A selection of reviews by Irish Timeswriters.

Nouvelles Folies
Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny

By Peter Crawley

A weather-beaten fisherman emerges from an impossibly tiny cabin and finds a tangle of rope on the ground. As he leans over the morass his eyes attempt to locate the rope's end.

Slowly, at first, his head traces the line along unending chinks and through sudden chicanes, but, sucked into the effort, his movements become frantic. Now his entire body begins to wriggle, bounce and convulse with the chase until - voila - he seizes the loose end.

It's the opening gag in a piece of consummate clowning from French company Fiat Lux; a simple and effective trick, done well, but it begs the question: what is so nouvelle about these folies? Following its successful appearance at Kilkenny Arts Festival last year with Strike, the company returns with one of its earlier productions, a crowd-pleaser from 1999, so inoffensive that it is as difficult to dislike the show as it is to love it.

A professional city couple arrive to a seaside village inhabited exclusively, it seems, by seagulls, pigs and male sailors. The guy is a real jerk. The girl is a real girl. The sailors are real attentive. What follows is an excuse for a series of comic set-pieces, delivered wordlessly and with bright and brash mimetic skill.

The seadog captain (an excellent Dominique Prié) sends the couple off on a wild goose chase, miming an impossible set of directions to their destination. Someone takes the opportunity to be funny with a plank of wood. The sailors sit around cleaning cabbages, fanning out the leaves, then transforming the set up into a heated card game (Snap, presumably). Someone takes the opportunity to be funny with a plank of wood again.

There is a warm thrumming innocence to the show that smacks with the familiarity of a Charlie Chaplin movie or, more often, any given episode of Mr Bean. (If a woman must kiss a man on the cheek, for instance, he will dissolve into bashfulness.) That may seem a backhanded observation, particularly when the show's director, conceiver and one of its performers, Didier Guyon, has attained his skills over a long and disciplined journey. Yet the very accessibility that endears it to festival programmers tends to dull the edge of its comedy.

There is one scabrously brilliant exception, when a distant funeral march runs foul of ravenous pigs and the only metonym we see - Christ on the cross - is forced to beat a hasty, undignified retreat. That is true clowning, arousing delight among family audiences, then skewering sacred cows and vieilles folies. But it is a trick that Guyon uses only once. During a sequence of maritime shtick, he recognises that just a microsecond of Celine Dion and a visual reference to Titanic will more safely bring the house down. Some things are universal.

Ends today. The Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until Sun

Bill Callahan
The Village, Dublin

By Kevin Courtney

The music of Bill Callahan lopes along at a measured pace, like an old frontiersman walking leisurely along the riverbank, checking his traps along the way.

With a reservoir-deep voice, repetitive guitar signatures and deadpan style of delivery, the baby-faced man from Maryland could easily be mistaken for an "outsider" artist, a musical naif who has stumbled on a distinctive sound of his own, and is bent on exploring its every nook and cranny. But though he counts outsider musician Jandek as an influence, Callahan's vision has all the clarity and purpose of an experienced tracker.

Before he recently started trading under his own name, Callahan was better-known (but not much better-known) as Smog. Over numerous fine albums, including Dongs of Sevotion and A River Ain't Too Much To Love, Smog built up a body of odd, disconnected songs that somehow managed to take hold on a deeper, more primal level. He has been accused of being depressing, but a song such as Dress Sexy at My Funeral exposes the black humour beneath the stentorian bark.

Wielding a guitar so small it was nearly a ukulele, and backed by a keyboard player and a drummer, Callahan led the crowd slowly through the backwoods of his mind, performing songs from more than a decade of Smog, including Rock Bottom Riser, Cold Discovery, Show Me The Colts and I Feel Like the Mother of the World. The songs could be classed as roots/Americana, but they're a country mile away from your common-or-garden ballads.

Songs from his new album, Woke On a Whaleheart, shows that Callahan hasn't abandoned that eerie air of detachment. Sycamore drips with repressed emotion, and Footprints steps lightly but leaves a solid impression.

Every now and again, the trio breaks out of their unhurried pace and takes it to near-rock'n'roll level, particularly on the crowd-rousing coda of Cold-Blooded Old Times.