Irish Times writers review the Abbey's production of The Burial at Thebes and a recital by Belfast composer Brian Irvine at the National Concert Hall

The Burial at Thebes

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Flesh and dust are called to mind by the title of Seamus Heaney's new version of Sophocles' Antigone, emphasising the Greek playwright's preoccupation with burial rites, with ancient ritual. Every version of this play brings a different emphasis to its set of oppositions: between the state and the individual, between men and women, youth and age, the living and the dead. Underlying the moral argument about justice and human rights is the suggestion that something sacred has been violated. In Heaney's vivid text, that sense of the numinous is expressed through rich imagery drawn from the natural world, from the cycle of the seasons and from agriculture.

Divine power is immanent and eternal; the power of rulers is borrowed and temporal.

"Like foaming wave on wave across a strand" the troubles break on the royal family of Thebes, the children of Oedipus. The city of Thebes has withstood an attack led by one of Oedipus's sons, against another, in which both are killed. The surviving ruler, their uncle Creon, decrees that the body of the aggressor, Polyneices, should remain unburied. When Antigone (Ruth Negga), the sister of the two dead men, defies Creon, she challenges his right to ignore the religious requirement for all bodies to be given full burial rites, declaring that she is honouring the "unwritten, original, god-given laws".

The abiding fascination of the play lies in its brilliant characterisation and subtle arguments, the fact that Creon and Antigone both act from high moral principle and are on a collision course, each refusing to yield until it is too late. In Lorraine Pintal's production the forces are well matched: Lorcan Cranitch's physically expressive Creon isn't demonised. Nor is Ruth Negga's portrayal of Antigone's sacrifice seen as blindly fanatical: she emanates an appealingly serene sense of vocation.

Apart from these two leads, however, the performances are uncertain and uneven and the pace is static. This plot turns at a breakneck speed yet, as staged here, it all seems inert. Having Creon's wife Eurydice (Cathy Belton) appear on stage silently in the early scenes, along with one of Creon's flunkeys, means that, while the guard (Aidan Kelly) is imparting his dramatic news, there are five characters standing like statues listening to him.

The Chorus, who speak some of the most gracefully lyrical lines in Heaney's text, are played by two very distinctive character actors, Barry McGovern and Garret Keogh, who seem miscast. Rather than suggesting a community of elderly Thebans declaiming their "Ode to Man", they come across as an almost comic double-act, like Vladimir and Estragon or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

While there is always a danger in being too reductive in the setting of this play and overstating contemporary ideological parallels, the opposite problem is illustrated here: the setting and context are vague, contributing to a sense of dramatic vacuum. None of Heaney's telluric imagery is reflected in Carl Fillion's set design which, along with the costumes, evokes a mid-20th-century European dictatorship, in a bland, almost clichéd form, without fleshing out that allusion.

Antigone will, of course, survive this production, especially in Heaney's new version which has taken Sophocles' dense, concentrated poetry and decanted it into a beautifully transparent contemporary idiom.

Runs until May 1st

Helen Meany

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Composers' Choice: Brian Irvine

John Field Room,

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Belfast composer Brian Irvine (born 1965) began his musical career playing in punk bands in Belfast in the 1970s. He studied music in Boston at the Berklee College of Music, which he describes as "a jazz factory," dropped out after a year and a half and then went back across the Atlantic to take a music degree the University of Surrey. From jazz he got hooked on the European avant-garde, and from there he moved on to John Zorn.

But the musical development he describes with greatest animation is encountering the work of the Russian musician Sergei Kuryokhin (1954-96), whose hands-on, not quite scripted way with an ensemble seemed just what Irvine had been looking for.

Irvine talks in playful terms about what he does. He describes his own band, the Brian Irvine Ensemble, modelled on Kuryokhin's work, as "the DIY approach to music-making". He frequently mentions "the game aspect" of making music. He's on record as describing composition as "the best toy I ever had: all the thrills of a home-made go-kart, but with more levels than a Sony playstation". And he describes his current level of success, which brings invitations to do what he likes doing best, as making him feel "like a kid in the biggest sweetie shop in the world".

This Composers' Choice concert with his own group showed him attempting to forge an idealised experience of conducting, so that he was not just co-ordinating and shaping the music-making, but defining and forming the sounds of his 13 players with a freedom that relates to normal conducting as the physical stretchings and dilations of cartoon characters do to physical reality.

The musical style is typically raunchy and aggressive, the major influences stirred and mixed into a sort of blended sauce, spiced with the heat of a ubiquitous and not always subtly-flavoured curry powder.

There are moments of humour (though not as many as titles like My life as a Renault Espace might suggest), corners turned to reveal real surprises, and the solo skills of the ensemble's members are willingly highlighted.

Irvine's conducting inclines towards the orgasmic, and the effects it yields sometimes border on the anarchic. But, whether in the original pieces or the interspersed arrangements, there was a tendency for background clutter, albeit clutter with high levels of energy, to fill rather too much of the acoustic space. The music and the music-making were at their most interesting when, as in Irvine's own Tango on my old Hitachi and Howard Skempton's Pole, the greatest clarity was achieved.

Michael Dervan