The Shape of Metal at the Abbey Theatre is reviewed by Fintan O'TooleGiselle at the Samuel Beckett Centre is reviewed by Michael Seaver and The Tiger Lillies at Liberty Hall is reviewed by Peter Crawley

The Shape of Metal Abbey Theatre

Thomas Kilroy's new play has a sculptor, the 82 year-old Nell Jeffrey, at its heart. And seeing it is rather like watching a sculptor at work, chipping way at some unyielding material, in order to reveal, bit by bit, the shape that lies within. A hard lump of life is placed on stage and remains there, while the actors seek to penetrate its surface and knock away its obscurities. The form emerges over time, giving the play, for all the lurid drama of Nell's past, a quietly meditative feel.

Athol Fugard described his 1984 play, The Road to Mecca - also a three-hander about an aged female sculptor - as "an attempt to understand the genius, nature and consequences of a creative energy". The Shape of Metal has a similar ambition and similar elements of disguised artistic autobiography. It is also in some respects a re-imagining of Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken, in which a sculptor approaches death in the knowledge that a devotion to art has squeezed the love out of his life.

What makes The Shape of Metal move beyond these obvious influences, however, is the way it also takes up concerns that have dominated Kilroy's own work. Many of his plays have delved into real lives - Constance Wilde, Brendan Bracken, Lord Haw Haw, Matt Talbot - and explored the tensions between private and public stories, the demands of the heart and the imperatives of larger events. The position of the artist, who both shapes and disorders life has been a long-standing theme of his. So while Nell Jeffrey may be in a clear line of theatrical history, she is also an undeniable child of Kilroy's own imagination.

He has made, moreover, the bold decision to make the real action happen inside her aged, forgetful, irascible, but steely mind. In John Comiskey's superbly elaborate set, Sara Kestelman's Nell sits for most of the play on a kind of throne, a decrepit but still imperious old queen in the twilight of her reign. Her courtiers are the half-finished sculptures that litter her studio. The real world does intrude, in the form of her daughter, Judith (Eleanor Methven), who brings the questions and reproaches that spark a confrontation with the past. But what must be confronted is the ghostly presence of her other daughter, Grace, who disappeared 30 years before and appears now both as a haunting memory, embodied by Justine Mitchell, and as a talking bronze statue.

In this sense, the real action of the play is intangible. Though there are the materials for a scandalous and lurid melodrama - the core of what must be confronted is Nell's sexual betrayal of Grace's love - they are glimpsed as if through a curtain of gauze. The actual feel of the piece is low-key and static. The drama is apprehended, for the most part, at the remove of memory. Anyone looking for a rattling, gripping tale will be disappointed.

The virtues on offer are different. That Kilroy imagines his characters with an extraordinary vividness is obvious from the sheer quality of the three performances. Kestelman is magisterial in her ability to give full expression both to Nell's awfulness as a lover and mother - her egotism, her selfishness, her fatal tendency to apply aesthetic standards of perfection to the messiness of human relationships - and to her elemental vitality. Her Nell is an unsympathetic character who commands attention because she doesn't seek sympathy.

Methven is the perfect foil, her toughness tempered by a warmth that makes her a much nicer woman but also a less powerful one. And Justine Mitchell's Grace is sublime, a completely convincing portrait of mental illness in which fragility is given its own kind of radiance. Lynne Parker's stylishly assured direction blends these contrasting forces of character in just the right doses to create a strong sense of family dynamics.

The shape that emerges, then, is not a potent heroic sculpture, but a more abstract, suggestive and incomplete work. Nell comes to accept the power of failure, the notion that life is best represented, not in the perfection of art, but in the struggle to articulate what cannot quite be said.

This is also a remarkably honest description of the play itself, a work which acknowledges its own inadequacies with the acute intelligence and unflinching integrity that have always marked Kilroy's theatre.  Fintan O'Toole

Runs until October 11th

Giselle

Samuel Beckett Centre

Adaptations, however loose or rebellious, can often trap the viewer into an inadvertent game of spot-the-difference. In choosing the quintessential Romantic ballet Giselle as his springboard, Michael Keegan-Dolan is offered Théophile Gautier's solidly structured tale of the victory of love even after death. Certain readings of the ballet cite victimisation of women and the working class, and suggest that Giselle, by forgiving and rescuing the aristocratic lover who betrayed her, effectively condones his behaviour. But against this is a tradition that sees the ballet solely as a thing of great beauty, a tradition that doesn't recognise the political agenda it explicitly or implicitly supports. Keegan-Dolan's Giselle finds itself somewhere between the two: awareness of the social forces acting on the characters and, by following the original's journey from narrative to pure dance, reliance on the power of movement and image to resolve the narrative.

The location is a mythical midlands town called Ballyfeeny that is inhabited by misfits whose dysfunctionality is magnified by the use an all-male cast. Set against them is the female Giselle MacCready, wonderfully played by Daphne Strothmann, whose love is betrayed by the outsider, Albrecht, but her characterisation means it is she who is the constant outsider rather than the transient bisexual Bratislavan line-dance teacher. She is despised in her own family and in a community where other female characters (played by men) are jealous and vindictive. Powerless to make decisions for herself, even the passionate act of dancing in the graveyard (the climax in the ballet, but underplayed here) is instigated by Albrecht. So after a life of abuse, brutality and betrayal, Giselle's death achieves nothing: neither a victory for love, nor the restoration of the status quo, nor even simple revenge.

This dramatic weakness is, ironically, a victim of the effective first half, with its funny setpieces such as the line-dancing sequences, which shows Keegan-Dolan's keen eye for imagery and humour. He is blessed with a marvellous cast who tackle a range of tasks with aplomb, and a finely weighted score by Philip Feeney that enhances dialogue and movement with beauty and menace.  Michael Seaver

Runs until October 11th

The Tiger Lillies

Liberty Hall

Sailors and gutters and ailing old hookers; circus freaks, Jesus and evil onlookers; dismembered babies and trite rhyming schemes - these are a few of their favourite themes.

To describe this rare Dublin performance by England's punk-cabaret trio as appalling might easily be viewed as a compliment by The Tiger Lillies, exponents of the madcap macabre. Unfortunately, that's not the intention. When singer Martyn Jacques finally emerges from prolonged technical difficulties, it proves how easily his sordid fantasies can be ruptured.

"Where was I?" he inquires in his unwavering cockney falsetto, reminiscent of Monty Python at its gender-warping silliest. "I think I was stamping on a little baby's head." Since 1989, Jacques, a trained opera singer, has been stomping on the progeny of such warped imaginings. But it wasn't until the success of Shockheaded Peter, a "junk opera" based on the grisly children's fables of Heinrich Hoffmann, that his combo secured a theatrical following.

Efforts to develop subsequent albums (such as The Gorey End) into theatre shows have apparently faltered, and so a disjointed trawl through the company's expansive back-catalogue (embellished with a single smoke machine) trundles sheepishly into the Dublin Theatre Festival. One night in the Fringe's Spiegeltent might have sufficed.

The Tiger Lillies scour carnivals and brothels for inspiration, transforming guttural shrieks into a tortured soundscape where no groan is left unturned. But when wheezing waltzes, bawdy oompahs and Jacques's castrato-Tom-Waits vocal style have exhausted such sleazy back-alleys, not even the throbbing crucifixion fantasy of Banging in the Nails can provoke a thinning audience out of their weariness. Shock value also quickly depreciates - the only people who seem to find tunes of decrepitude, blasphemy and transsexuals titillating or teeth-gnashingly spiteful are the performers. Even without the sound problems, ultimately The Tiger Lillies suffer from a delusion of rancour.  Peter Crawley

Ends tonight

Sharon's Grave

Olympia

This is an extract from Fintan O'Toole's original review of the production in Galway, published on September 11th:

"Presiding over the first half of Garry Hynes's coruscating Druid production of John B. Keane's Sharon's Grave is a large and colourful projection of the crucified Christ. It serves to draw our attention to what is not there. The play was written at the end of the 1950s and is set in 1925, when Catholic Ireland was in its triumphant prime. But its world has only the thinnest veneer of Christianity. The prayers at the obsequies of the dead Donal Conlee are drowned out by riotous anarchy. The sacrament of marriage is profaned and subordinated to the sacred hunger for land. . . The play has a psychedelic, hallucinatory quality. It both is and is not realistic. At one level, it has to be presented as a set of events that could conceivably happen in a world comparable to our own. At another, it has to unfold in the outlandish sphere of myth, where forces and archetypes, not mere men and women, tread the Earth. Hynes has the guts to go all the way with this strange, disruptive logic . . .The sheer physical presence of the play overwhelms its strangeness and makes it, in this production at least, fabulously real."  Fintan O'Toole

Runs at the Gaiety until October 7th