Shakespeare opens the festival

Reviews of productions at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival

Hamlet at the Peacock Theatre

Hamlet exists in two dimensions. One is Shakespeare's unstable text, itself hospitable to an almost infinite variety of approaches. The other is the long and vigorous history of productions that seek to assault, explode, undermine or transform that text, whose status as the great classic offers equally endless temptation. Conall Morrison's new version, staged as the first ever co-production by the Abbey and the Lyric, Belfast, hovers uneasily between these two dimensions. It is too twitchy, too hyped-up with nervous energy, to stand as a real exploration of the text. Yet it is too narrowly bounded by that text to be a convincing attack. This double nature is reflected in its quality, for it also hovers between mediocrity and brilliance.

Almost everything about the production seems hesitant. It opens with Patrick O'Kane's Hamlet absorbed in electronic gadgetry, and announces itself as a version for the age of virtual reality. But though the technology retains a central place through John Comiskey's dazzling integration of set, lighting and video, its presence becomes increasingly marginal. The verse is spoken at heightened moments in a cold, declamatory style and key speeches are delivered as public addresses to the audience. Yet the actors are much more comfortable with a naturalistic, Irish-accented rhythm that pulls in the opposite direction. The editing of the text is jerky and at times the intention seems to be a radical deconstruction. But that intention is never followed through and what we get is ultimately a fairly typical three-hour version with a few vestigial oddities.

This sense of a constantly restrained urge to jump into the avant-garde makes for an oddly uneven show. Some of the performances, such as Eleanor Methven's Gertrude and Mark Lambert's Claudius, are polished accounts of the roles that would sit easily in the classical tradition of performance. Others operate on a different plane. Michael Harding's superb Polonius accommodates the language to his own midlands drawl and effortlessly shrugs off all the cliches that have clung to the role like barnacles, while Kathy Kiera Clarke's Ophelia has a punkish angularity.

O'Kane in the title role seems a compound of all these approaches. In the first act he affects a one-note, surly hysteria that seems unpromising. Yet when Morrison lets his own imagination off the leash, O'Kane thrives. His fierce physicality and growing ability to find a pitch that marries the cadence of the verse to his own Ulster voice find a counterpart in Morrison's happier inventions.

That inventiveness is at its fullest when Morrison is least concerned with the text. The play within a play, for example, is grotesquely but wonderfully re-imagined. The graveyard scene is likewise given a fresh visual gloss. The freer Morrison feels, the better the production gets. But he seems unwilling or unable to revel in that freedom, circling back into an account of the play which seems not to interest him. The world of Elsinore is never created. The detail of the action is seldom explored. Psychological subtlety and emotional connection are notable only by their absence. Unwilling either to trust or to abandon Shakespeare, the production floats between life and death, like old Hamlet's ghost. Fintan O'Toole

Until Oct 22

Laurel and Hardy at the Olympia Theatre

Late in the first act of Tom McGrath's paean to the kings of the double-act, comes a setpiece so familiar you can't help but chuckle. Dressed in overalls and their trademark bowler hats, Barnaby Power's simpering Stan Laurel and Steven McNicoll's exasperated Oliver Hardy are attempting some handiwork.

Naturally, you expect the bit with the dangerously swivelling ladder. Right on cue comes an accidentally stomped foot, a poked eye. Your chuckle becomes a giggle. And, as the slapstick routine builds with near-balletic grace, then slows into a painfully funny exchange of abuse, you might even find yourself teary with laughter. It's another fine mess they've gotten us into.

Such glorious moments excuse the flimsy premise of McGrath's 1976 play; that the ghosts of Stan and Ollie have materialised on a 1940s Hollywood sound-stage, a sort of ante-room to heaven, and rekindled their act to tell their life story.

A blend of biography and sketch show, Tony Cownie's sweet- natured production presents Hardy's runaway childhood and Laurel's vaudevillian apprenticeship as amusing skits; their accidental partnership and the glory days of the silent cinema era measured out in pratfalls and seltzer bottles.

It's a nostalgic, reassuring and simplified picture of a gentler time (even the set is in black and white), although McGrath dots the exposition with dark premonitions of Hardy's ill-health and that worsening, malignant condition generally known as the movie business. While slapstick offers us a safe haven, the vertiginous, perilous lines of Neil Murray's set acquire a similarly comforting disarray. Even heaven, it seems, is an accident waiting to happen.

Laurel and Hardy may cast a long shadow, their civilised violence and time-passing routines influencing every double act from Tom and Jerry to Vladimir and Estragon, but McGrath is too respectful to have plumbed his characters for deeper meaning. Other than the well-understood irony that Laurel, an endearingly gibbering mess on-screen, was the more ambitious partner, while Hardy traded his tie- twiddling fluster for contentment, this production seems convinced that they really lived the roles they played.

As such, Power and McNicoll offer something more than uncanny impersonations, expertly capturing the pair's gentle chaos, but opening it up to a universe of frustrations and determinations, the quiet dignity one must preserve when suddenly crowned with a dollop of wallpaper paste.

Ultimately, Laurel and Hardy will always have each other; a perpetual double-act where wives and studios proved interchangeable. In the untainted hilarity of this gentle performance, we finally have them back again. Peter Crawley

Until tomorrow

Old Times at the Gate Theatre

First produced in 1971, Old Times is generally acknowledged to be one of Harold Pinter's finest plays, a distillation of the kind of plot, language and inner tensions for which he is famous. In staging it, the director's ear for its strange music is crucial, and Michael Caven achieves a perfect harmony in this hypnotic production. It sings memorably to the author's tune.

Here the past is not just another country; it is shaped by memory, the triggers that access it and the self- serving suppressions. Deeley and Kate, a married couple living in a quiet seaside area, are being visited by Anna who, 20 years previously, was Kate's best - only - friend. Before her arrival, certain chords are struck. Deeley is an authoritative, sardonic man who hectors his wife, questioning her with near-truculence. She is quiet, if not altogether submissive, a colourless figure.

Anna is the opposite, an animated woman who talks a lot with an almost rhetorical flourish. She dives into reminiscence without restraint, often speaking directly to Deeley as if Kate were not present, and the skein becomes more tangled. How did Deeley really meet Kate, had he and Anna known each other in a parallel scenario that hardly bears reconstruction? He ploughs on, brash and insensitive, digging a deep, deep hole for himself.

Questions for the audience abound. Are all these cross-woven memories accurate, did certain recalled events really take place? Were Kate and Anna genuinely friends, or was there - is there - an undercurrent of hostility? Is what we see always happening now, or does a past reality occasionally merge with the real time of the present? And there is always the question of the marriage being stripped of its mutual deceptions, and the consequences for Deeley.

This is, if such a conflict were possible, a triangular duel, a three- dimensional game of chess that ends in a complex stalemate. It isacted superbly by Stephen Brennan, Janie Dee and Donna Dent, each of them treading the tightrope of controlled suspense with impressive poise and insider interpretation. Eileen Diss designed the atmospheric set in this fine tribute to a remarkable writer. Gerry Colgan

Until Sat

The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem at the Samuel Beckett Theatre

This puppet play by Rezo Gabriadze, who manages a small theatre in Georgia, is shown on a raised, covered stage no larger than a dinner table, and does not try to reconstruct the dreadful battle responsible for the death of some three million people in 1942. That would clearly be impossible, and what is attempted here is an emotional depiction of the horror of war in general. It could be set in any arena of major military confrontation.

The emotions are often vested surprisingly in the animal as well as the human realms. A romance between two horses, who meet in Berlin in 1942 and again in Stalingrad, explores familiar territory of courtship and rejection, parting and reunion, until the death of the female. An ant in the destroyed city laments its dead daughter, pleading their innocence of any wrongdoing.

These are very sentimental scenes, not fully engaging despite the licence granted to puppetry.

A young soldier writes home, to be killed almost immediately. An old Jew has his home destroyed by bombs. Another soldier imagines his beloved marrying another man during his prolonged absence, and is distraught. In a general way, war is pilloried for its destruction of love, as embodied here in human or animal, rather than for the fearful carnage it creates.

On a technical level, the puppets and their manipulation reflect exceptional skills, and there is a voiceover in English to aid comprehension. The stage is probably too small, in this large theatre, for puppets ranging from a few inches to several feet in height, and the near-whimsy of the non-human relationships may not have general appeal. But this remains a puppet play with a difference, and with an intensity of its own. Gerry Colgan

Until Wed

The Winter's Tale at the Abbey Theatre

Just as she is about to direct the culmination of The Winter's Tale, the play's moral guide, the fiercely virtuous Paulina, issues one of the most intriguing injunctions in all of Shakespeare: "awake thy faith." What follows feels like a religious allegory. The good queen Hermione, who was traduced and shunned by King Leontes, has apparently been dead for 16 years. Now, that which was lost, her daughter Perdita, has been found. Hermione reappears as a statue, like the statues of the Blessed Virgin smashed in the Reformation. The statue comes to life. Faith is awakened.

For those who believe that Shakespeare was a closet sympathiser with the Catholic cause, this scene is Exhibit A. But even those who don't can hardly deny that the great ending of The Winter's Tale gains its emotional resonance from memories of the old church rituals. Hermione is, in one way or another, the Blessed Mother. An idealised feminine presence is at the heart of the play.

The one overarching problem with Edward Hall's fluent, absorbing and often impressive production for his Propeller company is that it deliberately shuns this womanly presence. This is an all-male Winter's Tale. (The original production was too, but not by choice.) No amount of invention can disguise the fact that when the statue comes to life, it is a gaunt balding man who steps forward, trailing a faint but ineradicable campness in his wake. The disruption of the play's ideal of holy motherhood may be deliberate, but, like it or not, that ideal is what The Winter's Tale is about. Having the women played by men adds nothing and subtracts the essence.

The saving grace of Hall's production is that the same cleverness that misses the whole does refresh the parts. The Propeller style, as those who saw Rose Rage a few festivals ago will remember, is all about clarity, speed and vigour. The story is the thing and the plot is reeled out with a dynamic lucidity that cannot fail to grip. The verse is spoken with a fine blend of rhythmic verve and simple intelligibility. Michael Pavelka's set designs and costumes are witty and precise. And the feeling that the male company is rather like a good football team, bonded together and psyched up to tackle the play hard, does generate a compelling energy.

But The Winter's Tale isn't an opposing team to be put under pressure. It is fragile and full of yearning. It is all-male in a very different sense, imbued with an ageing man's guilt for the mistreatment of women and desire to worship in a womanly church. That is where its warped beauty lies. For all its power, pace and punch, Hall's production flies wide of that goal. Fintan O'Toole

Until Sat