If the first three short plays in Fishamble Theatre Company's Y2K Festival are portents of the impending millennium, humanity may be in for a lean time. Gavin Kostick's Doom Raider has no humanity at all in it. Its heroine (a lissom Fiona Browne) is the principal character in one of those appalling computer games who kills and is killed repeatedly and repetitively and the play, regrettably, has just as much and just as little meaning as the games from which it derived.
Rather more purposeful is Nicholas Kelly's The Great Jubilee, in which a sardonic unfrocked priest reviews The Jubilee and what his Church said about it and how he succumbed to the pleasures of sex in a fling with his housekeeper. While the subject matter has potential depth, the play does not plumb deeply. But, nicely acted by Garrett Keogh as the unhappy Father Malachy, knowingly directed by Brid O Gallachoir, it holds the attention effortlessly and provides laughter along with the misery of the man.
The most substantial and best-wrought of the triple bill is Jennifer Johnston's Moon- light and Music. It is also the darkest of the three, stripping layer after layer away from the life of Rosie Fleming, the lively and committed English Literature teacher who enjoys and respects her Leaving Certificate students, loves listening to Edith Piaf and Ella FitzGerald, prefers expensive single-malt whisky to cheaper blends and has just been fired Sensitively directed by Caroline FitzGerald, Catherine Byrne simply is Rosie Fleming. Optimistic, cheerful even in adversity, she cannot always produce the words to describe events in her childhood, so she glosses over them as she gulps what may the last of her single malt. Here is a major characterisation, the more harrowing for its cheerfulness, and not to be missed.
In Tallaght until Saturday, February 12th. To book phone 01-4627477. In The Crypt, Dublin Castle, February 14th to 26th. To book phone 01- 6713387.
