Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review Laura Veirsat Whelan's and Beware of the Storybook Wolves at the Ark, Dublin.

Laura Veirs, Whelan's, Dublin

Laura Veirs's support act, Clyde, who bears a strikingly close resemblance in demeanour to Mark Everett of Eels, cut a quirky, spellbinding path through her tales of paranoid schizophrenia (Torrey Pines) and a disturbed childhood, with a magnificent mixture of awkwardness and fearlessness. Musically dissonant and visually mesmerising, she transformed her personal angst into performance art so tantalising that she stilled the already crowded room from her opening chords.

When Pacific coaster Veirs arrived on stage, she brought nothing more than her backing tracks, a guitar, a banjo and a voice - and rarely did they stray from the straight and narrow confines of mild peculiarity. Images of stars and oceans and falling leaves populate her songs, but rarely do they conjure up anything more substantial than fragile ephemera. She's been touted occasionally as the west coast equivalent of Suzanne Vega, but Veirs does pastoral with lyrics so vacant that she repeatedly loses her audience in the sheer banality of it all.

Veirs's abstraction might be her strength on record, where she and her band, The Saltbreakers, can let a song ebb and flow across the ether, but on stage, without the hammock of other musicians, her greatest strength is her guitar-playing, which can run the gamut from percussive insistence to dreamy infinity in a heartbeat. Vocally, though, she struggles to reach the furthest corners of her own songs, particularly on Don't Lose Yourself and Rip Tide.

When she ventures towards roots music, she begins to loosen up, to shed some of her drum-tight control. Her winsome figure came alive when she covered Elizabeth Cotton's Freight Train, its rhythm'n'blues offering her a sufficient scaffold to float free of her vocal constraints. Preceded by a laid-back, down-home take on Cuckold Hen, with banjo in full flow, Veirs was clearly on solid ground with these old-time stalwarts. In between, though, she struggled to find her feet in a repertoire so porous it leeched the life from her performance. A far cry from her much greater comfort level in the studio. - Siobhán Long

Beware of the Storybook Wolves, Ark, Dublin

"You tried to eat my toes for dinner, but I said no, no, no." One senses that Amy Winehouse would approve of her lyrics being hijacked by a great big lad in his pyjamas celebrating his defeat of a couple of oily and anarchic wolves by turning them into "platterkillers" (caterpillars). Beware of the Storybook Wolves is a high-octane, rebellious adaptation by Tom Swift of Lauren Child's book of the same name, a grisly tale which divulges just how nasty and wild those prim fairy-tale characters can become when the lights go out and someone forgets to close the picture-book.

In keeping with Child's vibrant collage-like illustrations, which are the hallmark of her remarkable series of children's books, this vigorous adaptation is colourfully set by Sinéad O'Hanlon and wonderfully costumed by Niamh Lunny. The wildly busy action, orchestrated by Jo Mangan, includes a funky, malodorous fairy-tale ball and some remarkably quick changes behind the revolving door, all delivered by an assured and ballsy cast. Emma McIvor, as a neurotic witch and a ditzy fairy godmother, is wonderful, as are the grubby and dim wolves played by the lordly Louis Lovett and his dangerously feral sidekick, Jill Murphy, both of whom make bedtime more than a bit of a nightmare for poor old Herb (a warmly believable Stephen Swift). This is a fast-moving hour of loud and rabid fun, correctly aimed at six-year-olds and upwards (after a moment of panic when the big Brylcreemed wolf appeared in a ghastly suit, even my wide-eyed six-year-old decided he could take the pace). Anyway, back to McIvor's malapropisms and her thoughts on caterpillars: "I do like platterkillers - so much less demanding than frogs, always thinking they're princes!" A show worth sliming aboard the lark for. - Hilary Fannin

Runs until Mar 16th