Crabbed Youth and Age at Bewley's Café Theatre and The Merchant of Venice at Cork Opera House.

Crabbed Youth and Age

Bewley's Café Theatre

Gerry Colgan

Lennox Robinson's work is not often seen on the stage today. His gentle wit and subtle characterisations belong to a past era and stage - the Abbey Theatre of the first half of the last century - and his consummate craftsmanship no longer inspires the modern producer. All the more reason, then, to welcome an excellent example of his work in this revival of Crabbed Youth and Age, a short play originally entitled The Revolt of the Swans that first saw the Abbey footlights in 1922. It is typically undramatic, more concerned with humorous observation than colourful narrative, and remains an enjoyable vignette.

The middle-class home of Mrs Swan and her three daughters, aged between 20 and 30, is naturally open to young men, and they call regularly for an evening of chat and song. The difficulty is that they come to worship at the shrine of the vivacious widow, in favour of whom they neglect the girls. It all proves too much for the latter on this occasion, and they take mother severely to task.

In deference to their frustrations, mum pleads a headache and a need for bed, whereupon her immature suitors go into an overdrive of concern, making matters worse than ever. After some complications it ends on that note, with the daughters quite defeated.

Michael James Ford directs a good cast in the true spirit of the play, with Emilia Simcox's set design and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú's costumes creating atmosphere. Geraldine Plunkett as Mrs Swan leads Gene Rooney, Susie Lamb, Katharine Fullam, Frank Bourke, Dermot Magennis and Richie Hayes in a bravura revisiting of a talent not yet ready to be forgotten.

Runs to April 19th at 1.10p.m.; booking at 086-8784001

The Merchant of Venice

Cork Opera House

Mary Leland

The whole of this Opera House production of The Merchant of Venice is not equal to its parts. But it is the parts which will remain in the memory, especially the Shylock of David Coon. Unsympathetic and implacable - not the most sensitive of portrayals really - this is a man with a mind like an abacus; in the trial scene he expounds the theory of exchange as if it were a catechism (and perhaps it is) of financial probity.

Rather late in the day the play takes shape; the banker and the merchant assume their economic status, and the giddy fable of those caskets in Belmont is revealed as a moral sight-line and as a piece of essential scaffolding for the darker substance of the plot. Nothing much new about that, but this performance provides the tension which knits the play together - tension which, given Belinda Wilde's amiable directing style, is very badly needed.

The cast, however, works against this tendency to sag; some of the interpretations might be argued with, but these are good voices with measured delivery and the kind of authoritative projection demanded by a theatre full of teenagers ready to cheer at every entrance and (more worryingly) every exit and to erupt volcanically at a kiss or a word such as "bosom" or even at Antonio's bare chest. These are the chosen ones for such productions, and cast and director together knew what to expect when presenting a curriculum play.

It would be good to know if any of this audience grasped that this very honest production offers a full measure of Shakespeare, and that they were seeing thoughtful actors who not only understand what they are doing but are doing it very well indeed. There are problems, in that Katherine Sankey's set (again, apart from the trial scene) is too flimsy for its architectural load, the costumes are either inefficient or unconvincing and sometimes both, there is not enough of Colm O'Sullivan's music and there is absolutely no sense of impetus at all. But there is authority as well, and that silenced the house for all the important bits.

The Merchant of Venice runs at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin from March 18th to 21st (021 4270022) and at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on March 24th and 25th (091 5699777)