Reviewed today are Talking Through His Hat, at Éigse, Carlow,Jennifer Trouton at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork and Chicago at the  Grand Opera House, Belfast

Talking Through His Hat

Éigse, Carlow

Harding is well-known as a writer-dramatist, and has directed his own plays. He is less familiar as an actor, a talent he brings with considerable success to his short new play about Dean Swift, launched as part of Carlow's Éigse Arts Festival for just two lunchtime performances.

It is a one-man outing in which the author plays Swift, the blind musician Turlough O'Carolan and a handful of characters assembled to dine at the good Dean's table. These include a big-bellied bishop, a wealthy farmer, a society lady and her débutante daughter.

Their host is now an old man, and his talk is a blend of the savagely satirical and addled commentary into which is fitted neatly an extract from his Modest Proposal for the eating of children.

The occasion may indeed be a fantasy in which past and present are blurred in his failing intellect. He is at his sharpest and most honest when exchanging opinions with O'Carolan, who is absorbed in his own music, and indifferent to the social status of his host and the other guests. The bishop is displeased with Swift's combative conversation and often boorish manners, a combination that peaks when he gives vent to his known cloacal obsessions. There may be official church consequences.

Harding plays all the characters with a mobile face, a versatile voice and an adaptive personality that moves easily from the comic first half to a dying fall of brooding and disillusion.

The excellence of the writing, rooted in historical accuracy and with its own integrity, enlivens the clued-in performance. For about an hour, the audience is entertained and beguiled by an entertainment that adds to the festival's general ambience.

Gerry Colgan

Jennifer Trouton

Triskel Arts Centre, Cork

Art practice often blurs the lines between traditional and mixed-media techniques. Jennifer Trouton's work substantiates this, as on first encounter, it is difficult to see which pieces are photographs and which are paintings.

The 256 panels which comprise this installation are arranged into a neatly ordered bock in a corner of the gallery space. The imagery selected by the artist is reflective of some form of a visual diary, where she recorded her experiences with a variety of "still-life" objects.

The dominant theme is shaped by a predilection for the old, worn and abandoned, with the artist seeming to have a nostalgic affinity with her subjects. More poignantly though, there is a certain absence or melancholy embedded within these images. Items of clothing, spectacles, shoes have a faded quality reminiscent of photographs showing the stockpile of personal belongings recycled in Nazi concentration camps.

The initial difficulty in distinguishing between paint and photograph has further relevance in that the artist may have produced the paintings by actually working over companion photographs.

This ambiguity in working practice adds an elusive, mysterious quality to the work. But even if the artist employed this shortcut in the rendering of the images, it does not deflect from the purposeful paint application, which shows Trouton to be an accomplished, naturalistic colourist.

This realist style lends further gravity to the imagery, establishing a tangible connection and sense of place for the artist and the viewer.

Mark Ewart

Runs until June 27th

Chicago

Grand Opera House, Belfast

With its noisy arrival into London's West End in 1997, this sassy, multi-award winning revival of Chicago - The Musical has gone from strength to strength. Barring a few cast changes, this dramatic reworking of Ebb and Fosse's 1975 two-act musical vaudeville is the same production as can be seen in London and on Broadway. This is a gutsy slice of low-life in the underbelly of the tough city of its title.

The story is of Roxie Hart, a small-time night club singer and dancer, who murders her lover and ends up in prison. There she meets a handful of other murderers, among them the glamorous Velma Kelly and a poor, Hungarian-speaking woman, who is found guilty and sentenced to death in the very courtroom where Roxie will face trial. Her only possible escape route is via the money-grabbing lawyer Billy Flynn, who turns her into a media celebrity and fabricates a tear-jerking defence.

With musical director James Dunsmore and his terrific band perched high against a blackened brick wall and playing an integral on-stage role, Jane Fowler's Roxie and Amra-Faye Wright's street-wise Velma sashay and high kick their way through their deadly double act, supported by a fabulous troupe of dancers.

The contrasting highs and lows of modern city life are made to fit reasonably seamlessly together, making a few salient points on the way about the death penalty, the cult of celebrity and the American justice system.

But it is the dazzling gloss of the presentation, the fantastic dancing and knowing, tongue-in-cheek performances of the two principals which make this Chicago a thoroughly enjoyable night out.

Jane Coyle

Runs until June 29th.

Bookings from the Ticket Shop on Belfast 90241919