Irish Times writers review the Abbey's production of The Shaughraun and a toxic performance by Britney Spears at the Point.

The Shaughraun

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Dion Boucicault gets great comic mileage from the illiteracy of his hero, Conn the Shaughraun. In a scene in which a crucial message is conveyed to him in a letter, Conn (Adrian Dunbar) manages to cover up his inadequacy and find someone else to read it for him.

Sure what would he need with the writin', at all at all, and he a likely lad who can live by his blather and his roguery? Boucicault had cracked the art of pandering to his largely illiterate mass audiences in his extravagant musical dramas, which played from New York to London to Melbourne in the 1860s and 1870s. At the Abbey we're invited to identify with them, to clap, hiss and boo the large, energetic cast in panto style. Everyone is assuming a role, including the audience, and if even more money had been spent on this lavish production we might have been sitting by gaslight with bonnets and top hats provided.

Extravagant visual spectacle, the raison d'être of melodrama, is amply delivered here by John McColgan, the Riverdance director, who makes his Abbey début, assisted by Martin Drury. Francis O'Connor's mobile set re-creates the Romantic Ireland scenography of Boucicault's productions, with cut-out crenellated turrets, silhouetted ruins and a craggy shoreline, all heightened by Rupert Murray's lighting.

Stone cottages rotate and are split open to reveal classic interiors, and the Shaughraun leaps with gusto between rocky outcrops that glide beneath his feet. At the dramatic high point he swings by rope across the stage to rescue his sweetheart (Jasmine Russell).

This creation of a pastiche of what is already pastiche becomes more problematic when it comes to interpreting the play, directing performances and generating audience reaction. If in 2004 we're identifying with those 19th-century audiences lapping up Boucicault's stage Irishry, what exactly are we laughing at? Tone is crucial, and in this production it fluctuates wildly: from irony to sentimentality, from a knowing, tongue-in-cheek performance such as Don Wycherly's, playing the villain who winks at the audience, to the panto-dame excesses of Anita Reeves as the Shaughraun's mother. The love scenes between the English captain (Hadley Fraser) and his Irish colleen (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) veer between high camp and straight romance. Where a light touch is required we're often given heavy-handed hamming and exaggeration, so that writing that is already drenched in primary colours is made lurid by the direction. The Shaughraun's wake scene, in particular, is marred by excruciating exaggeration that undermines its satirical effect.

Add to this a series of extended music-and-dance set pieces and the work becomes bloated. Boucicault's text, with all its plot exposition and heavy signalling, is surely not so fine or sacrosanct as to preclude a bit of editing? The exuberant dance scenes compound the problem of tonal slippage and audience collusion: if this is intended to be a satire on ersatz Irishry and our cultural industry, then why bring in as director one of the leading purveyors of such images, which are bolstered rather than satirised here by the outbreaks of foot-stomping lads and high-kicking lassies? A generous conclusion might be that this production is consciously raising all these questions, but somehow it seems more likely that they arise from sheer confusion.

Helen Meany

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Britney Spears

Point, Dublin

She came, she saw, she danced, she mimed, she stripped down to her bra and panties and she writhed around on a bed in a display of simulated sex she definitely didn't learn from Disney. Britney Spears is in town this week, bringing her Onyx Hotel tour to the little children of Ireland and mortifying their mummies with the raunchiness of her routines. Under-12s shouldn't have been allowed in, but as Britney's fans are predominantly pre-pubescent that would have forced her to go to a smaller venue - a lap-dancing club, perhaps.

What was more shocking, however, was the fakeness of it all, like a 1980s revival show but with even worse tunes. This was Toxic Barbie, robotically going through the choreographed motions and raking in as much as she can before the Blade Runners arrive to terminate this pop-star replicant. Her heavily enhanced vocals made her sound like a badly singing android, and her exaggerated lip movements (or perhaps skilful lip-synching) added to the mechanical effect. And her dance moves have been programmed from old footage of Madonna and Janet Jackson, both of whom wrote the book on raunchy.

In her five years at the top Spears has amassed a fortune but come up with only two decent songs. Toxic is tossed off at the beginning of the show, while Hit Me One More Time is given a spurious jazz-lounge treatment, the way Darius might have done it. Luckily, her supple troupe of dancers took up the slack left by the lack of good tunes, while the elaborate light show, camp master of ceremonies and what looked like a giant biscuit tin on wheels provided plenty of eye candy for the little-uns. It all ended rather suddenly and anti-climatically, but that's Britney: she looks real from a distance, but up close she turns out to be as ersatz as a shop-window mannequin.

Kevin Courtney