Irish Timeswriters review recent events:
Johnny Meister and The Stitch
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
Johnny Meister and David "Stitch" Brown are a couple of bad lads from the wrong side of the tracks. They tick all the boxes - speaking the language of the streets, wearing the standard uniform of trackies and cheap bling, ducking and diving their way in and out of trouble. These two happen to come from Belfast. They could just as easily be hanging out in the hardlands of inner-city Dublin, Birmingham, Glasgow or London.
If chavs are reckoned to be cool, Johnny Meister and The Stitch are the height of coolness. Rosemary Jenkinson has caught their salty, quick-fire, foul-mouthed chat with an uncannily acute ear, translating it into dialogue which is, at times, almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
Paul Kennedy's punchy production admirably succeeds in attracting a new audience of young people, who did not miss a beat of the rough humour and subtext of its two interlocking monologues, performed by John Travers and Brian Markey with a level of attack and thinly veiled aggression designed to knock the unwary off their feet.
When it comes to alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, racism or cruising, there are virtually no boundaries that they and their dubious band of brothers will not cross.
Yet, thanks in no small way to the two central performances, these overblown characters are not without a certain disarming charm. And as glimpses of their dysfunctional family lives and social backgrounds emerge, one starts to get a sense of why they are the way they are.
With a little more attention to the quieter moments of reflection, Jenkinson's new play for Belfast's emerging Jigsaw company has the capacity to follow in the footsteps of memorable predecessors such as Disco Pigs, Frank Pig Says Helloand Mojo Mickybo. - JANE COYLE
• Ends this evening
Crash Ensemble
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin
Two concerts by Crash Ensemble this week, respectively devoted to composers at work in Ireland and England, sampled a broad cross-section of vivid contemporary styles.
Characteristically with this performing group, the strengths of the Irish programme were predominately conceptual. Rather than the ensemble work per se, it was the composed sounds, the quirky and thought-provoking schemes, that made the evening.
All six works were international or Irish premieres. Perhaps ironically, the most orthodoxly avant garde was Whisper Whisper Whisper*(2007) by the youngest of the six composers, Seán Clancy.
This gritty little essay in mechanised expressionism took the Crash players closest to mainstream chamber music. Yet despite help from conductor Alan Pierson, the edges were blurred.
Adding to the seeping colours of a keyboarded background, silvery glockenspiel touches formed the most effective acoustic component in John McLachlan's drifting and enigmatic Wonder(2008).
Two further acoustic-electronic partnerships achieved cogency on the one hand and witty incongruity on the other.
Poignantly melodic playing from Deirdre O'Leary on bass clarinet was melded with restrained and thoughtful taped electronics in Jonathan Nangle's Our headlights blew softly into the black, illuminating very little(2007).
On solo violin and vocals, Andrew Hamilton deftly delivered the acoustic elements of his own In Beautiful May(2008), a cunningly paced join-the-dots exercise that gradually develops disparate sound-shards into a deliciously grotesque chorale.
Theatricality peaked with Peter Moran's self-analysing lecture A Casual Analysis of Prose Rhythms(2004). Punctuating the catchily variable sound patterns with woodblock, Natasha Lohan negotiated the fickle and sometimes headlong prosody to a fault.
Like the clang of some great bell frozen in time, however, it was John Godfrey's 20-minute experiment with tone in its purest form, The Abstract Despotisms of Calculus(2008), that created the evening's most potent chemistry of treasurable strangeness. - ANDREW JOHNSTONE
Beach House,
Whelan's, Dublin
As 2008 grinds into recession and we face into a cash-strapped Christmas, it's good to look back on this year's good things - and the Baltimore duo Beach House is certainly one of these.
Their sophomore release, Devotion, was a delightful slow-burner, and their live Whelan's show proved the album was just the beginning.
With the lights down low, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand devised a devious plot to tantalise the senses.
Beach Houser songs are multi-layered, earthly yet otherworldly. Gila, a strong contender for song of the year, was given an early airing and typifies what Beach House offers - a mix and match of ideas from Motown to shoegaze, sprinkled with a timeless charm.
Rarely deviating from their signature slow tempo, the magic of the music lies in Legrand's remarkable voice - frequently compared to Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval - and sparse, unadorned arrangements.
Scally's guitar parts and backing vocals are an understated accompaniment to Legrand's keyboard playing and singing. The sultry, languorous Wedding Bellshone rays of summer sun and Astronaut, with it's chiming guitar and cymbal-rush intro, transported us all to its wonderland of innocence.
Legrand played the humble card with her banter - "We don't deserve you guys". If it seemed to be over all too soon, it's because it was. A meagre 55 minutes, albeit a consistently gorgeous 55 minutes, just wasn't enough. - BRIAN KEANE
