A look at what is going on in the world of the arts.
Coming Up Roses
Bewley's Café Theatre
Bewley's Café Theatre is again open for lunchtime theatre and evening cabaret, after a week when builders, electricians and others laboured to the last available minute to prepare it for business. It was easy to empathise with Michael James Ford, onlie begetter of the theatre, when he quipped that it was appropriate that it should be re-launched with the premiere of an impressionist Finnish play.
The visitors do lend a sense of occasion with their stylish work, written and directed by Julia Siltanen. Two women and a man, all foreign visitors, meet in a Dublin cafe, and pretend to each other that they are Irish.
The man, George, comes on to the woman, Joyce, trying to impress her with his claimed status as a maths teacher and "hypnologist".
She tells him of her husband's death from a fall with a horse from the Cliffs of Moher, illustrated with a fantasy recreation.
Victoria, when she appears, adds a new dimension to the addled story, clearly having had some previous relationship with the man. Between the two women, George becomes increasingly fraught, vainly trying to escape.
His claim to be a cosmetic surgeon through hypnotism is put to the test. There is an ending of sorts that does not clarify much, but then it would be against the surreal grain of the play to be explanatory.
In many respects this is the venerable theatre of the absurd, by no means to be discounted. There is a deal of wit and clued-in contradictions in the avenues it explores, a kind of intellectual slapstick that yields a decent quota of laughs and a few probing thoughts. The Finnish trio of Angelika Meusel, Kai Tanner and Miia Lindstrom bring an unfamiliar and effective style to their performances, and Pat McGrath's waiter is a delicious cameo.
Gerry Colgan
Runs to June 11
Fallen Angels Cabaret
Project Cube, Dublin
There's something archly perverse and slightly confusing about handing out lollipops before a ribald display of adult humour. But the Fallen Angels Cabaret has little time for conventional expectations. "This show is not a salute to the past," drawls mc Rose Lawless in a pointed riposte to Dublin's burgeoning cabaret scene.
"It is not Brel meets Dietrich." It's not even clear whether this swaggering assembly of risque turns, comic monologues, elegantly lewd poetry and satirical skits is a cabaret or a comedy sketch show.
It intends to be merrily scandalous, however, and Lawless informs us that she doesn't need a feather boa to be bad. No, just torn fishnets and denim hot pants apparently.
As we shuttle from the tongue-in-cheek burlesque style of original musical numbers and wryly delivered showtunes (pumped out by composer/keyboardist Monsieur Robes); through fright-wigged parodies of militant feminists and haranguing nuns; from razor-sharp spoof news bulletins to the feline slinkiness of a cat-suited poet, the show is often entertaining but chases a fitful sort of rhythm.
This is largely because the young comedians take less influence from the stages of Parisian cafes or Weimar Germany than the bullet-paced editing of television gags. Sketches may draw from The Day Today or The Fast Show, but seldom recognise that on stage even the bearer of a one-liner needs to make an exit.
A laboured Waiting for Godot parody would almost seal this discomfort with theatre, were it not for the casual confidence of Anne Lillis and Alison McKay, whose insouciant audience interaction is involving, at times even giddying.
And for all their subversive intent, the Angels ultimately still fall for the cabaret tradition.
Lawless may sing in a phoney accent, bearing a parodic pout, but there's something oddly sincere in our mc's rendition of Ne Me Quitte Pas. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was Brel meets Dietrich.
Until June 4 at the Project; then June 11 at the Belltable, Limerick and July 30 at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
Peter Crawley
Tori Amos
Vicar St, Dublin
With the biblical references and the sheer portentousness of her entire repertoire, Tori Amos cuts it like a southern preacher hell-bent on saving her audience from the fires of damnation - or at the very least from themselves.
The woman with the primal relationship with her piano had little difficulty wooing an audience which swallowed every last, super-size nugget of her wisdom whole.
With her ninth album, The Beekeeper, Amos has trawled through the morass and occasional wilderness of relationships armed with both scalpel and sledgehammer.
Her campaigning sexuality is unapologetic as she straddles piano and organ, assaulting everything from Original Sinsuality to Sweet the Sting with a rabid enthusiasm reminiscent of Martin Amis's beloved Gloria in The Rachel Papers, who, once aroused, "would have been to detect few noteworthy points of contrast between sexual arousal and rabies".
Amos's original appeal lay in her bald honesty and insistence on exposing her emotional traumas to the universe, at a time when words like incest and rape were still a rarity in the media.
Since then, she has taken her own time to reflect on life through a curiously idiosyncratic prism, armed with a vocal range that stretches all the way from her birthplace of North Carolina to Cornwall.
She's at her best tackling underdog tales of emotional distress such as Playboy Mommy, Josephine and Icicle, investing each and every note with the intense focus of a woman on death row.
But choosing to cover Lloyd Cole's Rattlesnakes in the same manner simply divested it of its louche nonchalance, and left it thrashing and flailing for air amid the florid delivery.
There's no doubting Amos's unwavering belief in the healing power of music. Nor is she to be damned for her campaigning spirit and her refreshing insistence on using nothing more than piano and organ on her live tour.
But two solid hours of rabid intensity does her back catalogue a grave disservice, with each and every morsel served up with an overabundance of dressings, smothering, rather than tickling the palate.
Siobhán Long
