Selected highlights chosen by Tony Clayton-Lea, Siobhán Long, Aidan Dunne, Peter Crawley and Cormac Larkin
MONDAY
ART
Dublin Painting & Sketching Club 139th Annual Exhibition
Concourse Gallery, Dun Laoghaire County Hall, Marine Road, Dun Laoghaire May 8-21 dublinpaintingandsketchingclub.ie
Marking the 200th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of Dun Laoghaire Harbour and its East Pier, this year's Club show features a maritime theme as a major strand. At one point the club's history, an adventurous subset of members, known as the Graphic Cruisers Club, would set sail in George Prescott's wide-beamed yacht the Iris, and from their watery perspective paint aspects of the sea and shore with easels lashed to the deck. With work by 90 members plus pieces selected from open submission. Margo Banks, Patrick Cahill, Bridget Flynn, Michael Gemmell, Vincent Lambe, Pamela Leonard, Tom Ryan PPRHA and club president Aidan Hickey are among those showing. (Pictured left is The Coal Harbour by Tom Roche.) AD
THEATRE
The Chastitute
The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Ends May 20, 7.30pm (Mat 2.30pm) ticketmaster.ie
"What I am, is a disaster," says John Bosco McLaine, the 53-year-old virgin, by way of introduction. The title of John B Keane's final play suggests something cruder – the "opposite of a prostitute". This new production adds to its broad, parochial, nudge-nudge comedy, an insistence that Stephen Brennan's (with Aisling O'Neill, below) innocent John is something sadder still; a kind of unwilling sacrifice to conservative values.
Where John is a frustrated celibate – to the concern of his fretting aunt, an oily matchmaker and a sleazy lothario – Keane's play is surprisingly promiscuous. It swings from memory play to comic picaresque to rural tragedy, loving and leaving every style. This leads to abrupt pivots in tone which director Michael Scott's sparing production struggles to handle. Some will baulk at the light presentation of the play's sexual politics, where one honourably adamantine woman is eventually commanded, "Come here, slut", by a "whoremaster", and obeys, like another tamed shrew. The production suggests that religion is to blame, pushing parishioners into self-flagellating prayer and flying a monumental crucifix above John's attack of scruples. That he chooses other kind of spirits to drown his sorrows and obliterate his desire is a real tragedy, here laid on thick. PC
TUESDAY
THEATRE
I, Malvolio
Town Hall Theatre, Galway. May 9 8pm €20/€18 tht.ie
If everybody is the star of their own story, what insights do the minor roles and spear-carriers of famous plays possess? When Tom Stoppard made Rosencrantz and Guildenstern more than plot devices in Hamlet, it cracked open a universe of possibilities. Ten years ago, Tim Crouch (left), a formidable contemporary theatre maker, did something similar with The Tempest by giving its enslaved monster a right to reply in I, Caliban.
Since then he has afforded top billing to three more Shakespearean bit parts and presented them to young audiences. I, Malvolio, which last came to Ireland in 2013, may supply a memorable précis of Twelfth Night (no small achievement given its comic chicanery), but Crouch's play is a splendid achievement itself. Never an arid study aid, nor a display of intellectual showboating, Crouch's slyly involving performance comes at Shakespeare from revealing new angles. Our participation in tormenting his sour Malvolio is feverishly comic, for instance, until it escalates into bullying. That reveals the resonance of Shakespeare, but it also generously explores the possibilities of new creation and audience empathy. As Crouch ingeniously reminds us, there's always another side of the story. PC
ART
Glitch Festival Dublin 2017
Sedimentary Structures – Traces of the Live Event. Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre, Tallaght, Dublin Until June 10 ruared.ie
The annual digital arts festival kicks off with artists David Beattie, Cliona Harmey, David Lunney, Richard Forrest and Robin Price inhabiting Rua Red's white cube creating new works with Livestock performances artists occupying the Performance space. All that to May 11th. Thereafter, the works made by the five artists, in whatever form they happen to take, "the material traces of an onsite experimentation period in the gallery" or "Traces of the Live Event," will be on view, plus Cécile Baboile, Cathy Coughlan and in Gallery 2, Final year students from the Creative Digital Media BA programme at IT Tallaght until June 10 (plus live performance event May 13). Matthew Nevin and Ciara Scanlon curated. AD
WEDNESDAY
ART
Zephyr
Works on paper by Alice Maher. Claremorris Gallery, Mount St, Claremorris, Co Mayo Until June 1 claremorrisgallery.com
Alice Maher's first show in a commercial gallery in the west of Ireland showcases the breadth and variety of her practice in drawing, print and watercolour. Maher's Zephyr is a giantess in a yellow swimsuit who exhales a storm. In these magical images there is a visceral edge to metamorphosis. In the midst of fantasy, the bodies are disturbingly real and material. The monstrous heart attached to the back of a crouching woman in Hunter is anatomically precise, raw and vulnerable. AD
GUITAR DUO
Julien & John
Arthurs, Thomas St, Dublin, 8pm, €10/€8, arthursub.ie
What is it about guitarists, you know, playing with one another? Aside from the odd piano duo, players of musical instruments tend to give their fellow instrumentalists a wide berth, but guitarist seem to actively seek each other out. Italian Julien Colarossi and Dubliner John Keogh certainly thrive on the intimacy of two guitars – the back and forth, the finishing each other's thoughts.
Their 2016 debut, Street Life, was a likeable collection of rearranged pop standards that struck the right balance between mainstream appeal and muso credibility, covering everything from Stevie Wonder to Coldplay. More of the same is on the cards as they get ready to record the follow-up. CL
THURSDAY
FIDDLER
Steve Wickham
Sugar Club Dublin 8pm €22.50 ticketmaster.ie
For perhaps too many years, Irish fiddle player Steve Wickham has been the catalyst to many a musician's flight of fancy. Fans of The Waterboys, for example, will have experienced how Wickham can get under the skin of music, slowly peel it off and then whirl it around like a toreador's cape. Promoting his second solo album Beekeeper (the tardy follow-up to 2004's Geronimo), Wickham embarks on a short Irish tour; whether he will be joined by any of the guests that appear on the album (these include Ger Wolfe, Katie Kim, Joe Chester, Mike Scott) remains to be seen. What's certain is that he will be delivering many shades of music and throwing a few accompanying shapes. Wickham also plays Model Arts Centre, Sligo, Friday May 12th and St Luke's Church, Cork, Saturday May 27th. TCL
JAZZ
Halferty/Ware/O'Brien/O'Donovan
Arthurs, Thomas St, Dublin, 8pm, €10, arthursub.ie
With the death last year of the great Louis Stewart, guitarist Tommy Halferty assumed the mantle of elder statesman of Irish jazz guitar. As he enters his seventh decade, Halferty's zest for musical life is undiminished, and already this year he has been feted at a star-studded birthday concert in Dublin and toured his own compositions with his jazz-meets-classical 10-piece Albert Camus project. But the Derryman's natural habitat is cutting loose in front of a hard-swinging rhythm section, and they won't come much harder than this Newpark faculty works outing, with pianist Phil Ware, bassist Cormac O'Brien and drummer Shane O'Donovan. No quarter will be given, nor asked for. CL
VANTASTIC Battle of the Bands
Odd Mollie's, Drogheda, Co Louth 8pm €4 vantastival.com
The notion of music acts fighting it out on a small stage for some manner of prize might seem quaint by today's strategic standards, but there is clearly some life left in the idea. Co-launched by Vantastival and Firestone Music Tour – and to tie in with the return of Vantastival to Beaulieu House, Baltray, Co Louth, on June 3rd/4th – five Irish music acts convene here to compete for the top prize package, which includes three days of recording at Grouse Lodge Studios, an €1,800 voucher for Dublin music store Musicmaker, and the headline slot on the Firestone Music Station stage at the festival. Battle of the Bands' judges includes yours-truly, Today FM sound engineer Gavin Blake, and Vantastival/Firestone Music Tour personnel. Seconds out – round one. TCL
JAZZ
Hugh Buckley/Myles Drennan/Dave Fleming
McHughs, Belfast, 8.30pm, £12/£8, mchughsbar.com
Buckley and Drennan are two of the most illustrious names in Irish jazz, musical dynasties that have shaped the history of the art form on this island. Guitarist Hugh Buckley is a nephew of the hugely influential saxophonist Dick Buckley and cousin of modern saxophone colossuses Richie and Michael. Pianist (and equally adept drummer) Myles Drennan is son of pianist Tony Drennan and brother of guitarist Anto. Along with the venerable bassist Dave Fleming – venerable enough to have collaborated regularly with the previous generation of Buckleys and Drennans – they represent a storehouse of jazz experience and a strong sense of continuity with the mainstream of the last generation. CL
ART
Memory Needs a Landscape
Bernadette Kiely. Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St, Dublin Until May 27 taylorgalleries.ie
Marking 20 years exhibiting with Taylor, Bernadette Kiely's show (seen in differing form at Solstice, Navan, recently) has a suitably reflective, retrospective quality, as she muses on familiar landscapes: around Thomastown where she lives, and the River Nore, southwards to Carrick-on-Suir, north to Donegal and North Mayo. She favours floods and mists and fogs and visual uncertainty, moments when we are slightly disorientated. AD
