Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events.

Carrothers-Brady Quartet

JJ Smyth's, Dublin

Pianist Bill Carrothers opened his Irish tour, with drummer Kevin Brady, John Moriarty (guitar) and Dave Redmond (bass), with an exhilarating concert. And though it was the group's first public appearance, it promised much good music throughout its tour.

The first two pieces were statements of intent. The opening Alone Together, with some delicious harmonic choices from the piano, and a gleefully disassembled Bemsha Swing, full of rhythmic displacements, unexpected chords and intervals like missing a step in the dark, emphasised the impact Carrothers was to have on these excellent musicians, so quick witted in their responses; a fine coda on the latter, for example, one of many that night, was developed out of a two-note piano motif picked up by bass and guitar.

After a change of pace with a ballad, Polka Dots And Moonbeams, another interesting element was introduced with Red Cross. An old Charlie Parker/Tiny Grimes 32-bar, it is very seldom played. It wasn't to be the only time Carrothers would raid obscure corners; later they romped though a wickedly uptempo first World War tune, Hello My Baby, which really stretched the musicians: it ended with a stunningly altered reprise of the melody, duly also reharmonised and fitted with a dreamily mysterious coda. The group also found an intriguing coda, subtly built around If I Were A Bell and pianist Sonny Clark's intro for Dexter Gordon's recording of that tune, for It's A Blue World, on which Redmond contributed a fine solo.

The surprises - and pleasures - continued through an enjoyable second set that included a splendid Little Niles, full of deftly negotiated changes of pace for light and shade and excellent solos from piano, guitar and bass, compellingly driven by the drums. Also notable in the set were a relaxed On A Misty Night (another marvellous coda) and an absorbing piano trio performance of Herbie Hancock's Water Babies.  Ray Comiskey

Galway tonight, Limerick tomorrow, Wexford (Jan 28) and Bray (Jan 30)

There Came a Gypsy Riding

Almeida Theatre, London

Frank McGuinness is prolific and unpredictable. For his new play the Almeida stage is covered in West of Ireland rocks - horribly reminiscent of the setting of a dire London production of his Mutabilitie (William Shakespeare, on hols from the Globe, goes to Ireland, meets Edmund Spenser. Brilliant conceit, but . . .).

However, in There Came a Gypsy Riding a 20th-century holiday home sits on the rocks and the owners, a well-off Dublin family, are about to arrive. The mother, Margaret (university lecturer), has brought her husband, Leo (owner of many Dublin pubs), and their two grown-up children to the cottage for a sad, strange anniversary.

It is July, and two years ago the body of their third child, Eugene, was found on the beach near the house. He had committed suicide, and grief has devastated the family ever since. The siblings want closure, while their mother still has a long way to go. Eugene was "her gold, her happiness" and both she and her husband have submerged themselves in work, given up alcohol and begun to row with an intensity reminiscent of Albee's Virginia Woolf couple. At one point Leo says with marvellous irony "Can you imagine this night if there had been drink involved?"

There is, however, a distraction at hand - an elderly cousin called Bridget (Eileen Atkins). She found Eugene's body; she is eccentric and manipulative and encourages people to think she has Alzheimer's. This gives her the licence to say the unsayable. She is something of a philosopher, has fine comic riffs about "that gobshite" St Patrick and claims an intimate relationship with the Devil ("He's always very upset at Christmas because nobody remembers his birthday"). It's a peach of a part which Atkins grabs with glee and fine timing but also with a weird, unstable accent.

The loss of a child is such a powerful theme that the first act was sometimes charged with almost unbearable emotion. Margaret cannot understand why her son did not leave a note. But when one appears - quite convincingly for such a hoary device - it reveals very little. In act two the parents begin, at last, to let their feelings pour out in great arias of grief.

The acting is excellent: Ian McElhinney is solidly believable as the father; Elaine Cassidy makes a touching daughter and Aidan McArdle an enigmatic son. But the honours go to Imelda Staunton for her formidable portrait of a Donegal woman who is both tough and heartbroken. This play is on-form McGuinness, finely directed by Michael Attenborough. Bernard Adams

Runs until March 3

Biggs, Ó Cuinneagáin

NCH, Dublin

To say that bass-baritone Conor Biggs and pianist Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin were well prepared for this concert would be an understatement. With seven out of 14 items taken from their recent disc of Tchaikovsky songs, their programme was consistently ready and fluent.

Their mostly Russian selections were neatly arranged like a Russian doll, with an outer layer of Rachmaninov and an inner one of Tchaikovsky. At the centre, and receiving its first performance, was a song cycle by English composer Andrew Wise, who, like Biggs, is a resident of Belgium.

Tackling three Auden poems from the 1930s, Wise's cycle is in a colourful and aptly neo-tonal idiom that's reminiscent of art-deco modernism. An arioso-like setting of Musée des Beaux Arts brings out the poem's semantics rather than its irregular rhymes and metres, while Roman Wall Blues and Autumn Song capitalise on the crisper prosody of two sardonic ballad texts - the one swinging with mock cabaret fun, the other a finely crafted series of variations.

It's not unknown for leading vocalists to refer to a score during song recitals. Biggs, however, had committed this new material to memory - as he had the swathes of Russian verse. His preparedness extended from the mental realm to the vocal, with the initial vowel of every song hitting its mark of grit, tenderness or trepidation.

In a repertory that's popularly associated with the rumblings of bassi profundi, Biggs's svelte tones and Ó Cuinneagáin's polished and artfully scaled accompaniments made for a satisfying mix, both technically and emotionally, of gravitas and agility . Andrew Johnstone

World in Pictures

Project Upstairs, Dublin

Forced Entertainment, a British company with a reputation for experimental work, paid a brief visit to Dublin with a potted and chaotic history of mankind. The introduction is engagingly witty: seven actors gather to advise the eighth, Gerry, how to improve his introductory piece. Try to be more epic, don't be clever, just be yourself, they urge.

Gerry ends his intro at a point when he has supposedly jumped off the roof of a high-rise building. The thought had just occurred to him that he was so close to solving the meaning of God and related matters that it would be a pity not to follow through. He stops half-way in his descent, however - just grabbing our attention.

Then we're away, with a narrator taking us through mankind's evolution, illustrated by the others, including Gerry. It begins with a scene from prehistoric times, cavemen and women in a loopy dance. On their odyssey, the group takes us through ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and Egypt, a sketch of lost civilisations. Then it's Rome, barbarian hordes, Vikings, the Black Death with talk of buboes and groins, all illustrated by manic gyrations as the narrator stands valiantly by her microphone assailed by artificial snow, even when close to the equator. They run out of time, and take the last century or so at a superficial gallop.

The Abbe Sieyes, asked what he did in the French Revolution, replied "I survived", and survival is indeed an accomplishment of sorts. This company has been in business for 20 years, so they must have been doing something right - but this, I fear, is not it. Gerry Colgan

Jesse Malin

Whelans, Dublin

Amid all these genre-mashing bands, it's almost refreshing to encounter an unironic singer-songwriter who wants to rock out like the Replacements and save your soul like Bruce Springsteen.

Jesse Malin hails from New York, but his heart is firmly in the arms of America, and his roots follow lines already laid down by old-school American rockers, from Dylan to Paul Westerberg to John Cougar Mellencamp. His third album, Glitter in the Gutter, features guest appearances by Ryan Adams, Josh Homme, Jakob Dylan and The Boss himself, but when he played a packed Whelans, nobody was holding their breath for the arrival of any rock 'n' roll legends.

Malin is still waiting to be let into the pantheon, but he's banging on the door as hard as he can. Accompanied by a solid four-piece band, Malin kicks out the tunes like a boxer fighting a death-or-glory battle. He needs to make every song count, from older ones such as Riding on the Subway, Queen of the Underworld and Downliner to new songs Don't Let Them Take You Down, Black-Haired Girl and Prisoners of Paradise.

With all amps on 11, he seems unassailable, but when Malin lets down his rock 'n' roll guard, he shows more than one Achilles heel. That snarl of his is not enough to bolster such reflective songs as Broken Radio and Aftermath, and even though his cover of the Replacements' Bastards of Young is deftly carried off, you feel it's more credit to the song than to the singer.

Malin's unreconstructed rock attitude leaves him little room to widen his palette; he might espouse the virtues of the Clash and Lucinda Williams, but often his songs seem to follow that same old lonesome highway to redemption. But there's no doubting Malin's belief in the healing power of rock, and when he steps in among us and gets us to sit on the floor and sing along to Solitaire, it leaves us with a warm glow. Kevin Courtney