Irish Times writers review Our Lady of Sligo at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Still at Meeting House Square in Dublin, and Andrew Murphy, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra with Laurent Wagner at the National Concert Hall

Though much of Our Lady of Sligo revolves around death, Town Hall Theatre's latest production of the play pulses with life.

The story is based on the morphine-induced visions of Mai O'Hara, who is dying of liver cancer caused by decades of alcoholism. Once credited with being the first woman in Sligo to wear trousers, Mai tells an engaging story of passion, conceit and destructive love.

The strongest aspects of the writing lie in Sebastian Barry's ability to distil the events of an entire era through the eyes of ordinary people.

Mai's story, for example, provides a compelling portrait of the demise of the "Castle Catholic" - a disillusioned class on the verge of an ideological breakdown. There is a whiff of revisionism in the air as well and some of the condemnation of de Valera's Ireland seems to be based more on modern thinking than on contemporaneous belief. Though the play is set in 1953, the fallout from the Mother and Child Scheme finds no place in Mai's rants against Catholic, Gaelic Ireland.

But this is not a comfortable evening in the theatre. Barry's intensely lyrical style and long monologues lack theatricality and demand a lot of the audience. Fortunately the dramatic flow is aided by some fine performances from the leading actors.

Fidelma Cullen gives a majesterial performance in the lead role while Brendan Conroy is fecklessness incarnate as her husband Jack, a wannabee aristocrat who "drank away their house". Welsh director, Ian Rowlands, gets the most out of a well-drilled cast while Seán Crowley's set is bare and functional.

Runs until August 24th and then tours to Dún Laoghaire, Sligo and Limerick

The innovative Fishamble company recently held a new play competition won by Rosalind Haslett, a 22-year old from Derry who is a final-year student at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College.

Still was her first play, and it is now having a short run in the outdoor environment of Meeting House Square in Temple Bar.

For some 50 minutes the play looks at an interlude in the lives of three young people, two women and a man. Grace has inherited an interest in her grandmother's run-down house, and lives there with her friend Wendy with a view to selling it eventually. In the meantime they are trying to clean and refurbish it, and it is heavy going.

The extrovert Grace has a casual encounter with backpacker Jackson, and invites him to share the house. After a while, a situation of some intimacy develops between him and Wendy, but it transpires that he is afraid of committing himself to it. He makes his lame excuses and leaves, leaving the women to resume their mutually dependent ways.

It is a slight enough piece, but the novice author is on the right track, knowing that good theatre has more to do with relationships than with complex plots. Her women are convincingly drawn, the man rather less so, but the merits of the writing exceed its defects in satisfying measure. The whole is greatly enlivened by Jim Culleton's direction, which uses voice amplification, animated slides, film clips and occasional shifts from the large stage to peripheral locations on the square.

Admission to the show, one of the summer-long Temple Bar Diversions programme of events, is free (tickets from Temple Bar Properties offices, 18 Eustace Street, Dublin 2) - but it ends tonight.

The lunchtime concert in the NCH would have interested a historian of popular music; with the exception of Barber in Adagio for Strings, all the composers were deliberately trying to appeal to a public that prefers to be amused rather than elevated. The effort showed in the relentless high spirits of the items and the heavy reliance on cliché; a coarseness of approach seems hard to avoid.

Mitch Leigh's sentimentalisation of Don Quixote, even when sung with virile intensity by Andrew Murphy, deprives the knight of his dignity.

Shostakovich's use of jazz does little more than gesture towards an idiom that was esentially alien to the composer and Bernstein's attemp to force jazz into the classical mould is neither fish, flesh nor fowl. The Airs by Offenbach and Thomas are in the French tradition and not in the least effortful, but Andrew Murphy is too serious an artist to be fully at home in their frothy ebullience.

The NCO under Laurent Wagner played with spirit and all the necessary brashness, hammering out the message that music is fun; but it was their sensitive interpretation of Barber's Adagio that made the concert more than a Donnybrook fair.