Irish Times writers review Lucky Sods at the Tivoli, NSO/Gerard Markson at the National Concert Hall and Shelf Life at the Project Space.

There has to be a better word than prolific to describe the output of English playwright John Godber, who has written and produced 21 plays since he began his conquest of the stage in 1987.

Lucky Sods explores the phenomenon of the National Lottery, through which millions regularly try to buy their way out of the survival mechanisms that oppress their lives. Brendan, a security guard, and his wife Jean, who works in a video store, lead a humdrum existence in which their marriage has become a mere and often irritating habit.

Then they win the big prize. Things change. She wants to travel the world, and at first they do, to Hollywood and Venice.

But Brendan in particular is unhappy, and when Jean wins another lottery, and then more, he wants out. An old flame writes to him, and he is soon away with her in Holland, seeking to rekindle the missing spark in his life, his marriage on the rocks. Two other characters, Jean's sister Annie and her layabout husband Norman, complete the cast. They are disappointed at the absence of large handouts from their lucky relatives, and relationships become strained. Brendan becomes disillusioned with his affair, and returns to find a tragedy awaiting him.

The play is an odd mixture of serious comedy - not a contradiction in terms - and rib-nudging farce.

It has plenty of laughs, but gives a sense of flying on autopilot. The situations are basically clichés, the dialogue is working-class vernacular and the structure obviously contrived.

As for the ending, it is a manifest cop-out that brings matters to a halt, if not a conclusion.

The actors - Brendan Morrissey, Caroline Rothwell, Tom Hopkins and Amelia Crowley - inject plenty of comic energy into their roles.

Bruckner wrote his Fifth Symphony between 1875 and 1878, beginning work on it at a time when he had reported to a friend that "all the joy and pleasure have gone out of my life: it seems utterly pointless and futile".

The symphony yields nothing in achievement as a result of the composer's emotional state. The conception is both daring and daunting, and the music's uniquely impressive grandeur is achieved through a mastery of the techniques of counterpoint which Bruckner had so slavishly devoted himself to studying throughout his adult life.

Gerhard Markson's performance with the National Symphony Orchestra on Friday unveiled this monumental symphonic creation with an air of reverential severity, the focus on the great architectural spans taking precedence over any emotional heat of the moment.

The rewards were greatest in the fugal finale, where Bruckner marries disparate material with awe-inspiring ingenuity. Only at the climactic conclusion did the performance fall short, with Markson and his players either showing a reluctance to give the music its head or finding themselves out of headroom for a final surge.

On Friday he opened each half with the short Fanfare from the music Debussy wrote for Gabriele D'Annunzio's five-act "mystery," Le martyre de Saint Sébastien.

The music sounded strangely out of context, coming across with an air of Puccinian chinoiserie.

Michael Alcorn's new Synapse, an RTÉ commission receiving its first performance, is a work for orchestra with live electronics, in which the electronic sound-world is "triggered, articulated and shaped by the orchestral instruments". The piece uses both pre-composed electronic sounds as well as real-time transformations of the orchestra's playing.

This description conjures up a world of fantastical possibilities. But the piece itself, with jumpy orchestral interjections, flurries and swells appearing to obscure an electronic undergrowth, seemed altogether more concerned with the processes involved than with the outcome, which, in this performance, sounded musically flat.

New York's Big Art Group closed the Pan Pan Theatre Symposium with a multimedia event that can be taken as a template for use of the form.

The influences of film have reared their heads, ugly and otherwise, on stages quite regularly in the past several years. In Shelf Life, the company take this notion literally, and make a movie, live and onstage.

The action is projected on a shoulder high screen by three stationery video cameras; behind the cameras, the players change position, move props, and provide cutaways (cars, doorways, shops in a mall) via colour photocopies. Wigs and costumes are doubled and trebled as the actors create different angles, and extra arms, indeed, entire bodies are used in long "shots", to create, on screen, what looks like a film. A large part of the enjoyment comes from watching them do the work, as they negotiate their narrow stage area in inventive ways.

The story is perfect low-budget cinematic fodder, the kind that is restricted to few locations and even fewer actors, as Frankie, a kind of twenty-first century Holly Golightly wanders her way into the lives of two men and one woman, all who want to possess her.

The unqualified assurance with which they executed their project via the technology was impressive.

A well-conceived soundtrack of effects and music added to the filmic feel, and the union between the gadgets and live performance resulted in a creative and impressive show.