A review of what is happening in the world of the arts.

Hamlet

Project Arts Centre

Hamlet, as someone allegedly complained, is full of quotations. One is "hoist with his own petard" - blown up with his own bomb. In the case of Gúna Nua's two-man version, the petard is Hamlet itself. Attempting the play with just two actors is a suicidal over-estimation of one's own capacities. Like every suicide bombing, it results in a rather pointless mess.

Part of the problem is that mucking about with Hamlet is such old hat. The play's combination of classic status and extreme oddness has made it a magnet for experimentation. So far as I know, the first female Hamlet was Sarah Siddons in 1775. There have been black Hamlets since the 19th century, a transgendered Hamlet with a wooden leg (Sarah Bernhardt), spin-off Hamlets (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; A Night in Elsinore; I Hate Hamlet); a Dr Seuss-style Hamlet movie (Green Eggs and Hamlet); Hamlet ballets, operas, novels and paintings; and Charles Marowitz's famous cut-up Hamlet. When straight versions of the play are almost rarer than "radical new approaches", a supposedly unconventional production has to have more to offer than the alleged novelty of its willingness to do something different.

The Unique Selling Point of David Parnell's two-actor Hamlet is that it is, er, performed by just two actors. To make it work, they would have to be blindingly brilliant. One of the great strengths of the play is that it creates the impression of being densely peopled. The Prince may hold centre stage, but other people keep hurtling in, often from unexpected angles. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pop up out of the ether. Travelling players arrive. Young Fortinbras strides in with a vast army. The Gravedigger and his mate take the spotlight. Laertes disappears and resurfaces. And the masses are out there - "the distracted multitude" - threatening to rush in at any moment and overturn everything. No one is ever alone, nothing is ever secret or private.

Since the form of the play is bound up with the contrast between Hamlet's painful awareness of his individuality and the press of teeming humanity all around him, stripping away the sense of multitude makes no sense. It might be possible to imagine a one-actor Hamlet, in which the variety of personality is evoked in a single mind. But having two actors kills off that possibility. It creates the expectation that the full range of roles will be enacted, a task that would stretch even the most heroic performers. Enda Kilroy and Paul Meade are decent enough actors but the only thing heroic in their performances is the scale of hubris.

What we get, to be blunt, is two actors - for whom any of the major parts in Hamlet would be, at this stage of their careers, a supreme challenge - tackling many of those roles at once. For Paul Meade to play Hamlet would be tough, but to play the Prince, Polonius, and bits of Claudius as well is simply naïve. Enda Kilroy's juggling of pretty much every other role is impressive enough, but precisely as juggling, not as acting.

Meade and Kilroy do gallop through an edited text in two hours, but only by jettisoning all subtleties, idiosyncrasies, subtexts and ambiguities. The shifts from male to female characters, for example, are achieved with signals of femininity that Shirley Temple Bar would find crude. And because the concentration is so much on the physical business of establishing characters, David Parnell's direction never gets round to notions such as variations in dramatic pace.

The one level on which the production does work is the visual. The involvement of the performance artist Amanda Coogan as set and costume designer hints at ways in which this Hamlet might have been genuinely radical. Her use of colour, of drapes and of props achieves an austere beauty that is enhanced by Kevin McFadden's superbly sympathetic lighting. It has a seriousness and clarity of purpose that the performance otherwise lacks. That absence makes it, to borrow another quotation, "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable".

Runs until Apr 9

Fintan O'Toole

Always Patsy Cline

Liberty Hall Theatre

This tribute show to Patsy Cline, the legendary country singer who died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, was first produced in 1990, and has been a smash hit since throughout America and Canada. It is a tribute to the singer that her songs have remained popular for so long, and that so many talented performers have helped to keep her music alive.

This is all the more impressive given that the show, written and originally directed by Ted Swindley, is given a storyline that is banal and embarrassingly contrived. It is based on a real relationship between Cline and a housewife fan named Louise Seger, who maintained a two-year correspondence with her before her death. It was a tenuous enough friendship, limited in time and intimacy - they met only once. Seger is made the narrator, with a linking script that is decidedly clunky.

Leslie Maness plays Seger with an off-putting enthusiasm that faithfully delivers the dialogue provided for her. A small, bouncy figure, she follows her star with unflagging adoration, joins her briefly in song and finally massages the generous encores. All this she does with professional commitment, but to little avail. Her pervasive role is a no-no.

Dominique Plaisant, who plays Cline, is more fortunate. Her material consists essentially of the songs, and she delivers them with the kind of star quality that her original must have possessed. She has a strong voice with range and expression, and projects a magnetic stage presence. The songs, at this remove from their time and place, are not confined to country. There are pop ballads, rock songs and traditional numbers mixed liberally among the 27 offerings, and they are all a delight to listen to. Forget the trimmings; go to see and hear Plaisant recreating Cline's songs. She is eminently worth it.

Runs to Apr 17

Gerry Colgan

Good Charlotte

Olympia Theatre

School's out for Easter; the kids have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and their parents are on duty watch. They want to bring them to something safe (but not so safe their kids will whine) and something traditional (but so traditional their kids will refuse to join in). Something that rocks but gently so; no heavy-handed swearing, nothing that could be remotely described as sexy. Something moderately exciting but in a containable form.

Welcome to the world of Good Charlotte: a safe haven of culled and overtly institutionalised punk/pop - influenced by The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers but brought down to earth by threadbare originality.

Fronted by US-based, second-generation Irish brothers Joel and Benji Madden, Good Charlotte have risen to their present profile through hard work and no small charm. The combination has provided healthy record sales and a predominantly female audience, and it is the cultivation of the latter that seems to have the brothers and their out-of-focus band members riding the waves of success.

Admittedly, some of the songs, in their own small way, are punk/pop gems: there isn't much more anyone can do to improve upon the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Girls & Boys, The Anthem, and Riot Girl. Outside of these tracks, however (tellingly, all from the band's 2002 crossover album, The Young and the Hopeless), there's little to distinguish Good Charlotte from many other punk/pop also-rans. All too often the concert degenerates into pantomimic call-and-response, shouts of "Duuubbbllliinnnn", stage patter so contrived it makes the bones shrivel, and songs so weak they need crutches of faux hip-hop and punk cabaret to get them to the exit. Time for a radical rehaul before the kids twig there are better, harder acts around? We think so.

Tony Clayton-Lea