Reviews: Irish Times writers review Gemma Hayes at Spirit in Dublin, La belle Hélène in County Down, The Maids at the Granary Theatre, Cork and the Royal Irish Academy of Music Precussion  Ensemble with Richard O'Donnell at the NCH.

Gemma Hayes

Spirit

She may look waifer thin onstage, but Cork cracker Gemma Hayes packs a powerful musical punch, landing somewhere between Kim Deal and Joni Mitchell, and hitting the emotional G-spot with almost unerring accuracy.

It has taken a while, but Irish rock has finally shed its woman's heart, and Hayes represents a new generation of guitar-wielding women, no longer shrouded in Celtic mist, but covered head to toe in grunge and guilelessness. At Dublin's Spirit venue, however, Hayes is still standing on shaky ground, not sure if she should flaunt her vulnerability, or simply hide behind a wall of distorted sound.

Limerick band Woodstar warmed up the seated crowd with a set that owed a debt to Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse and Flaming Lips, but repaid it with excellent songs and vibrant delivery. Suicide Way went a bit overboard on the Theremin, but Sorry Skin perfectly captured that all-too prickly feeling of being emotionally flayed.

Enter Gemma Hayes, blonde and beautiful, performing tracks from Night On My Side. Her backing band includes Karl and Dave Odlum on guitar and bass, and former Therapy? drummer Graham Hopkins, but somehow Hayes holds up her fragility amid the heavy rock 'n' roll baggage. Ran For Miles is a personal best, while Let A Good Thing Go is almost resigned in its misplaced rejection.

Lucky One, however, is lost in a flurry of beats, and Hanging Around just, well, hangs there.

Gemma Hayes is - no contest - Ireland's finest folk-rock femme, but she may be relying too much on brute instrumental force, and forgetting to develop her own personal power.

Stop The Wind and Tear In My Side are soul-shredding tunes all right, but what we really need right now is a woman who can rip our hearts out with just an acoustic guitar and a killer lyric. And then rock out on our graves. Gemma, we know you can do it. - Kevin Courtney

La belle Hélène

Castleward Opera

Opera's new English-language production of Offenbach's satirical La belle Hélène gets off to a good start.

Conductor Martin Handley shows real affection for the composer's zesty tunefulness. The gaiety he secures is unforced, and at the other end of the scale he doesn't labour and he doesn't linger unduly.

The simple, pale-blue set by David Craig has some of its components tilted, so that the bands of parallel white lines which cross it don't all manage to run quite horizontally. And Peter Ruthven Hall's bright, iconic, 20th-century costumes complete the visual preparation for the fun and frolics of a plot relentlessly guying the figures of classical antiquity and the commonplaces of the mid 19th-century operatic stage.

Director Nik Ashton seems set on taking the line that you can never have too much of a good thing.

He presents the Calchas of Colin Morris as a clergyman aiming for a Guinness Book of Records entry as the campest performer outside of a Carry On film _- in spite of Morris's impeccable physical timing, the effect is so over-the-top it's like an intrusion from another show.

Heading the cast are the fate-bedevilled Hélène of Deborah Hawksley, who's not quite vocally pert enough to negotiate Offenbach's demands with real ease, and the ever-eager Paris of Stephen Brown, who comfortably trampolines up to the high notes demanded of him.

The smaller roles are taken with mixed success, some of them too awkwardly for comfort and with sticky delivery of speech as well as song.

The chorus, however, are a bright spot, lively and fresh-toned, though with one or two voices which stray from the centre and stand out on their own.

Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the second opera of Castleward's season, got off to a late start on Tuesday, due to the late arrival of an orchestral performer, held up in traffic from Dublin. The start wasn't quite late enough for me, as I got held up even longer and missed the start of the evening.

The period costumes and stone setting (again by Craig and Ruthven Hall) provide images for Tom Hawkes's restrained production that could have come from the title page of a 19th-century printed pot-pourri of airs from Lucia.

The visual aptness, however, is not at all reliably matched in the musical values. Brian MacKay's conducting is loose, and allows serious indiscipline to show in the orchestral playing. Lucy Bates's Lucia is intelligently conceived, but not always well controlled in delivery.

Colin Lee's Edgardo, more consistent of musicianship and voice, provided the main rewards in an evening that was unsettled and unsettling, but not for the right reasons. - Michael Dervan

Castleward Opera's season at Strangford House, Co Down, continues until Saturday, June 22nd. Details from 048-9066 1090.

The Maids

The Granary Theatre, Mardyke, Cork

Curtain-call at the end of The Maids at the Granary Theatre had the sombre air of a viva voce presentation successfully accomplished, and indeed this Granary production is presented in association with the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies at UCC.

Director Maura Currivan accepts Genet's use of men in the role of the eponymous servants, although this does little to enhance the texture of the play while compounding its complexities of identity, disguise, fantasy and reality. In the absence of their wealthy employer, the maids move from acting out what they consider to be the scenes of her life to intervening and even directing its events.

This is sophisticated material, delivered with style, but while both Andrew Deering and Brian Condon grasp the intellectual challenge it presents, the measured language, thickened by internal scene-setting, denies the sense of intimacy in which the quality of menace might be better developed.

Linda Murray controls the superficiality of her role as the mistress, and all three, despite some problems with the costumes (especially shoes) make this piece of theatre confidently their own.

They are helped by Maura Currivan's well-dressed set and by Max Dixon' s lighting design. - Mary Leland

The Maids continues at The Granary until tomorrow; tel: 021 4904275

Royal Irish Academy of Music Percussion Ensemble/Richard O'Donnell

National Concert Hall

This week the Royal Irish Academy of Music Percussion Ensemble visited the US and gave a concert with soloists from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The programme was to be repeated at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday. But the American players were stranded in New York by the Aer Lingus pilots' strike, and the rest had just two days to create a new programme. It was therefore to everyone's credit that the concert gave no inkling of haste or inadequate preparation.

Writing for percussion ensemble tends to fall into distinct categories. Latin-American and Caribbean influences were evident in the fun pieces which acted as preludes and postludes to the main programme. Aggression and massive sound dominated Thom Hasenpflug's Bicksa, while percussion ensemble seems ideal for Louis Andriessen's Workers' Union, which is scored for any group of loud-sounding instruments.

George Crumb's writing is atmospheric and ruminative. One of the highlights of this concert was his Madrigals, where soprano Wendy Dwyer sang with authority and a rare precision of gesture.

One survivor of the programme change was John MacLachlan's Meetings with Famous Men, a commission supported by the Arts Council and inspired by famous philosophers.

Its five short movements show the composer's self-confessed pleasure in the instruments' possibilities for sheer beauty of sound. In that respect at least, its aesthetic is closer to Crumb than to Andriessen; but it also shows a strong sense that one can still find strength in traditional concepts of craft.

With Richard O'Donnell directing, these young players gave afull-blooded account of this interesting programme.

The full ensemble will be reunited in time for the concert tomorrow in Drogheda, which will include a rare opportunity to hear Antheil's Ballet Mecanique, complete with aircraft propellers! -  Martin Adams