Irish Times critics review Yo Yo at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire and NCC/Celso Antunes at the National Gallery, Dublin.

YO YO, PAVILION THEATRE, DUN LAOGHAIRE

A disembodied voice tells us that Angela de Castro will be a little late, but has sent word that she will arrive soon. Suddenly an androgynous figure with shaven head, clad in a very large white suit, appears. It is our hostess for the evening, and her tardiness is just a little gag to get us going.

De Castro is a clown of international reputation, but this show is different. It is autobiographical, a potted version of her life based on her stories and poetry. The skills required to put it across are very different from those of clowning.

She was born in Brazil, and snippets are thrown in of her early life, its poverty and hardships. We are told fleetingly of her friendships, of betrayal by a woman, of recuperating in solitude on a beach, only to be attacked and raped there. But on with the motley, and she is soon off on international tours with a theatre company. Arriving in London, she enrols in a school for clowns and finds her vocation.

De Castro is candid about her weakness for shopping and about her sexuality. She is gay, and once drifted into a London sex shop where she discovered sado-masochism and the pleasures of whipping, a talent that has gained her friends all over the world.

Too much information, perhaps, but as long as she doesn't do it in the street and frighten the horses, where's the harm?

As the show ends, she seems to be about to head off for pastures new in Australia, and other global shopping centres. If she is, I hope that she can winch this show up to an acceptable level.

As it stands, it lacks interest and entertainment value, being little more than a poorly delivered compendium of self-indulgent narrative and pseudo-philosophical hokum. A clown should make us laugh.

Gerry Colgan

NCC/CELSO ANTUNES, NATIONAL GALLERY, DUBLIN

Celso Antunes, the new artistic director of the National Chamber Choir, is blowing a blast of fresh air through the choir and its practices. The programmes of his first concert series, "Contrasts and Contexts", which opened at the National Gallery on Thursday, are compact and solid. The frequent bittiness of old has been dispensed with, as have the often irrelevant-seeming piano interludes. And the choir already seems both vocally and stylistically invigorated by his presence.

Thursday's programme went through the motions of pitting two composers of the Renaissance against two from the twentieth century. But the two inner works in the programme - seven of the prophecies from Lassus's Prophetiae Sibyllarum and Hindemith's Six Chansons, setting French texts (from Quatrains valaisans) by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke - actually reached across the centuries. Lassus's writing is self-consciously chromatically adventurous, Hindemith's encompasses moments that hark back to the style of earlier ages.

Antunes's performances captured the nuances and painted the distinctions of style with sure strokes. In a way, the programme seemd like a delcaration to the audience, saying, "Listen! I bet you never thought the choir could do this". The opening motet by Josquin, Memor esto, verbi tui, was as clear in performance as restrained Gregorian chant, and every bit as affecting. Petrassi's 50-year-old Nonsense Rhymes (settings of Italian translations of verses by Edward Lear), swooned, swattered and soared with gleeful abandon.

Antunes balances his voices based on the controlled carrying power of the lowest dynamics and the strength of the weakest line.

As a result, the voices seem altogether better supported. The mean volume level of the evening was so much lower than has been this choir's norm and the variety around that mean was so carefully judged that the climaxes had an effect of sometimes startling impact.

In short, the choir sounded distinctive and stylish - almost like four different choirs for the four different composers - in a way that augurs extremely well for the future.

Michael Dervan