Irish Timeswriters review  After the Endat the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, Queens of the Stone Ageat the Ambassador, Dublin and the  RTÉ NSO/Maloney at the National Concert Hall.

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

Jane Coyle

A terrorist bomb goes off outside a pub. Louise, an attractive, tipsy young woman, is rescued by her workmate, Mark, who carries her away to safety in the well-stocked nuclear fallout shelter he has conveniently installed in his back garden.

Rewind. There is no explosion. There is no bomb. Louise is drunk and her wobbly state of mind and body gives Mark the chance he has so long been waiting for. Once inside his clinically neat underground bunker, she is his, entirely at the disposal of his needy lusting and cruel methods of deprivation. Dennis Kelly's tortuous psychological thriller offers up either scenario. Real or imagined, it provides an unsettling context for this portrayal of the depths to which the human psyche can descend when confronted by extreme conditions of obsession and survival.

Will Irvine is quietly chilling as ostensibly nice, caring Mark. Katy Ducker, still a university student, displays huge helpings of nerve as gobby Louise, who does her best to deter Mark's creepy advances while trying to preserve some equilibrium in their shared, rationed existence.

Emma Jordan's directing debut in this Prime Cut Irish premiere is sensitive, measured and deliberate, coolly capturing the queasy opening scenes and the role reversal of the dark finale, where Mark finds salvation in unexpected surroundings while the once carefree Louise is doomed to be forever a deeply damaged creature. But, with an unbroken running time of 110 minutes, Jordan needs to crank up and vary the pace and tension of those pivotal central scenes, when tortures are traded and the threat of violence must strike sickening fear into the hearts and minds of the audience.

Runs until Saturday

Ambassador, Dublin

Davin O'Dwyer

There was more black worn at this gig than the average funeral, but Josh Homme and his fellow Queens proved beyond any reasonable doubt that heavy rock is far from dead. Few bands can create such a crunching, pummelling squall and not lapse into metal cliche, but while this Californian quintet don't boast the broadest range, they certainly pack a surprising amount of melody into their raucous tunes.

It's a sound that inspires a fierce loyalty - this gig attracted fans from as far afield as Stuttgart - and as the show progressed, the band gradually repaid that faith with an intense set that charmed and bludgeoned in equal measure.

Stylised chandeliers hung ominously over the stage, but, once illuminated, they evoked fraying cobwebs rather than country manors.

The band appeared on stage to the sound of Dance to the Music, but the cacophony that followed was far from Sly and the Family Stone.

On stage, Homme appears to be one of the squarest men on the planet - even in the midst of a frenetic guitar wigout, he possesses more right angles than a Mies van der Rohe office block - and his dominating frame is the rock on which the Queens' live show hangs.

The Queens' ever-rotating line-up has previously boasted such ear-rattling luminaries as Dave Grohl and Mark Lanegan, but this tour largely sees the musicians that appeared on last year's Era Vulgaris album fill the same roles on the road.

Guitarist Dean Fertita has obviously been taking sartorial tips from his Raconteurs bandmate Jack White, while on drums, Joey Castillo manages to be every bit as frantic and propulsive as Grohl. Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar and Michael Shuman on bass fill out the sound.

The set-list was heavy with material from Era Vulgaris, while also featuring some songs from the band's earliest albums, Queens of the Stone Age and Rated R. Better Living Through Chemistry, in particular, was a raucous, out-of-control heavyweight, demanding the spontaneous crowd-surfing that saw a pair of legs point triumphantly heavenwards above the audience before gravity and security dragged them back to the ground.

There was no appearance for classic songs No One Knows or Feel Good Hit of the Summer, but it was a measure of Homme and his band's performance that they were barely missed.

NCH, Dublin

Andrew Johnstone

Stephen Gardner - NEVER...NEVER...NEVER.

Roger Doyle - Adolf Gébler, Clarinettist.

The last of this year's RTÉ Horizons concerts marked a quick return, after his first appearance in the series two years ago, for studio and theatre musician Roger Doyle. It included the premiere of his Adolf Gébler, Clarinettist, a 35-minute work he describes as "a soundtrack for an imaginary film". The dialogue, pre-recorded by the composer, is by the titular subject's grandson, Carlo Gébler, and recounts the troubled life of a gifted central European musician who joined the first Irish radio orchestra in 1936.

As Adolf, Jonathan Ryan tells the inauspicious tale with a colourfully credible foreign accent, Mary McEvoy plays his hapless Irish wife, Rita, and four other parts are spoken by Isobel Mahon and Rory Connolly.

Apart from two brief but statuesque contributions from singer Susannah de Wrixon, who materialised on stage in period garb, the experience was comparable to a radio play with live orchestral music.

Though script and score both enjoy moments of autonomy, the general deference of each to the other keeps tension to a modicum. Gébler's succinct text deals impassively with its interesting social content, while the music - in contrast to Doyle's other work to date - is in an intentionally arty and laconic style that savours of Michael Nyman.

Gavin Maloney at the rostrum and Doyle in the control room synchronised the performance with no apparent hitches. Yet despite the conservatism of Doyle's computer-aided instrumentation, the music sometimes overshadowed the text.

To open the programme, Doyle had chosen a shorter but altogether more colossal work, NEVER...NEVER...NEVER (2003), by Stephen Gardner. The performance was fiery.

Though the title, which acknowledges Ian Paisley as Gardner's audacious choice of subject, may have been superseded by recent events, the music's staggeringly relentless rhetoric still packs a fearsome punch.