Owen MacCártaigh’s set is both evocative and disorientating.

It presents the exterior walls of two country cottages, facing off against each other like symbols of warring kingdoms. Looming over both is an enormous row of iron bars – a structure that creates a claustrophobic tone, while also reflecting the lights in unpredictable ways. This creates a mood of strangeness that persists throughout the play.

That mood extends to the characterisation. As Coleman, John Olohan is bear-like and expansive, full of grand gestures and sneaky humour. Michael McElhatton is unrecognisable as Valene: he swaggers prissily around the stage in white trainers, pausing occasionally to admire his comb-over hairstyle, in a marvellous portrait of misplaced vanity. In the supporting roles, Owen McDonnell and Samantha Heaney bring subtlety and pathos to the action.

This emphasis on the visual moves our focus from the religious to the physical – and reminds us that sexual suppression is still an important presence in our culture. It also emphasises the play's debt to physical comedy and slapstick. Valene and Coleman may think they're Cain and Abel, but Flynn's production shows they're really much closer to Laurel and Hardy. PATRICK LONERGAN

Cork Opera House, 21-26 Sept; The Helix, Dublin, 6-10 Oct.

Kearns, RTÉ NSO/Rophé

NCH, Dublin

Berlioz — Love Scene from Romeo and Juliet. Canteloube — Songs from the Auvergne. Saint-Saëns — Organ Symphony.

Friday’s concert by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was like a carefully graded climax. So much so, in fact, that it was tempting to wonder how different the opening work might have sounded had the orchestra tackled it again at the end of the evening.

The evening opened with a laid-back performance of the Scène d'amourfrom Berlioz's symphony Roméo et Juliette. Conductor Pascal Rophé did not so much approach the music of this passionate composer with a willing embrace as keep it at a safe distance, allowing its tenderness to seem rather chilly, its amorous arousal artificial.

Soprano Helen Kearns is in her late twenties and is already appearing in opera houses across Europe. Her singing of the first and fourth series of Joseph Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergnewas assured and fluent.

Canteloube’s orchestration often constitutes a kind of shimmering, floating, musical garland to the folk songs. And Kearns always provided a central focus that was solid without seeming too rigid, although the variation in expressive manner and nuancing was quite limited.

Camille Saint-Saëns ended his long life as a kind of musical coelacanth, a man espousing the restrained values he had represented in the middle of the 19th century to a world that had experienced the shocks of Strauss's Elektra, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. His third symphony of 1886 remains full of fascination, with a prominent part for organ that has given it the nickname the organ symphony. Rophé presented it as if it were one of the greatest treasures, revelling as much in its intricacies, its blatant demonstrativeness of technique, as in the fearlessness of its pomp.

There were a few moments where the heavy brass opted for vulgarity instead of weight. But most of the time the performance seemed fully up to matching the vision of a conductor who looked sure of where the strengths of Saint-Saëns's greatest symphony lie. And the audience was vociferous in its approval. MICHAEL DERVAN

Camerata Ireland/Douglas

Castletown House, Celbridge

Mozart – Piano Concerto in B flat K456. Elliott Carter – Elegy. Mozart – Symphony No 33

Camerata Ireland opened and closed the first of their weekend concerts in Castletown House with music contemporaneous with the room in which they played it.

Castletown's Long Gallery was converted into a room for informal entertaining and theatrical performances in 1756, the same year that saw the birth of Mozart whose B flat Piano ConcertoK 456 opened the concert. There's something special about hearing Mozart in a space from his own time.

And the ghosts of Castletown would have awoken to and enjoyed the highly-charged spirit that soloist and director Barry Douglas elicited from his players.

In the piano part, he made as much impact with a simple melody played sublimely – as in the gentle theme of the slow movement – as with exciting, virtuosic passagework played with flawless execution. The players produced more character and colour when Douglas was free to conduct than when his hands were occupied with the solo part.

So it was that he ensured the Symphony No 33 had great character throughout, a thrilling spirit of joy and energy that was enough to overshadow the occasional lack of unanimity among the first violins. MICHAEL DUNGAN