Irish Times critics review Diana Ross's visit to The Point Theatre and Flaming Fables in Befast's Old Museum Arts Centre.
Diana Ross, The Point, Dublin
Our diva is pleased to find the room arranged in just the way she likes it. Contorted around a circular stage, The Point has undergone an awesome transformation, luring all attention and affection towards its centre, and topping it off with - what else? - a glitter ball. Its twirling mirrors soak up the light and give it back to us in myriad individual rays.
Diana Ross has exactly the same effect. Smothered in sequins, her love is a game of give and take; a balancing act as challenging as the architecturally impressive head-dress sported upon reassuringly huge hair. If her temperament is rumoured to be just as precarious, magnificently, there is no holding back tonight.
With her smile set to stun, Diana delivers a four-decade retrospective, getting from Motown to disco and classic to camp, without ever resorting to an infernal medley.
Although some of her oeuvre has been nipped and tucked (unlike herself, she insists), we are love-bombed with unadulterated hits and glitz, pumped out at an exhilarating rate.
Where Did Our Love Go? swoons into Baby Love; Stop! In the Name of Love charges into You Can't Hurry Love, and Ross dashes off to don another outrageous costume.
At such times you feel abandoned. When she turns her back, you feel ignored. But, steadily meeting every gaze, Ross often seems to be singing to you, and you alone. This astonishing illusion of intimacy can transform a group of librarians into a cavorting and clamorous gang, eyed warily by concert security.
"I made it!" Ross trumpets, matching pride in her 60th birthday with a cutesy rendition of The Best Years of My Life, later introducing a rambunctious I Will Survive with careful euphemisms about recent crises - "that are really lessons". Nailing humility as perfectly as her songs, she takes a crowd in like a confidant. It's a magnificent display - Peter Crawley
Psycho-delia and Monolith. Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
Those hardy punters who braved Thursday night's sleet and gales to see Wales's Diversions Dance Company certainly empathised with the gait of the performers at the beginning of Sean Tuan John's Psycho-delia. With arms thrust into the pockets of their Macs, shoulders hunched and a forward-leaning purpose in their strides, they mimicked how most of us had walked to the theatre, and the everyday gestures that then evolved further imitated the mundane in our lives.
After this clear and well-paced opening things began rapidly to disintegrate, and the gestures had to make way for tortuous narrations, stunted movement phrases and illogical set-pieces that quickly dragged everything down. Based around sci-fi B movies, Psycho-delia isn't nearly as witty as it thinks it is, and conceptual naivety happily shares the stage with naffness in a sprawling and dispiriting work.
The audience members who left at the interval missed an altogether more uplifting experience in Spaniard Toni Mira's Monolith. Here was a work that had the elements missing in Psycho-delia, like a clear sense of purpose, integrity and respect for the performers. Five moveable rectangular structures created different environments, from a mini-Stonehenge to a maze where video projections of the performers were chased by the real bodies.
Any number of metaphors were possible through their constant presence and although manually manipulated by the performers they managed to exude a greater, more primal, sense of power than the humans. There were some clever and well-judged set-pieces, such as the duet between a female dancer and a radio-controlled car, a solo where a live dancer managed to swim underwater via video projection and another duet between a live body and video shadow.
The movement material throughout was strong, with one exhilarating quintet in the middle showing fleet-footed changes in direction, constant shifts in weight and constant easy-flowing motion around an irregular musical metre of five. At these moments the full talents of the strong cast were shown as they embodied not just the movement, but the very essence of the work.- Michael Seaver
Flaming Fables, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
If you play with fire, the chances are you'll get badly hurt. Leer and Lack, Daisy and the Duchess, naughty Flora and dozy Granny all played with Fire and ended up in a bad way. Mary McNally's sparky new play for Replay Productions is produced in association with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and Home Accident Prevention, which may sound rather worthy but, under Richard Croxford's ever-imaginative direction, is anything but. Fire is a rock star, the genuine article - bad, brash and utterly gorgeous. Today is his birthday and his followers Aroara, Amber and Ash have prepared something special for their hero. It's a magic memory box.
Drop in a sprinkle of stardust and some laughter lines and, abracadabra, the flames are fanned under Fire's gleefully destructive past. It takes him to his childhood and the lasting influence of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven. In keeping with the tone of this engaging piece, Prometheus is amusingly portrayed as a curly-haired Greek wearing a tropical print shirt and a bandana. So the audience has a little history lesson without even noticing.
The messages reach deep into the heart of the ways in which Fire gets to have his wicked way - matches left within children's reach, careless smokers in the home, kids making hoax telephone calls to the fire brigade, childish tantrums, batteries removed from smoke alarms and put into toys. All these stories are told within the sparkling maze of Siobhan Ferrie's set and through a gallery of fantastical, colourful characters portrayed by just three actors - Maria Connolly, Jo Donnelly and Sean-Paul O'Rawe. And directing operations is the charismatic Tommy Wallace as Fire, revelling in Paul Boyd's rock and pop soundtrack, directing Paul McEneaney's brilliantly-integrated illusions and glowing in the horrid satisfaction of his evil intentions.
The North's long-established theatre-in-education company continues to go from strength to strength, delighting children young and old. - Jane Coyle
Tours to Riverside Theatre, Coleraine March 25th and Island Arts Centre, Lisburn, March 31st and April 1st.
The Lost Letters of a Victorian Lady Bewley's Café Theatre, Grafton Street, Dublin
Nobody ever said Victorian women had it easy; but until you've met sweet, well-meaning Edith Lampton, as dim as she is dutiful, you don't know the half of it. This is the play which was enough of a success on the 1996 Fringe circuit to encourage its creator, the comic and playwright Michelle Read, to establish the innovative company READCO, which last year produced the excellent The Other Side.
Sharp, pacey comedy has become Read's hallmark, and her performance in the central role here is mercilessly funny from the first moment she turns Edith's gormless, rabbit-in-the-headlights stare to the audience.
Between a languishing mother (pleasingly gangly and gravel-voiced for a Victorian Ma, realised as she is by the hilarious Neil Watkins), a disaster-prone brother (unseen but for the silhouettes of his growing collection of dismembered limbs), two half-witted servants and a mysterious Irish major (Damien Devaney), who turns up to send her mother into a tizzy with his rebel songs, Edith carries a weight upon her satin-flounced young shoulders.
All is documented in her candid missives to Esme, a mentor and supplier of dubious advice, but after her mother expires, wrapped in a tricolour, and after she's forced to shoot her impossible brother with a harpoon gun, only to discover that the estate has been squandered on opium, Edith must strike out on her own.
A trip to Amsterdam brings the farce levels to new heights and the troupe of villains and rescuers who populate her adventure sustain an endless flow of hilarity. By the end of it all, and by the end of your lunchtime, poor Edith may be none the wiser, but, under the direction of Jo Mangan, snappy writing, outlandish scenarios and a wealth of priceless facial expressions mean that you, at least, will be sniggering into your sandwich. - Belinda McKeown
