k.d lang in the Olympia theatre and Casanova in Project Cube, Dublin.
k.d. lang
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
By Tony Clayton-Lea
Barefoot and commanding, cajoling and flirty, nonplussed and skittish, the Canadian singer-songwriter k.d. lang returns to Dublin after more than several years somewhat more the wiser and lesser of profile.
Her downturn in commercial returns doesn't seem to have depressed her too much. Indeed, there's a sense that she's enjoying herself more than she did during her commercial peak, in the early to mid-1990s.
Yes, her lesbian following is evident throughout the show ("Riverdance on a G string, kaydeee," a female voice requests), but lang radiates the insouciance of a person who has come to terms with such an adoring, voluble audience ("I think I've
probably done that before," she replies with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders).
Lang's profile may have altered radically in the time since she last performed in Ireland, but her art doesn't seem to have suffered. Less prone to the pressures of following up a hit record with another best-seller, lang appear to have settled into her material, making an impression that refuses to disappear.
She trawls her back catalogue, peppering the set with selections from her recently released covers album, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel. It's a measure to her interpretative skills that songs such as Neil Young's Helpless and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sound very much her own, particularly the latter (which has been appropriated by perhaps one too many Jeff Buckley wannabes than is strictly necessary), which lang invests with equal measures of poignancy, purity and passion to take it beyond the overfamiliar.
Yet it was material that she is probably better known for that ricochets around the venue. Miss Chatelaine witnesses lang shimmying across the stage; Constant Craving sees her deflate her status as a star by a display of vulnerability rarely expressed.
Her voice is a showstopper throughout. In Crying, her erstwhile duet with Roy Orbison, she holds a note for what seems like ages. In an outstanding version of Patsy Cline's Three Cigarettes In An Ashtray (lang's sole nod to her early country material), she holds a note for the longest time this writer has ever experienced - and there is nothing of the show-off about it, either.
Lang is totally in the moment, on the case, in the realm of the senses, a natural phenomenon in her natural surroundings, very much at home and very much the real thing.
Casanova
Project Cube, Dublin
By Gerry Colgan
David Greig's modern Casanova is a saturnine young man afflicted with a severe strain of satyriasis, a sex mechanic with attitude. He believes that he has a mission, in a world desensitised by tranquillisers, Valium and other downers, to celebrate the carnal life and establish a republic of desire. Well, nice work if you can get it.
A rich woman, an ex-lover, plans to construct an exhibition celebrating his 1,000-plus sexual conquests, in which he will be the main exhibit - but as what? While we wait to find out, Casanova entertains us by bowling women over like ninepins in foreign countries, aircraft toilets and airports; he has merely to ask nicely, and they are invariably accommodating. There is a potty sub-plot about a tradesman seeking to avenge the seduction of his wife, but it soon fizzles out.
C is turned down by his rich sponsor the second time around. When he mutters his hypnotic mantra, "You are the one," to her, she just tells him he is sick - all those women! He turns to drink but remains true to his code. His role at the exhibition is that of a suicide by hanging.
The play is some two and a half hours long, an indicator of how seriously it takes itself. I could not, alas, do the same, despite the talented efforts of students from the Royal Welsh College of Drama, directed by Tom Daley.
Run ended
