Irish Times critcs review the football drama, Paradise, as well as Benjamin Britten's opera Albert Herring and Ursula Rani Sarma's seminal play ...touched....

Paradise

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Paradise tells of the demise of Belfast Celtic FC, based at Celtic Park - paradise to the 30,000 people who watched games at the west Belfast stadium. The team abandoned it after a player, Jimmy Jones, had his leg broken by a mob of Linfield fans at the end of a match in 1948. Telling the story through real players and composite characters, director Dan Gordon builds the first act up effectively to the events' climax. Clever characterisation by the authors - Pádraig Coyle, Conor Grimes and Alan McKee (the last two also act) - allows dramatic freedom while keeping sight of the core truth of the events.

Gordon has gathered a very strong cast: Lalor Roddy's Elisha Scott, manager of the club, makes the most of his role, the play's most rounded; McKee and Grimes have some excellent comedic moments, which add an element of farce. Farce is appropriate: a club with a huge following was allowed to fade away, neither footballing nor political authorities being concerned to keep a "Catholic" club in a "loyal" league. The authors shade the portrait with more than green and orange: a Linfield fan tears up his ticket in disgust at his fellow supporters; a Linfield player shields Celtic players from attack; and Celtic directors, it is hinted, were too middle class for the working man's game, too ready to profit from selling players.

If the first act tells of the death of the club, then the second is the post-mortem, and it suffers accordingly: the drama is over. Paradise is perilously close to being a game of one half. It plays out time by examining the role of journalism in reporting sectarian strife, but the scenes are as subtle as a tackle from behind. That said, the audience gave Paradise a standing ovation.

Runs until July 3rd

Pól Ó Muirí

Albert Herring

Castleward Opera, Strangford

On the face of it this production had everything going for it. Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring seems an enterprising choice, and its modest requirements - a small orchestra, a small cast, no chorus - suit Castleward. Why, then, was it such heavy going? The performance had its good points: Brian MacKay's assured conducting of Castleward Opera Orchestra, some good horn playing in the pit, some amusing moments in the action. Nuala Murray (Nancy) sang sympathetically, and Christine Courtney (Lady Billows) gave us some good high notes. But elsewhere beauty of sound and imaginative singing were elusive. Dramatically, this was a straight-from- the-shoulder performance, good humoured but with a touch of the amateur dramatics. Peter Morgan-Barnes tends to clump his singers together, on one side of the stage or the other, and the set was makeshift.

But were the shortcomings solely those of the performers? We're told of the significance that the themes of innocence and experience had for Britten, and much has been written about how, in his only out-and-out comedy innocence, instead of being violated by experience he assimilates it with at least the hope of achieving maturity. These explanations account for his choice of subject, but they don't explain why he felt he had to work through such a prosaic text. The music does sometimes surprise us with its inventiveness, but at other times it's as dull as the libretto. One sympathised with Martin O'Hagan, who as Herring spent most of the time looking as if he wished he were elsewhere.

Dermot Gault

. . . touched . . .

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

You might guess from the innocent style of the title that . . . touched . . . is one of Ursula Rani Sarma's earliest plays, written when she was just 19 and received with great enthusiasm at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Asylum Productions has chosen to revisit this seminal piece at a time when it is more difficult than ever to attract young people to theatre. Success in that direction was plain here, with many in the audience about the same age as the playwright.

Director Donal Gallagher has preserved the original freshness of voice and clear-sightedness of vision in retelling the ultimate horror story for any generation: the premature, enforced loss of innocence. In a starkly claustrophobic, curved-wall black box, with only a couple of wooden beer crates as accessories, Mark O'Brien, Catriona Lynch and Ed Malone simply become Macca, Cora and Mikey, three young people from very different backgrounds brought together by chance on the cold, heartless streets of Dublin.

O'Brien's Macca is a wise-cracking, loud-mouthed young hoodlum. When he meets this brother-sister pair, just up from the country, they could be from another planet. But for all that Macca may be streetwise and tricky, they are harbouring much darker experiences than he could ever imagine.

Rani Sarma has beautifully captured the clash of urban and rural mores, particularly in the superficially naive characters of Mikey and Cora. Malone comes on all wild-eyed and gauche, but there is something truly terrifying lurking behind his gangling exterior. Lynch, making her first appearance in Ireland, is heartbreakingly convincing as a young girl whose life was forever tainted the day the local doctor took her to the beach for a celebratory birthday ice cream.

Gallagher is extremely skilled at grafting black on to white, experience on to innocence. The effect was evident from the stunned silence of the audience.

Ends here tomorrow, moving to the Everyman Palace, in Cork, on Tuesday

Jane Coyle