Fintan O'Toole reviews and Michael Dervan hears Enric Pace at Kilruddery House.

Perchance to Dream

IFSC, Dublin

If Shakespeare can be brought forward in time, can he also be taken back in time? If the plays can be modernised, why can't they be mediaevalised? That question is usually implicit in Footsbarn's work and in the first of two shows they are bringing to Dublin for the next six weeks, it is more or less explicit. In the long, mad and generally marvellous Perchance to Dream, in their big circus tent pitched in the IFSC, they bring Shakespeare's tragedies back to their roots in mediaeval morality plays and in the rough magic of strolling players in the bustling marketplace.

No one is better equipped to do so, for Footsbarn is itself the nearest thing in contemporary Europe to the vagabond performers of the middle-ages. Displaced from their English origins (they are now based in France), working and living collectively, picking up ideas and performers on their travels, its members are the missing link between theatre and circus. Working without a director, sharing the tasks of acting, designing, singing, playing music and shifting scenery, they restore to theatre both its edgy, improvised existence and its outlandish exoticism. The only difference between them and the strolling players is that they have never been known to stroll. Footsbarn's high-energy style has a decidedly contemporary speed.

In restoring Shakespeare to the vibrant popular theatre from which he emerged, Footsbarn undoubtedly lose some of what made him unique. Especially since it became a multinational and multilingual company, no one should go to Footsbarn for a lesson in the speaking of blank verse or for subtle explorations of linguistic complexity. But while there is plenty of that available elsewhere, no one else can really do what this charismatic company does. Footsbarn's Shakespeare productions replace the poetry of language with the poetry of action. They paint in broad brushstrokes of vibrant colour and fill the canvas of their tent with startling and beguiling images.

The company's uniqueness is most obvious in Perchance to Dream, for in any other hands the show would be an anarchic mess. It begins with the audience standing around an old wooden cart that serves as a stage, and a kind of maypole that marks the other end of a playing area. Some of the early scenes from Romeo and Juliet are enacted before we take our seats. What follows is a pot pourri of scenes from that play, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. A version of the Peter Quince scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream is used as light relief, but with the added absurdity that the rude mechanicals are rehearsing Lear. For three hours, we cut from one play to another.

This sounds ridiculous, and it is true that the whole is not always greater than the sum of the parts. The deliberate breaking of the narrative continuity of the individual plays places on the performers themselves all the burden of maintaining a forward drive over such a long period. There are times, especially when the more heavily wordy scenes are being spoken in heavily accented English, that the momentum flags. But such moments are in fact extraordinarily rare. The astonishing, fiery energy of the performers and the rich creativity of the production generate an irresistible force. Perchance to Dream is like a volcano, spewing out the odd bit of rubbish but showering us with spectacular explosions of delightful ingenuity.

Alongside the expected Footsbarn staples of marvellous masks, Knockabout clowning, barnstorming movement and richly evocative music, the company juggles Indian and Japanese forms, commedia dell'arte, silent cinema, folk ritual and puppetry. It also makes brilliant use of the projection of shadows onto a large white screen that is used with typical dexterity to change the nature of the playing space. And if the heavily wordy scenes in the tragedies sometimes suffer, Perchance to Dream comes into its own with the passages of the plays that are often most awkwardly handled in more mainstream productions. The imagining of the ghosts of Hamlet's father and of Banquo, the dumbshow of Macbeth's second visit to the witches, the play-within-a-play in Hamlet and Lear and Ophelia's madness is breathtaking. The culmination, when the patchwork is sewn together with the deaths of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Romeo, Juliet, Lear and Hamlet is mesmerising and moving enough to justify the whoops that greeted it on the opening night.

Fintan O'Toole

Runs until July 7th

Enrico Pace (piano)

Killruddery House, Bray

Beethoven - Sonata in E Op 109

Schumann - Davidsbündlertünze

Liszt - Années de Pèlerinage, Italie

There were two Enrico Paces on show at the IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses festival at Killruddery House on Thursday.

There was the Pace who approached Beethoven's late Sonata in E with an almost formal reserve, as if the correct handling of the work could be worked out as an issue of musical etiquette. Think of someone speaking a foreign language with an accent that's simply too perfect, with an inflection that too closely adheres to a set of rules, and you'll have an idea of both the refined quality of the piano playing and the sense of mis-match through idealisation that it suggested.

Less than 20 years separate the composition of Beethoven's Op. 109 and the sequence of character pieces that make up Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. But the musical gulf between the two works is great and the change in Pace's playing was if anything even greater.

In the Schumann, Pace was prepared to live and make the most of every moment, cajoling, caressing, obsessing, exploding. The composer wrote the work in the flush of a successful marriage proposal (the father, not the girl, would prove the obstacle), and the music, he told his beloved, "originated in the rarest excitement that I can ever remember". Pace is as persuasive an advocate of the young composer's astonishing ardency as you're likely to encounter.

The second half of the evening was devoted to a complete performance of the second year of Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage, the one stimulated by things Italian, including three Petrarch sonnets, and the "fantasia quasi sonata" inspired by a reading of Dante. The music doesn't maintain the consistency of quality achieved by Schumann, but Pace's fluid responsiveness was every bit as impressive as his handling of the Davidsbündlertänze.

Michael Dervan