Irish Times writers review some of last nights events around the country.
Simple Kid
Temple Bar Music Centre
He's wearing a stetson, he's playing slide guitar, and his voice wavers like Neil Young on a tightrope. But Corkman Ciaran McFeely is no ordinary country boy; underneath the twang guitars is a synthetic swell of keyboards and drum machines, an electronic buzz that constantly reminds you that you're not - and never were - in Kansas.
We're in the Temple Bar Music Centre, and Simple Kid is sitting onstage, burbling a robotic rendition of Hurt based on Johnny Cash's version. He's clearly having fun doing his Arlo Guthrie-on-GBH routine, but McFeely's not messing here. With a wad of critical notices in his back pocket for his debut album, SK1, and some well-received UK gigs under his belt, the former Young Offender is poised to become this year's big indie story - the badly drawn boy from Cork who grabbed the glory from under the polished noses of the music industry.
Tonight, though, it all feels like just a test, as McFeely tinkers his way around his live performance, trying to find the right home-grown mix to make this one special. He's accompanied by his brother Al on guitar and his pal, Matt, on keyboards, violin and various other sounds. Between them - and the drum machine - they deftly kick-start such tracks as Staring At The Sun (no relationship to the U2 song of the same name), Drugs (starts off like a folksy Led Zep, then neatly morphs into Alabama 3). It's like watching three dustbowl mechanics fixing your truck - it's a bit messy and grimy, but the engine purrs nicely in the end.
Simple Kid's rep has been built on EPs recorded at home and released on the 2M label, but though his songs can sometimes be a confusing melange of Marc Bolan, Arlo Guthrie, Syd Barratt and Beck, they mesh nicely onstage. Hello is a mischievous handshake with the devil, while Truck On waves the blues away and Kids Don't Care shrugs at the futility of fame. These are next season's slacker anthems, and it probably won't be long before everyone else is shrugging along.
SK ends with an early gem, I Am Rock, then encores with Average Man - the metal karaoke version, with Black Sabbath's Paranoid as the backing track. Ozzy himself would have been perplexed.
- Kevin Courtney
Lonely Hearts
The Civic Theatre, Tallaght
Comedy, they say, is tragedy plus time. Nearly a century ago, Henri Landru, a dapper con artist and an icily calm murderer, preyed on vulnerable widows through the personal ads of a French newspaper. He seduced hundreds of women, divesting most of their assets and many of their lives.
Observatory Lane's devastatingly entertaining dramatisation of this parisian psycho courses with grim wit, possessing a sardonic hindsight that renders an innocent marriage proposal chillingly funny: "Will you do me the honour of spending the rest of your life with me?" Landru asks, eying the furniture.
With minimum fuss and inspired stagecraft, director Paul Keeley lets his drama unfurl beneath a hanging guillotine blade, guiding a capable ensemble of investigative Gendarmes, concerned family members and a stream of duped widows to create a vivid tableau of wartime Paris across an otherwise bare stage. A park is suggested with the sound of chirping birds, hotels materialise with an amusing gaggle of shrill maids whirling on their mops like spinning tops.
Vivid too is Charles Richards' witty, probing script offering as many laughs as insights, sustaining a dizzying pace that never disorientates the plot. Best of all though is Mal Whyte's portrait of the serial killer, fuelled with fastidious charm, dusky fantasies and a presence so vibrant that even the action occasionally freezes to let him pass by. Were there any scenery, Whyte might chew it.
Richards can't resist delving into Landru's psyche, though, teasing out dreams and deceits as though a historical conundrum might finally unravel itself.
Like Landru's dark invitations or the tormented afterlife of his victims we eventually visit, there are some places it is unwise for even a dramatist to explore.
These are brief hesitations, however, in a deftly engaging black comedy, which up to its final, wonderful moments, combines the frisson of a burst of laughter with a lingering, slow shiver.
- Peter Crawley
My Arm
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
By its nature, a theatre audience is silent, implicit; it sits and watches and, ideally, loses itself in what happens onstage. But a theatre audience confronted with its own silence, and its inability to maintain that silence, creates an unexpected experience for itself: it becomes the stage, it creates its own theatre.
Drama which draws an audience's attention to itself is nothing new, but when, a short way into his beguiling first play, the director and performer Tim Crouch refers to "the Great Silence of 1973" and stares at a TV screen showing the face of a plastic doll - actually seated in front of a video camera on a nearby table, and representing the 10-year-old self of his protagonist - the audience is abandoned for several minutes to the sound of its own breathing, its own shifting bodies, its own nervous laughter.
Words seem to hang on Crouch's lips, as he turns from the screen occasionally to glance around the auditorium, and the audience wills them to fall; but not until we have grown to awareness of the elements, visible and invisible, which typically surround us in a theatre but to which we are typically oblivious. Handled by Crouch - a talented, deeply engaging performer - with a balance of humour and seriousness, the experience is tense, loaded, and unpredictable. For anyone interested in theatre, it is an instructive one.
The play is, literally, an object-lesson in bringing to awareness the elements of our being which we take for granted, and in what happens if we position these elements in different ways. Through the use, as characters, of everyday items - a bunch of keys, a hairbrush, a shoe - lent by the audience, Crouch renders convincing, amusing, and frequently moving the unlikely story of an Isle of Wight boy who decides one day to hold his arm above his head, and who has kept it there, despite pleas, threats and the deterioration of his physical well-being, until this moment, when we meet with him.
In his strangeness he has become the darling of the international art scene, painted, sculpted and eventually purchased outright.Though the theme of the art world and its disregard of boundaries, its questionable appropriation of private lives, is a perilously obvious one through which to explore the nature of theatre, to pose questions of what it is we see and what it is we contribute, Crouch's blend of narrative and visualisation is handled with intelligence and sensitivity. The Mermaid is to be complemented for spotting this original piece at its premiere last year in the Edinburgh Traverse, and for bringing it here.
- Belinda McKeon
100% Polyester
Post Office, Cork
Although the title might suggest a manufactured, inorganic and non-breathable experience, the bodiless dresses that dance together in Christian Rizzo's installation create a natural and sensory duet that is rich with elemental resonances. Part of ICD's Fête de la Danse, 100% polyester object dansant à définir No. 28 (to give it's full title) has been placed off-site at the Post Office on Grand Parade, where a steady trickle of people venture up the stairs to the calming spectacle and what the creator calls "imaginary reasoning".
The two see-through dresses are hung from a mobile structure and sewn together at the sleeves and so appear to have hands joined. Even in the stationary photographs downstairs there is a sense of companionship between the figures: the wooden hangers turn the shoulders slightly inwards so the "bodies" seem focused on each other, while the sleeves are cut and hung so it appears the virtual hands have their palms facing upwards, creating a generous receptiveness. But when you enter the installation the bodies are dancing, softly buffeted by fans that create ever-changing currents of air that choreograph the dresses in a duet.
With Cathy Olive's slowly changing light and the quiet babble of DJ Food, the initial effect is similar to watching the calm of billowing curtains, but there is also a meandering dialectic between the dresses as the outlines hint at the bodies that might inhabit them. Companionship is a constant because the arms are always joined and the dresses appear to move in sympathy. Behind the conceptual simplicity is an elegant and oddly affecting experience.
- Michael Seaver
