Three Plays

The Eglentier Theatre Company of Holland brought the Three Cities Festival of one-act plays to a conclusion at the Everyman Palace on Sunday with its production of One For The Road by Harold Pinter. This Amnesty-based essay on the fate, or responsibilities, of citizens living in a totalitarian state weighted the event, which was otherwise frothing with goodwill and celebration.

Each of the companies taking part was presenting itself as part of a shared learning experience, with performances followed by a discussion between cast, crew and audience. This was largely congratulatory and, for future reference, could do with an objective moderator already familiar with the material.

On the face of it, Eglentier, in particular, don't have much to learn. The austerity of this much-travelled presentation includes a programme that gives no credits, offering only the Jan Boerstal poem that is sung as a prologue to an orchestration of score, text and movement. The choreographed symbolism of threat and terror is costumed in black against a deep blue background, and is utterly compelling - which is just as well, given the language barrier, although the play was chosen in the belief that an English-speaking audience would be familiar even with this minor Pinter.

A different kind of language barrier was scaled by the Madder Market Theatre Company of Norwich with The London Vertigo, Brian Friel's tribute to Charles Macklin, the neglected 18th-century Donegal dramatist. Demanding acute management of phrasing and diction, the ferocity of the challenge is revealed in one character's unreliable falsetto, in the accent of another twanging like a xylophone.

London has turned the head of one Mrs O'Doherty of Dublin, whose practical husband must restore her to her senses while dispatching the fashionable courtier who has pursued her - but not before finalising some important business of his own. Although Tim Seely, the director, was working originally for open-air performances, the smartly costumed cast brought action and style down to auditorium scale without restricting the characteristic Restoration flourish.

The 1980s in New York might have had some excitements even for illegal entrants from Ireland, but Home Talk From Abroad is about loneliness and family inhibitions, and is a reminder of what it was like for the Irish when we were economic refugees. Two young Cork men sharing exile and a bedsit at Christmas discuss the calls they may, or may not, make home.

The constrained setting for this Everyman Palace contribution to the festival inhibited expansion of the theme taken by Brendan Griffin, but as directed by Michael McCarthy, the performances by Michael Lovett and Eoin Slattery enhanced the integrity of the play.