Whose House and A/S/L, Project Upstairs, Dublin
It isn't often that a play offered by students, here graduates from the Gaiety School of Acting, carries an "adults only" tag.
So if only because of this novelty, the second play shall here be first.
A/S/L stands for the first three questions asked when you participate in that modern get-together, the computer chat room - age, sex and location. And things can get steamy when cybersex is involved.
Paul O'Brien's play juxtaposes the real world of sexual relationships with cyber-fantasy. A man moves in on his friend's girl, and takes up residence in his flat. The friend Ron is meek and a chat room visitor, but he eventually loses his cool with dire consequence.
A comedian has a row with his critical wife, and dies on stage that night. She is also into chat rooms.
There are other characters who recreate themselves for others in the electronic spaces, and the language and scenarios warrant the moral warning, drifting close to the no-man's-land of porn.
But, as directed by Tara Derrington, it is also a funny comedy carrying a laugh-out-loud payload.
First play of the evening is Whose House, written by Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy.
This is a melodramatic saga revisiting the families and events of a "Big House" of the 1920s, restored in the 1950s. Several families and groups move in and out of the house, all to tragic effect.
The play is solidly structured, and Liam Halligan directs with numerous felicitous touches.
Both plays offer the students handsome opportunities to showcase their wares, and they do so con brio.
This must be as good a class as the Gaiety has turned out for some years, with everyone showing sound basic training, and a surprising number catching the eye with obvious flair and stage presence. Bon voyage.
Runs to June 25
-Gerry Colgan
Swingle Singers, National Concert Hall, Dublin
The Swingle Singers are four men and four women who give the impression that they will try to sing just about anything worth singing.
There is no piano, there is no band, there are no instruments at all in fact: just eight voices supplying melody, harmony and percussion in a wide repertoire and a huge range of textures, many of which brilliantly - sometimes hilariously - manage to mimic instrumental accompaniment.
Monday night's concert at the National Concert Hall - which was part of the 2005 Pipeworks Festival - was sub-titled "From Bach to Beatles", a throwaway bit of alliterative labelling which comes nowhere near to doing justice to the extraordinary diversity that the group presented.
Singing entirely from memory, they moved seamlessly around a repertoire embracing Bach fugues, Miles Davis-style trumpet solos, medieval shawms, the theme from Mission Impossible, a hard-to- believe big band sound, Stephen Sondheim, Quincy Jones, a big bossa nova number and so on.
They opened with a baroque set, so reflecting the group's earliest incarnation under founder Ward Swingle in the 1960s.
Their sound from that time is currently going out to a new audience courtesy of the pop charts and the singer Jem, whose single They samples the Swingles' classic take on Bach's Prelude in F minor.
The current eight have been together for two years. All are classically trained but had to demonstrate in auditions a wide stylistic range, including the not-to-be-taken-for-granted ability to switch the vibrato on or off.
Each one is a soloist, and the spotlight was shared between all eight throughout the concert.
Extra plaudits must go to musical director and tenor Tom Bullard, to soprano Meinir Thomas who designed the choreography, and to the "ninth member", smooth sound engineer Philip Hartley.
I found myself hoping that they were genuinely having as much fun as they appeared to be having - as much fun as I would imagine myself having if I could do it - in what was the most entertaining event I've attended this year.
-Michael Dungan
