Frank Pig Says Hello, Liberty Hall, Dublin:"When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent." It is now all of 10 years since, with those opening words of The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe launched Francie Brady on the world.
In that time, he has become, almost literally, a legend. The pity and terror of Francie's slow transformation from innocent child to psychopath are so convincingly drawn that he seems more real than the literal truth. We are less likely to see the book as a reflection of actual events than to interpret a terrible outbreak of violent madness in rural or small-town Ireland through the book.
Culturally, the impact of the novel remains enormous. Neil Jordan's film of The Butcher Boy is arguably the finest Irish movie of the 1990s. In literature a whole school of Irish rural gothic has emerged under McCabe's influence.
One of the questions around the revival of Frank Pig Says Hello, McCabe's dramatic version of the novel is, therefore, the extent to which all of this will blunt the edge of what was, when it first appeared, a startling show. It is a mark of how well- fashioned it was in the first place that the answer is very little.
Frank Pig is not, in the usual sense, an adaptation. Not only is it McCabe's own work, but it emerged more or less contemporaneously with the novel in 1992. The story is broadly the same, but its shape and focus are inevitably different.
For a start, the great technical achievement of the novel - the insidious intimacy of the narrative voice - is missing. The story becomes more external, a set of things that happen rather than a succession of words in a man's head.
The irresistible charm of Francie, his heartbreaking amiability, is largely lost. On screen, in Jordan's film, this could be recaptured by having Francie played by a child. On stage, this is a practical impossibility.
Frank Pig is not, then, as brilliant a play as The Butcher Boy is a novel. But the great virtue of Joe O'Byrne's supremely confident staging is that it wastes no time crying over split milk. It does not try to capture qualities that are beyond the grasp of theatre but rather sets about the task of reconstructing the story in theatrical terms.
The key to this is an almost complete disavowal of realism. There are just two actors. David Gorry plays the younger, active Francie, here called Piglet. Denis Conway is the older Frank, who is not so much a recollecting narrator as the mind in which the whole story is re-enacted.
Thus we get, not an adaptation, but a translation. The language of fiction becomes the language of theatre. The internal verbal world of the narrator becomes the external physical world of the stage.
In O'Byrne's own design, this is an invented space, half-real and half-abstract. One of the great advantages of this revival is that the new Liberty Hall space, with its open, uncluttered stage, is perfect for this style of fluid staging.
None of this would mean very much, though, were it not embodied by the performers. David Gorry's re-creation of his original role as Piglet is no less remarkable than it seemed a decade ago. Gorry goes back for inspiration beyond the naturalism of the modern Irish stage to the world of silent movies. He uses a language of movement and gesture that draws on the terrifying strangeness of Buster Keaton and the apparent innocence of Stan Laurel. And he achieves the same kind of visual eloquence, at once distant and engrossing.
Denis Conway is very different, but scarcely less impressive. Filling in a large array of other characters, he has to be slower and more subtle. But his assurance allows him to create the structure which Gorry can illuminate with his pyrotechnics. Their telepathic relationship lends the whole thing an air of absolute conviction.
This certainty that these people are completely in command of what they are doing is rare enough in the theatre, and it forms a powerful shield against the rush of passing time. Anyone who saw the show a decade ago should welcome it back. For anyone who didn't, it's time to say hello.
• Runs until November 30th
Alicia Keys
The Point, Dublin, the hour, cometh the soul sister. Punching out a two-hour show in a venue as vast and unfriendly as this on the basis of one album (albeit the glittering, multi-platinum Songs In A Minor) will always be a test, but Alicia Keys is thankfully no Macy Gray. As slick and professional as you would expect from a former student of a New York performance academy, there's still plenty of heart and soul to the Keys's performance.
What's apparent from the off is that Keys is a trooper. You name it and she does it: singing, dancing, hollering, chatting and swapping grand piano for keyboard at the drop of a hat. It's a highly effective energy, perfectly tuned to the themes of positivity and empowerment which come through in the songs. It's certainly to the fore in the bubbling Rock With U and also there in spades in her jam-packed version of Prince's How Come You Don't Call Me?.
When Keys is the focus of the show, all
is well, but when the spotlight hits her band, some decidedly unfunky moments occur. Appearing not able to make up their mind as to what direction to take, they occasionally crowd songs with frills and fringes which irk rather than delight. While this allows Keys to jam songs beyond their natural life-span, such indulgences might not be so tolerable if there was more material to choose from.
But when Keys takes to the piano and delivers some spine-chilling solo selections, few in the audience are left unsmitten. Encoring predictably with Fallin' - the song which is Keys in a soulful nutshell - she leaves us wanting to hear more, a very satisfactory state of affairs indeed.
By Jim Carroll
