Reviewed today are Tokyo Notes at the Samuel Beckett Theatre andOne Helluva Life  at the Tivoli Theatre

Tokyo Notes

Samuel Beckett Theatre

A camera-happy Japanese woman snaps a vacant seat and names her photograph "absence". One of many comic touches from playwright and director Oriza Hirata, this also alludes to his own theatrical approach. His award-winning play, written in 1994 for Seinendan Theatre Company, Tokyo, celebrates an aesthetic of elimination.

Set in the lobby of a Tokyo art gallery in 2004, as paintings are being evacuated to Japan from war-torn Europe, it consists of a series of overlapping conversations, which initially seem desultory and inconsequential. Characters come and go in formations of twos and threes, speaking very softly, often with their backs to the audience. The rhythms of the dialogue slowly swell to include motifs of family, marriage, love, with a nod in the direction of Yazujiro Ozu's film Tokyo Story, as siblings circle around the question of who is going to take care of their elderly parents.

The eldest sister, who constantly takes photographs, is fascinated by Vermeer's use of light and the selectivity of the camera obscura. This theme is taken up by other characters: how we see things, what is illuminated by our individual preoccupations, what is left out (such as the rumblings of war in the background), what the mind sees and what the heart sees. In another grouping a young heiress is deciding whether to donate to the gallery her Vermeer paintings, a legacy that means nothing to her.

Hirata avoids all overtly theatrical devices, concentrating on creating patterns of speech and movement that become increasingly absorbing. While initially the style appears strictly naturalistic, the cumulative effect comes close to an intricately choreographed dance, or, more aptly, a musical composition, like a sonata, beautifully unified in form and themes. From the minutiae of everyday life, of body language and conversational cadences, Hirata develops abstract themes, exploring modes of perception and the value of art, while remaining rooted in the specifics of his own culture. By focusing on how Japanese people actually move and interact, keeping their distance even in proximity, this marvellously performed work expands into a delicate meditation on the spaces between things, between people, between subject and object, audience and spectacle.

Finishes tonight

Helen Meany

One Helluva Life

Tivoli Theatre

You need only one reason or guarantee to see this one-man play: Tom Conti. He has enough presence and charm to mesmerise the back rows of the theatre, and a comic flair to roll 'em in the aisles. When he wishes to project a serious note, he can stop the laughter in its tracks, then resume it at will. His command of the audience is total.

Here he plays the great John Barrymore, youngest of the family trio who dominated the American stage and screen for decades. Now, at 60, he is trying to defy the years and alcoholism to revive his acclaimed portrayal of Richard III. Already befuddled with drink, he is struggling to rehearse with the aid of a frustrated off-stage prompter.

He talks to us of his life and misadventures, through William Luce's hilarious script. When he and W.C. Fields try to join the army, the recruiting clerk quips: "Who sent you - the enemy?" Of his first wife of four, he recalls: "Catherine and I had 20 years of bliss; then we met." A Hollywood columnist is dismissed with "I never liked Louella, and always will". Of divorce, he says it costs more than marriage, "but dammit, it's worth it".

He dons his costume for the second half, which makes some of the gags even more mirth-inducing. But here there are also interpolations of a serious kind, such as the soliloquy from Hamlet, that make us know we are in the presence of an actor of force and accomplishment. It is part of the substance of the play as a whole, and of its authoritative performance, that we constantly sense the man behind the quipster, the tragedy masked by the fun.

As the drinking takes its toll of the rehearsal attempts, the actor finally realises that there will be no triumphant comeback. He yields gracefully to the knowledge, and throws in the towel, his magnificent career finally and immutably in the doldrums. The great man could have found no finer interpreter than Tom Conti, and no more persuasive tribute to his once shining talent.

Gerry Colgan

Runs until Saturday; then at the Everyman Palace, Cork from October 8th to 12th