Irish Times writers review Come and Go at the Gate Theatre and Michael Flatley's Celtic Tiger at the Point.

Come and Go

Footfalls

Gate Theatre

Fintan O'Toole

One of the most persistent misunderstandings of Samuel Beckett is the notion that he fashioned precise texts and then insisted that directors, actors and designers follow his instructions to the letter. In fact, Beckett's texts are remarkably fluid and unsettled. Especially when he directed productions of his own plays, he made substantial revisions both to the texts and to the visual content. In relation to his later, shorter plays, where words and movements are incredibly concentrated, a few apparently small changes can significantly alter the mood and meaning of a piece.

This is especially so in the case of the tiny so-called "dramaticule" Come and Go, which had its English-language premiere at the Peacock in 1968. On the page, it covers less than two pages of text. Three female figures - Vi, Ru and Flo - sit on a bench.

They are of indeterminate age and their faces are half-hidden by their hats. They enter and leave in an algebraic order, and each confides an unheard secret about one of the others. They hold hands. The play ends.

In a work as minimalist as this, it is obviously important to pay attention to the fine details. Those details were changed soon after the play's first English-language outing in Dublin, but Annie Ryan's production for the Gate's Beckett festival uses the unrevised 1967 text which persists in the paperback Faber editions but which has been substantially altered in American editions and in French and German translations. (The expensive Faber edition of Beckett's theatrical notebooks contains a fully revised text.)

Two very important changes made by Beckett are thus ignored. He added a new opening and closing, in which names are called, establishing a rhythmic motif that defines the play's architecture. And he radically modified the costumes. Instead of the plain, fitted coats and hats that Leonore MacDonagh uses here (broadly in keeping with the original text), he called for the hats to be flowery, ribboned and feathered and the coats to be loose. Both changes were intended to create a more ethereal and ghostly effect.

These alterations were obviously well thought-through and intended to give the play a more disembodied feeling. It seems perverse to ignore them, especially in a production that is otherwise so beautifully poised. Ryan orchestrates the movement with a wonderful delicacy and the lines are spoken with clarity and restraint by Bernadette McKenna, Susan FitzGerald and Barbara Brennan.

The longer 1976 play Footfalls also has a complicated textual history, with Beckett working from two separate texts and then revising both, leaving some inconsistencies between them. So far as I could tell, Alan Gilsenan's production seems much more alert to Beckett's major changes, especially the way he added to the number of steps taken by the one physically present character, May, as she paces the floor and communes with the incorporeal voice of her mother.

The play is among Beckett's most haunting and, in a sense, most recognisable. Its image of an ageing woman so locked in to her mother's life that she has none of her own, has an obvious sociological truth - so obvious that the main task in staging it is to prevent it from becoming too rawly realistic.

This Gilsenan manages so well that the only quibble with his production might be that it goes a shade too far in the other direction.

The question here is largely about casting. Susan FitzGerald played May to devastating effect in the Gate's previous staging of Footfalls and in the Beckett on Film version. She was so effective partly because she is a wonderful actor but partly too because she is middle-aged and captured the deeper sadness of an older woman who has not yet begun to live. Here, though, FitzGerald plays the mother's voice, and May is played by the much younger Justine Mitchell. Mitchell speaks and moves superbly, creating a chilling sense of hollowness, and modulates May's gradual decline with great finesse.

But she does not seem like the fortysomething woman indicated by the text and this makes a difference to the play's emotional texture. Fine as these productions are, they also remind us that in Beckett such details matter.

Celtic Tiger

The Point

Christine Madden

In the second half of Michael Flatley's new programme, a prim Aer Lingus hostess minces out on stage, followed by a troupe of Chippendale-like pilots worthy of The Full Monty. They balance her, arms akimbo, in aircraft formation across the stage, then she loses her prudishness and performs a strip tease to the delighted howls of the crowd, shedding green items of clothing until wearing only a Stars-and Stripes bikini.

This episode reveals more than just most of the dancer's body - it also discloses the unabashed materialism and commercialism at the kernel of this bombastic work. The name Celtic Tiger seems to be a misnomer, as 3,000 years of Irish history, fraught with poverty, bloodshed and foreign conquest and domination, are dealt with fleetingly in the first half by smiling dancing maidens, scantily clad in outfits that would have, in this climate, frozen the tits off our ancestors. They smiled beatifically as husky men - Viking and British invaders as well as Irish warriors and 1916 insurgents joined them, and coiled snake-like around monks to cajole them out of celibacy.

The second half of this show about Irish history moved bizarrely to the US, as bootlegger gangsters, and hordes of stars and stripes-covered officers and cheerleaders pranced and tapped, sometimes to jazzed up Irish melodies, but frequently to jingoistic American anthems such as I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. Ireland's 20th century passed in the blink of an eye as political, cultural and popular icons flashed across the screen, figures as diverse as De Valera, Keano, Joyce and finally, a frothy pint of Guinness.

This was not so much Irish history as Flatley's history, an optimistic and opportunistic presentation of his Irish background. Watching it, the film Being John Malkovitch came to mind, and the eerie notion that I was watching the inside of Flatley's psyche, made me uneasy and even queasy.

It must be said that the dancers were often extraordinary, displaying great agility with razor-sharp synchronisation. At 47, Flatley can and does still strut his stuff, although he is wisely branching out into other areas of performance (but why singing, Michael, why singing?). An enormous amount of effort, investment, preparation and expertise went into this production.

For something so cringingly camp, incorrect, misleading, commercial and self-serving. Yet the crowd loved it, cheering, whooping, applauding at endless encores of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

The sad thing is, I've seen equally able and wonderfully expressive dancers giving presentations in venues one tenth the size of the Point and smaller, with the seats only half full. Why aren't all these dance-lovers at these gigs? Perhaps naming the show Celtic Tiger, with its connotations of rabid materialism, marketing and self-promotion, is more precise than we would like to admit.