After the success of Disco Pigs and Bedbound, Enda Walsh's reputation is deservedly high. The re-appearance, courtesy of the New York-based Origin company, of Misterman - presented briefly in Cork three years ago - thus raises expectations that a short excursion into familiar territory cannot fulfil.
Misterman
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
Misterman is no more than a creepy vignette, an accomplished but rather pointless exercise in the new Irish provincial Gothic (pioneered by Pat McCabe and Mike McCormack), in which the psychopath has replaced the shopkeeper as the mainstay of fiction.
Though enlivened by the taped voices of Aideen O'Kelly and Laoisa Sexton, the play is essentially a one-man show, with George Heslin as Thomas McGill, the small-town mammy's boy who fancies himself a "prophet of God". Heslin is deft and fluent, and the show is superbly lit and adeptly directed. But one-actor plays depend, above all, on the tone of voice and Walsh's tone is too knowingly literary to be compelling or convincing.
Fintan O'Toole
A Monarch in Hollywood
Teacher's Club
Hollywood in the 1950s, and a boy fresh from Iowa has taken the name that will turn him into a movie star. Dalton York (Derrick Devine) has everything: picture deal, mansion, adulation. But his is an invented life, intricately groomed for the press, and when his manager pressures him into marriage, the secrets - and the company - York has been keeping begin to rupture the polished surface.
It is hardly an unpredictable plot, and the dangers of cliché are manifold, but Aidan Harney's writing is dextrous enough, his dialogue witty and well-judged enough, to resist them and to allow the inevitability of York's downfall to evolve with tension rather than tedium. In a cast of strong performances, Eamon Rohan and Pep Garcia-Pascual are irresistible as York's manipulative manager and his manipulated lover respectively. Devine is also engaging, if subject to too many first night glitches. Fringe time is as good as any to see well-crafted naturalistic theatre.
Belinda McKeon
Aerowaves
Project
Robert Tirpa'k's contorted body twitches on the floor, while a video of the same body, projected on to venetian blinds, rolls around in water. The taut and sinewy live movements are wonderfully articulated in choreographer Helene Winzieri's subtly crafted . . . And the Damage Done, constructed at a fluid pace and imbued with a real sense of drama.
Estonian Mart Kangro offered Start, the light-hearted piece that has always felt to be needed in the Fringe's Aerowaves programmes. A promising beginning with absurd rhythmic movements, punctuated by silent suspensions and a silent video of a dance class, soon slipped into a tiresome and over-long collection of unfunny gags.
But the duet Consisting of Them, by Russian Taras Burnashev, was just short of perfect. Shrouded in gloom, Burnashev and Daria Buzovkina are like an old married couple, eschewing eye contact yet moving with complete awareness of the other. With a clear development of form and a fascinating hybrid of movement vocabularies, it was performed with clarity and understated tenderness.
Michael Seaver
Wise Guys
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
Jane Coyle
Takes guts to begin a show about angry young men, for angry young men, with an operatic aria. But Philip Osment's play for the Leeds-based Red Ladder company about the sad, mad, bad lives of Mike and Skid and Darren and Stephen is as gutsy as they come. Without straying either into condescension or preachiness, Osment takes up the cause of young people in contemporary society, who, for a variety of reasons - parental neglect, abuse, social and educational inequality, greed, boredom, peer pressure - do not fulfil their potential and, instead, drift into self-destructive, dead-end existences, fuelled by crime and violence. Relationships weave and interlink, fracture and reform in this cross-section of inner-city life, portrayed by four athletic, versatile young actors, pacily directed by Wendy Harris and with a brilliantly punchy rock-opera soundtrack by Ivan Stott.
Meet thick Darren (Simon Hadfield) and his dying grandad; bright, frustrated Mike (David Bell) and his violent father; Skid (Sean Cernow), smooth, lethal and exploitative; Stephen (Daniel Abelson), thrown out of home for being gay. They're no better and no worse than the world around them. "Everyone's on the take, at the end of the day," observes Mike. Among the affluent middle classes, the benficiaries are called entrepreneurs; in his world, they are merely criminals.
Within a moveable, metal-framed set, a simple sofa becomes a bed, a stolen car, a disco platform, a squat, an urban playground, where the gang of four act out the sordid episodes of their hopeless lives. Yet, beneath the bravado, lurks conscience and a sense of duty - mirrored in the final journey home with Darren's granda, the defence of Mike's young brother from his vicious father, the healing of a festering schooldays wound.
And while, finally, Darren is doomed to a drug-dependent life on the streets and Skid slides into a lucrative career as a dealer, there is redemption for Mike and Stephen, who make the difficult decision to change their lives and try for something better.
Within Osment's subtly powerful, one-hour play is an acknowledgement that hope lies in avoiding rather than repeating the sins of the fathers.
Lee Hazelwood
Olympia, Dublin
Kevin Courtney
Best known as the composer of Nancy Sinatra's 1966 hit, These Boots Are Made For Walkin', but at the ripe old age of 75, Lee Hazelwood is finally being recognized as one of the great songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s. Bono and Andrea Corr recently covered his classic, Summer Wine, and a whole raft of post-rockers have paid tribute to the man's maverick genius. When he headlined the 1999 Meltdown Festival, curated by Nick Cave, it was the first time in 25 years that his boots had walked onstage. Now, he's wrapping up a 13-date tour with a single show at Dublin's Olympia Theatre, and the small size of the crowd is testament to the man's enduring obscurity.
If you crossed Leonard Cohen with Otis Lee Crenshaw and tossed in a little pinch of Victor Meldrew, you might get a pretty reasonable facsimile of the hunched figure sitting stage front, baseball cap turned low over his craggy face.
Right from the off, Hazelwood makes light of his "cult" status and his advancing years, then delivers a selection of tunes in a croaky voice seasoned by smoke and plenty of strong whiskey.
His backing band features members of Stereolab and The High Llamas, but initially they sound like just another bunch of hired hands, competent but completely unconnected to the music. You Look Like A Lady is caked in cheesy synths, while I Move Around, So Long, Babe and She Comes Running are wrapped in ersatz 1960s arrangements.
Things get more balanced during melancholic country and western dirges like My Autumn's Done Come and Dirtnap Stories, the latter from Hazelwood's latest CD, For Every Solution There Is A Problem.
It's a mixed bag of oldies, obscure tunes and not-so-classic moments: there's an oompah waltz tune about German beer, a bar-room ballad about a desperate drunk, and a couple of down-at-heel tunes about jailbirds. The highlight is a funky version of Hazelwood's most famous song, wherein the band find their shagtastic groove, pumping out the 1960s Hammond sounds and descending basslines.
It wasn't exactly a kick-ass comeback, but it's good to see Hazelwood still walking the walk.
