Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review The Coming World at the Project Cube, Wilco in Vicar Street and Joshua Bell at the NCH.

The Coming World, Project Cube

The characters in the American dramatist Christopher Shinn's sensitive but muddled play are literally all at sea. Set on a beach in New England, the night-time retreat of Dora, a salty video store manager, and her deadbeat ex-boyfriend Ed, the play is narratively simple yet thematically complex to the point of disarray.

Ed, a sympathetic lug-head who has run afoul of shady mobsters, needs cash quick, but, unable to hit up his successful, strait-laced identical twin brother, he desperately solicits Dora to let him rob her video store.

Steadily lapping at that plot, however, are waves of questions about pain, love, the illusive succour of storytelling and how identity is formed. Or, as Ed puts it, straining to the furthest reaches of his articulacy in Joe Roch's touching depiction, "What makes us the way we are?"

First staged in early 2001, Shinn's text is a curious combination of elision and over- elaboration. The dialogue is often fractured, as though he had slashed through lines with Tippex, while frequent, overwrought monologues afford the characters the souls of sophomore poets: "Maybe it was the moon, the stars that made me reach out to him", or, "Wave foam gleamed dimly in the distance".

In response to criticism, Shinn rewrote the play and excised all monologues, but Making Strange's production reverts to the original text, as though director Tom Creed was more interested in its dystopic view and self-conscious artificiality.

That is certainly the guiding note of Deirdre Dwyer's set, a neon green-on-black grid, which could have been lifted directly from the sci-fi movie Tron, where even the ocean is presented through rear-wall plasma screens.

Such spareness places all emphasis on performance and the piece certainly carries attractions for actors: Roch, carefully distinguishes his roles when he appears later as the neurotic twin Ty, an eloquent and lonely soul, while Megan Riordan, a guarded Dora, must affect injury or, in one scene, a plunge beneath the waves using movement alone.

Shinn's revised text is far more opaque, but here his pronounced anxieties about contemporary existence and meaningful human contact can be drearily heavy- handed. Both Ty and Dora recognise themselves as cogs in the machine of an ever-more deceiving, isolating society which destroys the desperate, incarcerates the imaginative and forces sensitive intellectual types into seclusion.

If you buy that, the answer to this coming world, Shinn suggests, is to strip away stories to reveal unadorned truths. But in the surge of his unexpurgated text and the rising tide of his concerns, any clear meaning is steadily washed away. - Peter Crawley

Until November 24th

Wilco, Vicar Street, Dublin

A year ago Jeff Tweedy played on this stage with nothing to keep him company but his guitar collection. If the stage was barren that night, it was positively teeming for this performance with the band he is justifiably famous for fronting - Chicago's finest, Wilco.

Few bands receive or deserve the unanimous critical acclaim that has increasingly met every Wilco release since they were formed from the ashes of the fabled alt.country act, Uncle Tupelo. This show marked the culmination of a long tour supporting their latest album, Sky Blue Sky.

Tweedy and his five bandmates rolled into Via Chicago from 1999's Summer Teeth, extracting all the sweetness from the song's ambling country rhythm, before abruptly unleashing a torrent of thunderous noise midsong - it sounded like Neil Young playing both Harvest and Arc-Weld at the same time.

The Neil Young comparisons are obvious and valid - the rich, complex songs on seemingly simple foundations, the shifts between soft country and ear-splitting rock, the love of discordant noise, even down to Tweedy's big cowboy hat. Like Young, they also inspire quasi- religious devotion from their fans.

The band can rock out like Crazy Horse too. Drummer Glenn Kotche was either sitting under a leaky pipe or Christy Moore has a new competitor for the sweatiest man in music - in fairness, most goalkeepers expend less energy during a match than Kotche did during the first 30 minutes of this gig.

Unlike his solo gig, where he had no place to hide, Tweedy was fairly quiet, not saying a word for the first half hour or so. He was also more than happy to cede the spotlight, particularly to Nels Cline, who is probably the most physically ungainly guitar virtuoso ever - with his too-short trousers, his knees bent together and his back ramrod straight, you wouldn't mistake him for Jimmy Page, but he wields his axe with the best of them. Between songs, guitars were carried out to the band more often than pasta dishes in an Italian restaurant.

While they probably shifted gears too quickly and too often for the gig to be a classic, watching these superlative musicians play such beautifully crafted songs was a pleasure indeed. - Davin O'Dwyer

Bell, Denk, NCH, Dublin

Schumann - Sonata in A minor Op 105. Beethoven - Sonata in G Op 96. John Corigliano - Sonata. Grieg - Sonata in C minor Op 45

It was a welcome return to the National Concert Hall/Irish Times celebrity series for top American violinist Joshua Bell and his regular piano accompanist Jeremy Denk. Together they form one of the world's most formidable chamber-music partnerships.

Though on paper their programme of four sonatas by mostly mainstream composers might have suggested the diligent proportions of a music examination syllabus, it proved to be a calculated succession of entrancing mood and colour.

In his natural and unaffected response to the composers' varied inspirations, Bell secured a slow yet steady rise in the emotional temperature. His always distinctive tone quality began appropriately understated - almost severe - in Schumann's Sonata in A minor, where the violinist must sacrifice all brilliance to an equitable dialogue with the pianist.

With Beethoven's last violin sonata too, Bell resisted any temptation to over-beautify his sound, but rather allowed the music to breathe and bloom, seemingly unaided by interpretive artifice. The unity of intention with Denk's fluid and transparent piano playing had the untouchable clarity of a vivid dream.

Bell stepped up the warm persuasiveness of his style with the altogether more wordly sonata (1963) by his compatriot John Corigliano. The performance, like the quintessentially American music itself, was such a model of coolly efficient panache that a genuinely comic note was struck when Denk launched into the finale before Bell was ready to play it.

This was the only lapse of communication - the only reminder, perhaps, that these artists are two separate individuals. And after the treasurable poetry and poise of Grieg's third and final sonata (one of his extended works not to sound like a byproduct of the piano concerto), the encore - Manuel Ponce's touching Estrellita - was an inevitable tear-jerker. Andrew Johnstone