Moonlight & Music in the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, The Nightingale in Project Upstairs, and Therapy? in the Ambassador.

Therapy?
The Ambassador, Dublin
By Peter Crawley

It's hard to write anything declarative about Therapy? (See what I mean?) It could be worse: try delivering a sober critique on the new-wave band named !!!. Should the two ever tour together, there's a good chance the double bill would cancel itself out. There is now a more urgent question mark hanging over the Larne trio, whose pitch-black music and uniforms have barely changed since the group emerged, in 1990.

Like most things about them, that question fits neatly on a T-Shirt. "Irony?" asks the caption emblazoned on the backs of a few diehards in an under-filled Ambassador. If they mean, "Can you please explain the term . . ." then the answer is, "The Darkness." Ferocious drums, screeching guitars and unintelligible lyrics can no longer be delivered without a knowing wink. Amiable Therapy? certainly are, but they take themselves unfashionably seriously.

"This is dedicated to Tony Blair and George Bush," sneers Andy Cairns, eliciting pantomime booing, before playing the subtle Die Like A Motherf***er. Later he dedicates Sister to anyone educated by "f***ing nuns or the f***ing Christian Brothers." This neatly aligns Therapy? with Bryan McFadden. Now there's a double bill worth seeing.

The Nightingale
Project Upstairs, Dublin
By Gerry Colgan

This is the second play this year based on Oscar Wilde's story The Nightingale And The Rose (the first was produced for adults in the late and greatly lamented Bewley's Café Theatre). The approach here is very different, and the target audience is children over eight, but not excluding younger tots.

This version was created by Selina Cartmell and Rebecca Collins, who is the sole performer. She enters as a birthday girl, dressed in a grey tracksuit, carrying a cake covered in candles. Digging through a box of presents, she comes up with a boy's top and a girl's dress. These, when she dons them later, cast her as the human leads.

The basic story is that boy loves girl, who unreasonably demands a red rose out of season as proof of his ardour. He is crestfallen, but a nightingale comes to the rescue. The bird finds a silver rose with a sharp thorn and presses it to her breast. It turns red, and the boy is in business.

It is a simple tale, with enough of the parable in it to testify that the author was more than just a pretty wit. All the words here are sung to melodies written by the performer. She offers a lively interpretation of her roles, with bits of business added to amuse the children, who were manifestly engaged by the whole proceedings. That is a verdict I would not dissent from by one iota.

Ends tomorrow

Moonlight & Music
Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
By Gerry Colgan

This 45-minute one-woman play, written four years ago by Jennifer Johnston, is a powerful piece of introspective drama, interpreted with conviction by Mary McEvoy. We meet Rose, a middle-aged alcoholic, on the day she has been sacked from her job teaching English to secondary-school students. Parents have complained, the headmaster tells her, and she has had many written warnings about her behaviour. She accepts his verdict meekly and returns home and her comforting bottles.

She begins by talking to herself, then gradually shifts her soliloquy towards the audience. Her martinet father turned into something more sinister as she reached her teens. He abused her sexually over many years while she switched off in terror in the darkness of her room. Her mother was a simple woman, defeated and disengaged.

When Rose left to go to university, in Dublin, she wrote to her parents saying that she never wanted to see them again. It remained thus while she qualified as a teacher and went to England. Her mother's illness finally brought her reluctantly home, and after that death she faced up to weekly visits to her father, now in a nursing home addled by age. But her dreams remained corrupted, with memories indistinguishable from nightmares.

We leave her dancing drunkenly around the room, a sad victim of an unbearable life. The writing is vivid and poignant, and Mary McEvoy's nuanced performance, directed by Caroline FitzGerald, is one to savour.

Ends today