Today Fintan O'Toole reviews Forty-Four Sycamore at the Andrews Lane Theatre and Kevin Courtney reviews The Flaming Lips at Vicar St.

Forty-Four Sycamore

Andrews Lane, Dublin

Fintan O'Toole

The past 20 years of popular culture produced a mythic world of their own, a late 20th-century equivalent of the Wild West or the war movie? To the extent that they have, the new myth is generated by the conflict between the sterile social hygiene of affluent suburbia and the violent rage that lies beneath.

In the movies, the best expression is David Lynch's Blue Velvet. On the small screen, it is The Sopranos. In the theatre it is Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and a small core of hard brilliance amid the vast output of Alan Ayckbourn.

There is no real Irish equivalent of this kind of work. But the sad thing about Bernard Farrell's Forty-Four Sycamore, now revived at the Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin before an extensive national tour, is that it is not all that far from filling the role.

If the writer had held his nerve, if the ambition of the piece was pitched just a bit higher than the level of a competent entertainment, if the direction of this production did not play it so safe, something quite powerful might happen on stage. Too many ifs and buts, though, leave us with a vivid sense of the failure that comes from an unwillingness to risk failure.

Forty-Four Sycamore is not, in any formal sense, an adventurous piece. The format - new arrivals on the estate invite successful neighbours for a drink, but the presence of an ill-fitting stranger brings unpredicted consequences - is familiar. The setting - Moggie Douglas's grotesquely accurate recreation of an early 1990s suburban sitting-room - is conventionally naturalistic.

The characters are par for the course: Vinny, desperate to leave his working-class roots behind; his wife Joan, whose roots keep showing in her Dublin accent and phone calls to her Mammy; Derek, the bumptious captain of the squash club whom Vinny is so anxious to impress; Derek's wife Hilary, who is repenting at leisure the hasty sins that led to their marriage; and Prentice, the enigmatic old farmer whose land has been transformed into the Sycamore Estate.

All of this is proficiently predictable. Jim Nolan's cast of Sean Power, Jenny Maher, Fiona Browne, Ciaran McMahon and Niall O'Brien work hard to seem wide-awake even if they could probably do this stuff in their sleep. The movement is adept, the pace sharp.

The laughs roll by in their proper places. There is plenty of time after the final curtain for a drink or two. So long as you don't want a play to provide you with something to talk about during those drinks, you'll find nothing objection

able here.

And yet Bernard Farrell knows damn well that his own writing comes alive when he takes it for a walk on the dark side of suburban bliss. Vinny is a "security engineer" and the house is wired to the tip of the chimney with the icons of suburban paranoia: flashing lights, wailing sirens, intercoms, terrifying noises, hidden monitors. It is also plugged into an ambient sound system that simulates the sounds of the great outdoors so that, as Vinny boasts, you never have to actually go outside.

As well as these satiric metaphors, there is a political context. The arrival of Prentice brings into the room a keen sense of the past and the present.

His memories of the agricultural landscape remind us that this world has been constructed. And the story he tells reminds us that it has been constructed not just with bricks and mortar, but with backhanders, threats and brown envelopes.

The intrusion of this reality leads to a sudden outburst of ferocious violence. The play smashes out of its well-made box. And then, just as suddenly, it is all packed up again. The box is sealed, wrapped in pretty paper and tied up with a shiny ribbon. The play goes back to being an amiable comedy.

It is, in its own way, as astonishing as anything you will see on the Irish stage. That a fine writer would be so terrified by his own perceptions of Irish reality, that a director as intelligent as Jim Nolan would pretend that this cop-out isn't happening - these are, in themselves, perfect metaphors for the way we live now.

The Flaming Lips

Vicar St

Kevin Courtney

10 minutes to showtime, and Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd and a guy in a bear suit are wandering around the Vicar St stage, plugging in keyboards, checking guitar leads, and making sure the tiny camera attached to the mic stand is working properly. Few other major bands would act as their own roadies, but Flaming Lips are like few other bands - even their pre-gig preparations become part of the spectacle.

A Flaming Lips live show usually contains some or all of these ingredients: fake blood, glove puppets, giant bunny rabbit heads, bags of fairy dust, footage of eye operations, topless disco-dancing girls, blood-spattered Japanese schoolgirls with machine guns, and three large mirrorballs spinning ominously behind each band member, as though concealing some tiny alien cousins of U2 or Spinal Tap.

Bearded and wild-haired, Coyne appears positively evangelic as he thanks the crowd for coming out, then begins with the redemptive hysteria of new single, Do You Realize?

As he flings his arms triumphantly skywards and casts handfuls of fairy dust into the crowd, you wonder if he's invoking some strange god of avant-garde Americana to cast a spell over all and sundry.

Race For The Prize, from 1999's acclaimed album, The Soft Bulletin, is a frantic, heart-racing orchestral epic, the wobbly backing tracks battling with the trio's clattering guitar, bass and keyboards. The title track from their new album, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, is - paradoxically - a beautiful, touching ballad about conquering adversity.

Fight Test, on the other hand, sounds like a deliberate parody of Cat Stephens's Father And Son, and deals with similar themes of manhood and masculinity.

And this mad hatter's rock party just gets curiouser and curiouser.

There's a weirdcore version of Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, a lascivious reading of She Don't Use Jelly, a gloriously uplifting Waiting For A Superman, and the very odd juxtaposition of the Teletubbies with A Spoonful Weighs A Ton.

An acid trip through the kindergarten? Nothing would surprise me at this stage.