Irish Times reviewers give their verdict.
Limbo - Belfast Festival
Queen's Drama Centre
By Jane Coyle
We've all seen the headlines and briefly felt the pain: a gullible young woman, an exploitative older man, a baby, an act of desperation and a great gaping void of suffering. But rarely do the full details emerge and rarely are the victims allowed their chance of redemption. So it is with 17-year-old Claire, living away from home in a down-at-heel bedsit, struggling to pay the bills out of her meagre wages as a meat packer. There are good times, though - rowdy nights out with her pals, larks and laughs and even the fleeting chance of a relationship with a kind, considerate young man.
But happiness is a dim and distant possibility in Declan Feenan's dark, echoing play for Belfast's talented Sneaky Productions. Claire is paddling backward in a brackish lake, the ripples are spreading and the waters are rising fast around her.
Bronagh Taggart makes a compelling job of this most demanding of theatrical challenges, the dramatic monologue. She has excellent support both in Owen McCafferty's sensitive direction, which allows content and mood to dictate changes of pace and mood, and in designer David Craig's melancholy, watery set, littered with autumn leaves and lily pads. One moment, Taggart's mobile face is alight with joy, the next it is contorted with shock and grief.
The moment of realisation, which follows a gut-churning encounter with an expert sexual predator, is perfectly judged, dropping from a great height with a sickening thud. Feenan has an acute, and occasionally repetitive, eye for tiny detail - a shred of tobacco on a lip, a fleck of grey in the hair. This unsettling piece could lose a few minutes and draw us in even closer to the unspoken awfulness of Claire's universal plight.
Runs until Sat
War and Peace - Belfast Festival
Elmwood Hall
By Michael Dervan
"War and Peace" is such a rich topic for a music series that one on the small scale of the BBC's at the Belfast Festival - four hour-long recitals - could at best only scratch the surface.
The series opened well, with baritone Christopher Maltman on searingly fine form in songs by Mahler, Poulenc, Gurney and Butterworth.
With angular, sometimes even cryptic-sounding piano accompaniments from Iain Burnside, Maltman's mixture of penetration and intimacy was particularly impressive in the English songs written by men whose lives were directly blighted by the European conflagration of 1914-1918.
The second concert brought one of the most obvious of inclusions for a war-themed series, the Quartet for the End of Time, which Messiaen wrote while he was a prisoner of war in Stalag VIIIA, at Görlitz in Silesia.
This work, written "in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hand heavenwards saying, 'There will be no more Time'," is for violin, clarinet, cello and piano.
The composer and three fellow inmates gave the 1941 premiere before an audience of 5,000 prisoners.
"Never", said Messiaen, "have I been heard with as much attention and understanding."
The Belfast Festival performance by clarinettist Barnaby Robson and the Artur Pizarro Trio was secure in its broad outlines. But, particularly in the dense chords of the piano writing, it lacked the essential micro-tensions to fill in the necessary detail of Messiaen's awesome vision.
Elsewhere, the thematicism of the series drifted into sometimes rather loose associations of works written close to or in time of war.
Absolutely no links with peace were drawn, and a cock-up by presenter Seán Rafferty (who introduced Debussy when pianist Eugene Mursky played Beethoven) meant that the audience was left totally in the dark as to the reasoning behind the inclusion of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata.
Mursky's performance of the Beethoven was straight out of the virtuoso mould, attempting to impress with the climactic thrill of the moment rather than the sweep of the whole, and his handling of a selection of Debussy preludes (which differed from those announced by Rafferty) was more clinical than atmospheric.
The always pianistically impressive Mursky was altogether more at home in Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7 of 1942, which he delivered with controlled sharpness, and in Liszt's La Campanella, which he offered as a generous encore.
The Ondine Trio presented slightly rough-edged performances of Ravel's Trio in A minor (completed just after the declaration of war in 1914) and Shostakovich's Trio in E minor (written in 1942 and dedicated to the memory of his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky).
The performers made much of the stylistic distinctions within and between the two pieces, which they played with natural-sounding, easy-flowing musicianship.
Blake & Sons
Glucksman Gallery, Cork
By Mark Ewart
William Blake's position as one of the most complex and creative minds in art and literature found its apogee during the 1960s when artists and academics affiliated to the counter-culture took him on as a guiding light. This exhibition is something of a re-appraisal of this status as invited curator René Zechlin has brought together 16 artists who in their distinctive ways echo something of the man himself.
Blake was a rather enigmatic figure - a mystic and visionary who extrapolated alternative interpretations of scripture, the primacy of imagination over scientific rationalism and a disillusionment with the industrial revolution by yearning to return to a rural idyll.
This advocacy for alternative lifestyles is perhaps the most obvious theme of the exhibition. Simone Gilges' photographs illustrate this as we see a camp populated by people living freely in a commune out in the country. Sebastian Hammwohner's giant dreamcatcher made from branches and wool and Stephan Dillemuth's wood and crystal-strewn installation are by extension artefacts commonly associated with new age communities.
Closest in style to Blake are Dirk Bell's figurative graphite drawings representing images of a goddess figure in painstaking detail. Bell's drawings aside, the predominate style leans toward a crudity in rendering of material or an intentionally unsophisticated presentation. It is perhaps no accident that the lack of finesse is reminiscent of the unfettered informality characterised by Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s, where the unconventional was established as a means of provoking alternative views and lending metaphysical dimension to common objects.
Ultimately it is the opportunity to see Blake first hand that is the real draw - the highlight being the iconic The Ancient of Days frontispiece from Europe: A prophecy from 1794 where Blake's mastery of imagery and message still inspires today.
Runs until Jan 29
