Box in Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast is examined by Jane Coyle and the performance of David Kitt in Dublin's Vicar Street is reviewed by Peter Crawley
Box, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
With bombs and missiles raining down on Baghdad on our television screens, it is an extraordinarily unsettling experience to crowd into a tiny sitting-room installation to witness the surreal events portrayed in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros
in a new adaptation for Kabosh by poet/playwright Martin Mooney. Under the subtitle Box, director Karl Wallace has fashioned an exquisitely crazy little world within a world, hidden away at the top of the dingy backstairs of the Old Museum.
The Romanian-born writer certainly did not opt for subtlety in choosing a rhino as the central motif for this allegory of a small town over-run by ugly, uncontrolled, rampaging beasts. Writing at the time of the rise in fascism in Europe, Ionesco creates a bizarre collection of bourgeois characters, rivetingly played here by the wonderfully expressive Sonya Kelly, Jo Donnelly, Karl O'Neill and Mike Carbery, who, as Berenger, is fated to be the last man left when everyone else has, literally, turned to the rhinos.
In this cramped set, seating just 30 people and decked in a riot of gaudy, peeling wallpaper, Wallace and designers Diego Pitarch and Amy Smith, present a community that is tarnished, torn and fraying at the edges. These are people clinging onto the last fragments of what passes for normality, ripe for exploitation by a mighty, unseen enemy.
As the scenes change from pavement café to notary's office to seedy bedsit, the characters find themselves drawn more and more towards the creatures they both fear and revere. And, in 10 minutes of total blackout, a truly terrible metamorphosis takes place, in which our easy laughter is transformed into something approaching supressed hysteria. This seriously fine little piece of thought-provoking theatre cannot be allowed to disappear without trace at the end of its four-day Belfast run. Jane Coyle
David Kitt Vicar Street, Dublin
David Kitt has been keeping quiet recently but that's about to change - quite literally, in fact. Just as audiences and venues for his soft surging folktronica have grown enormously in a few years, so the performer and his amplitude have adjusted accordingly. Inevitably there are compromises that go with filling this new space, and the heavier, more energetic approach of his latest material often seems calibrated more for stadiums than bedrooms.
For this St Patrick's night concert, Kitt leaps onstage to an Irish reel. "That's as close to trad as we're going to get," he laughs, and it's clear too that the jig's up for introspective singer-songwriter expectations. From the opening new tune through Step Out in the Morning Light and Song From Hope Street, the skittering electronic/acoustic endorsement has lapsed in favour of swelling keyboards, strutting electric guitar licks and confident bass grooves.
With jazz organist Justin Carroll and ebullient dancing trumpeter Bryan Quinn at either end of a seven-piece orchestra, Kitt's melodies are eclectically augmented, remaining flexible enough not to snap under the weight of instrumental extremes.
The distinct twang of folk-rock adorns several new numbers, while solo acoustic renditions acquire an almost bluegrass charge. Amid Dylanesque organs and unabashed rock structures, Into the Breeze becomes a breathless 'rawk' anthem, lyrically incorporating The Specials, before barging into The Ramones' I Wanna Be Sedated. With Kitt's trademark delicacy so vigorously rebranded, the fragile duet with his 12-year-old brother Robbie, Another Love Song, seems almost incongruous.
It may sound different, muffling raw emotions behind grand gestures and denser textures, but Kitt makes such developments seem as natural as his audience rapport. If he wants to hold the crowd, he knows he must stay ahead of them. Peter Crawley
