Gerry Colgan reviews Rita, Sue And Bob Too & A State Affair at the Draíocht, Blanchardstown, while Michael Dervan gives his critic of Eyal Kless (violin) and John O'Conor (piano) who performed at the RIAM, Dublin.

Rita, Sue And Bob Too & A State Affair at the Draíocht, Blanchardstown

It is  legitimate function of theatre to take a slice of life and put it on the stage warts and all. This double bill (both plays were originally commissioned by Max Stafford-Clark, who directs the production) gives a view of a housing estate in Bradford, first in 1982, then 18 years later. It is the bleakest of perspectives, a scathing commentary on an uncaring and complacent society.

Andrea Dunbar, who wrote Rita, Sue And Bob Too when she was not yet 20, died 10 years later, from a brain haemorrhage. Her play opens with two 15-year-old schoolgirls having sex in a car with a 27-year-old handyman. He is married with children and has a bad relationship with his wife, whom he belittles and bullies.

The sex scenes are unusually explicit, and there is a sense that the girls are enjoying a feeling of being special rather than savouring the acts in which they enthusiastically engage.

The play spreads to take in families: a coarse but protective mother, a tyrannical father, a wife at the end of her tether and more. Their lives are seedy battlegrounds without exits, and the knowledge grows that the girls' frolics are as rich as their lives are going to get. It will be downhill from here.

Robin Soans wrote A State Affair in a different style; his characters mainly speak in monologue direct to the audience, exchanging only a few words with each other. But they are in the same terrain, now more devastated than ever. Crime, sexual abuse, poverty and, above all, drugs have taken a stranglehold on the community. There is a documentary feel to this work, which could hardly stand alone successfully. The combination of both plays does, however, ram home a message of man's inhumanity to man.

Not a cheerful or tasteful night in the theatre, then. But, as acted and directed with such excellence, it engages the intellect and the emotions in illuminating life's lower depths.

Gerry Colgan

Runs until Saturday; bookings at 01-8852622

Eyal Kless (violin), John O'Conor (piano) at the RIAM, Dublin.

Sonata In G Op 30 No 3, Sonata In G Op 96, Sonata In A Op 46 (Kreutzer)Beethoven

The final programme in Eyal Kless and John O'Conor's Beethoven series at the Royal Irish Academy of Music was in many ways the most rewarding.

Ensemble between the two players tightened up significantly from the strange looseness of the second concert. O'Conor, though still sounding heavier of gesture and thicker of texture than is his wont, paid due attention to the levels of balance between violin and keyboard. And Kless here produced his most consistent musical and technical showing in the three concerts of the series.

The music helped, of course, as Kless and O'Conor's ordering of the 10 sonatas was geared towards climaxing in the final programme.

The two sonatas in G that they offered in the evening's first half are highly contrasted.

The earlier, Op 30 No 3, has outer movements of the most irrepressible high spirits and a central, leisurely minuet that is one of the most delicately touching of Beethoven's creations. The later and last to be composed, Op 96, is a work that, even at its liveliest, is of the utmost inwardness. The Kreutzer Sonata of 10 years earlier rounded off the evening and the series. With its grand, extrovert gestures, it could hardly have differed more in mood and manner from the overriding reflectiveness of the later work.

The academy's Dagg Hall has been much modified over the years, but the terrible dryness of its acoustic remains - I remember performing there as a student and feeling that the sound was being sucked away from me, with no reverberation or feedback forthcoming.

On the basis of these Beethoven concerts, it seems the major problems remain. The performers could perhaps have made things easier for their listeners by placing themselves more forwardly on the curtained stage.

The playing certainly never achieved the freedom and fluency that might have been expected, and it's easy to imagine that the music-making would have flowered without so many fumbles in a more welcoming acoustic environment.

Michael Dervan