Reviews

Reviewed: Short Cutsand Scenes from the Big Picture

Short Cuts

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

The first half of Cathy Sharp Dance Company's Short Cuts could be exactly that. A few short pieces thrown together, headed up by an improvisation, concluded with an chunk of a longer work and packed tightly together to create one sustained dance. But the choreographic short cut succeeds, principally because each piece in the bare stage contains an essence of Cathy Sharp's choreography.

In . . . Between is a pas de deux with sensuous lunges and floating arms. Wout Geers' read-the-emotion-on-my-face glances to the audience spoil the mood somewhat, but Dominique Cardito completely indulges every move and can soften her tone in an instant. The new Falling Rooms, premiered on this tour, is a more rambunctious exploration of weight as Manuela Baer and Wilfried Seethaler flop playfully around a red mat. Rather than the vast emotional plain of In . . . Between, this is concerned with a more immediate locale ending with a tightly focused light on the red mat.

This notion of centre and periphery continued in the second half with Out of Ur, a meaty quintet with a whispered subtext of territorialism. Wearing combat trousers while referring to the city of Ur, the centre of ancient Sumerian civilisation in present-day Iraq, carries its own baggage, but the work's cosmology is more timeless than that.

Proportions of five - five dancers, five spaces, pentagonal-sided columns - are both natural and unstable. Hinting at something tribal, the pulsing music drives dancers from the sanctity of their squares of light to engage with each other, whether in combat or more lush duets. The 12 columns are then arranged into a line to be walked, instantly hinting journey, ritual and sacrifice. Clearing the clutter, a final quintet on a bare stage acts as a salubrious coda, with independent duets and trios departing from the unison movement.

Tours nationwide - Michael Seaver

Scenes from the Big Picture

Waterfront Hall Studio, Belfast

The big picture of 2007 was undoubtedly the image of old enemies sitting shoulder to shoulder at Stormont. In 2003, when Owen McCafferty's play received its triumphant premiere at London's National Theatre, the North was still stuck in the narrow confines of a political impasse that seemed to have been going on for ever. Thus, the big picture of that and so many other years was composed of a random selection of little pictures - snapshots of ordinary lives, blighted by drink, drugs, unemployment, loneliness, economic depression, childlessness, petty crime, bereavement.

Lives much like you'd find anywhere else, really - except that this is Belfast, where the fear and spectre of something dark and dangerous is never far away. Prime Cut deserves huge praise for bringing home this complex, swirling play, with its cast of 21 actors, who never leave the stage.

Conall Morrison's tight, purposeful direction, supported by Sabine Dargent's spare set, uses a continuous collage of grainy, back-projected images to capture the great depressing sweep of Belfast street life. At first a little diffidently, characters step forward to present their stories, which begin as isolated narrative pools, but slowly, unrelentingly intersect and collide, some connected by shared work experiences at the local abattoir.

As each chapter ends, the individual journeys continue, with the actors returning to their seats by a maze of routes. At almost three hours, this is not a short play, but, with the pace building, the interval comes as an unwelcome interruption, somewhat unhelpful to the series of denouements, which, with varying impact, form the core of the second act.

McCafferty's scathing, acutely observed humour is beautifully delivered by Ivan Little, Paddy Jenkins and Julia Dearden's sad trio of lushes, squeezing every last drop of booze and dodgy reminiscence out of a day at a funeral.

Gerard Jordan, who played a young hoodlum in the London production, has grown impressively into a sharp-suited, violent, upwardly-mobile drug dealer. And almost unwatchable is the barely suppressed grief at the heart of the performances of Eleanor Methven and Niall Cusack as the parents of a murdered teenage boy, whose buried body has lain undiscovered for many years. And there, in that click of the camera, we have it - a small picture of a family tragedy, instantly revealing how Belfast's big picture is, horribly, like no other.

Runs until Sept 29 - Jane Coyle