Irish Times critiics give their verdicts
About Time Project, Dublin
So what was that all about, then? One difficulty facing About Time, a short festival of live art curated by the British Council and Project arts centre, was that even they seemed to find the programme taboo. In part, the rubric of live art - an interdisciplinary platform straddling the borders of theatre, visual art, film and more besides - becomes so all-encompassing as to creep toward meaninglessness. About Time rarely mentioned it.
Instead, the festival proceeded with care, emphasising accessibility and entertainment while nursing quiet hopes that the work might stimulate Irish artists to question not just new subjects but also new forms. One can understand the frustration.
"We are looking for a theatre that really talks about what it is like to live through these times," goes the manifesto of Sheffield's Forced Entertainment. That theatre, the argument goes, doesn't come with a text, three acts and interval drinks. Bloody Mess, the company's 20th-anniversary show, honours director Tim Etchells' notion that fragmented times require shattered narratives: the rupture of website links, MP3 players set to shuffle and plots that proliferate with the click of a remote control.
Etchells' marvellous talk, In the Event, even found this lack of linearity in basic human impulses. "Wasn't sex itself always a kind of hypertext?" he asked. Stirring stuff to those of us mired in its Aristotelian unities of beginning, middle and end.
The apparent (but utterly deceptive) randomness of Bloody Mess - which, at one of its more coherent points, features two clowns wrestling while a grey-haired cheerleader urges the audience to cry and a performer in a gorilla suit throws out fistfuls of tissues - is a determined attempt to stage chaos. Thirty minutes of clowning routines and cast introductions elapse before someone announces: "I think we're ready to begin." It is a performance that starts long before it begins and ends a while after it finishes.
Such distrust of the play structure abounds in live art, where the artifice of the stage is stretched or dismantled: the fourth wall crumbles, suspension of disbelief is suspended. Rising to replace them are the lecture and the microphone, your guarantees of reality. So Robin Deacon's lecture cum multimedia performance, Colin Powell, offered a potted biography of the outgoing US secretary of state in comparison to Deacon's own history, using the Bounty bar and Oreo cookie to illustrate his ethnic points: black on the outside, white on the inside.
Like Etchells' engaging but seemingly interminable video pieces, and much of Bloody Mess, Colin Powell was a neat concept followed by wearying recapitulation. If the examination goes no further than the abstract, a thumbnail sketch or a text message would have sufficed.
On The Scent succeeded best, precisely because it demanded experience. In a terraced house on Synge Street the three members of Curious introduced intimate gatherings to their personal histories, entwined with myriad aromas: high-street perfumes and childhood; grilled pork, chilli pepper, singed hair and the atomic bomb; biscuits, eucalyptus, whiskey and hypochondria.
Elsewhere the theory seemed invariably more radical than the practice. The self-reflexivity of performance without characters, narratives without structure or signs without referents may shriek of reality. Yet there was as much design, artifice and role-playing in Forced Entertainment, Lone Twin
and Robin Deacon as you will find in The Shaughraun, at the Abbey.
Theatre emerges from live art as robust as ever, the only medium in an interdisciplinary endeavour that can easily accommodate all the others. And for all those attempts to break it apart and reassemble it into something that bears the burden of our experience, something theatre-shaped remains. It grants structure to chaos. It still talks, with each new language it can learn, about what it means to live though these times. Peter Crawley
The Remarkable Rocket Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin
Probably the final show to be mounted at Bewley's, this small but perfectly formed production is having a curtailed run. Its excellence underlines what we are losing.
The one-man play has been adapted by Michael James Ford, who also performs, from a story by Oscar Wilde. The eponymous firework arrives to tell us about a beautiful princess and her handsome prince, and of the arrangements made by the king for their wedding. The Court Pyrotechnist has been directed to prepare a dazzling display in which Rocket believes himself to be the dramatic lead Vanity of vanities; this is the story's theme, as the Rocket continues to boast to his fellow fireworks.
But he manages to engineer his own misfortune, misses the show and is thrown over a wall. There he meets others, a frog, dragonfly and duck and, finally and fatally, two small boys. His dreams of glory turn to dust.
It is beautifully written, with wonderful descriptive passages and evocative words. The actor brings to his morality tale a panoply of skills, the first of which is a mastery of voices. The Rocket booms, the Squibs pipe, a Roman Candle whooshes deeply, a Catherine Wheel sighs; and later the living creatures add native sounds to their words. To these are added a controlled mime to flesh out the narrative. It is a joy to watch and listen to.
At some 40 minutes, this delightful show is the perfect asylum for lunchtime shoppers to relax into. It deserves to find a new venue in which to continue over the festive season. Anything else would be a great waste. Ends today, with shows at 1.10 p.m. and 4 p.m. Gerry Colgan
Barenaked Ladies, Olympia, Dublin
And so this is Christmas. People are dreaming of a white one, apparently. The boys from the NYPD choir are at it again. And, while a clutch of pop stars try once more to feed the world, an audience at the Olympia is treated to the "madcap" humour of the Barenaked Ladies. Well tonight thank God it's them, instead of you.
Actually, to be fair to the "wacky" Canadians, this gig supporting their Yuletide record, Barenaked For The Holidays, is like another seasonal inevitability: the Christmas jumper. It first appears ridiculous, and you fidget uneasily inside it, but finally you relax into its snug comforts. Then, like George Michael's heart, perhaps, the very next day you give it away.
For the moment, though, the zany antics of the Barenaked Ladies quickly thaw into the group's real trademark: cloying sentimentality, pure maple syrup. This charm oozes from the quintet, who crowd around a microphone carolling out I Saw Three Ships, then Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah. It's a bi-denominational season's greeting with accordion, upright bass and honeyed harmonies.
Sadly, South Park, a cartoon not renowned for ethnic sensitivity, has done this funnier with A Lonely Jew At Christmas ("I'd be merry / But I'm Hebrew"). Barenaked Ladies seem touchingly aware of such shortcomings, noticing the new record available here on import for €26.99. "It's not worth it," says singer Ed Robertson. Mixing two parts merriment with three parts schmaltz, much of this concert goes on to prove his point.
There are frequent gifts, though: an apparently freestyle rap gives props to Dublin's famous Jew, Leopold Bloom, while the folksy fun of Pinch Me, One Week, Brian Wilson and If I Had $1,000,000 each deliver.
They do seem rather pleased with themselves, though, even on Jingle Bells, when the sleighing song gets truly slain. 'Tis the season, I suppose. Peter Crawley
