Irish Times critics review a performance of Shiver at the Project, Dublin; Steve Earle at the Olympia and two classical performances at the National Concert Hall: with Hugh Tinney playing with the NSO and the Callino Quartet with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and Dublin Wind Soloists

Shiver at the Project, Dublin

When things move as fast as they did in late 1990s Ireland, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Before you've really done the maths, you're dealing with the aftermaths. Declan Hughes's new play for Rough Magic, Shiver, is marked by this sense of trying to catch up with a new, new thing that is already old hat, to grasp a bubble that has burst. The dot.com Ireland of fabulous pretensions and soaring stocks that it dissects already belongs to history.

This applies to both the content and the form of the play. The characters, aged between 37 and 40, divide into two married couples. Cathy Belton's Marion is a graphic designer with a trendy company that has been taken over by a multinational conglomerate. Her husband, Kevin (Paul Hickey), has left his teaching job to stay at home and mind their baby. Their neighbours and friends, Richard (Peter Hanly) and Jenny (Cathy White), have come back from the US to start an Internet company called 51st State.

In their own way, these characters are as redolent of the bygone era of late 1990s Dublin as Bessie Burgess and Fluther Good are of the revolutionary period. Their new suburban houses, superbly evoked in John Comiskey's sumptuously elaborate set of kitchen, sitting-room and patio are as emblematic as O'Casey's tenements.

Hughes knows this, of course. Early in the play, when Marion first utters the phrase "dot.com", Jenny apologises sardonically to the audience: "It's like 'boutique' or 'fondue set' , it already sounds so dated." But this self-awareness can't prevent the characters from being somewhat schematic, for they are representative social types before they are individuals.

And in terms of form, this is a story that is over before it has begun. Living as we do in the morning after optimism, we know that Marion's glamorous corporation will succumb to a bad dose of Enron-itis and that Richard and Jenny's dot.com folly will tumble into the same bottomless pit into which they have dumped their own savings and their investor's money. Things cannot be revealed, merely enacted.

It is this sense that the theatre is trying to capture things that have been and gone that helps to explain the prevalence in contemporary Irish drama of the narrative form. Whereas a previous generation of playwrights was dealing with unfolding events, so that everything was still up for grabs, Hughes and many of his contemporaries are telling a story whose ending has already happened.

So, in Shiver, the actors are really narrators. Some scenes are fully dramatised, but the overall shape of the piece is retrospective. The software has been installed, and the program is being run. What you get with this form is cool control, style and wit. What you don't get is tension, drama, any feeling of risk or danger.

For consummate professionals, Shiver is well within the comfort zone. Lynne Parker can control the pace and flow with impressive ease. Belton, Hanly, White and Hickey are entirely relaxed with their characters and give precise, clear and coherent performances.

But there is no feeling of anyone being stretched. The bar is cleared in style but has not, in dramatic terms, been set very high.

It is indeed when it becomes more ambitious that the play becomes more problematic. In the first half, when it is essentially a comedy of millennial manners, Hughes's satiric wit and sardonic observation of the delusions of the time carry it through all hesitations. He captures the evangelistic nonsense of dot.com-speak wonderfully well.

In the second half, when the tone becomes more portentous, the narrative structure begins to sag under the weight. Sensing the thin texture of the boom-bust story, he tries to reach for religious and historical resonances. But this attempt to turn social comedy into philosophic tragedy leaves us feeling, at times, as if we are watching two different plays at once.

Overall, Shiver manages to entertain but not to enrapture, to float pleasantly along rather than to plunge into the depths, to hold the attention but not to command it.

Runs until April 19th

Fintan O'Toole

Steve Earle at the Olympia, Dublin

Whenever we've needed a barometer, a political weather-vane, there have always been musicians who've stepped up to the plate, from Woody Guthrie to Joni Mitchell, Billy Bragg to Christy Moore. But Steve Earle has been one of the most consistently passionate and angry musicians to grace the stage over the past two decades, and his mood on Saturday night was just as fired, just as steely as it's ever been.

Ever since he cut his teeth in the frontline of Austin's Antones club way back in the early 1980s, Earle has been searching for something bigger than a fix for a broken heart. His many musical identities yielded to the core on Saturday night: hard-drivin' country rock with a tincture of blues and bluegrass. Train A Comin', Harlan Man and the ever fresh-faced Copperhead Road were the pivots on which the rest of the night hinged, with the timely John Walker's Blues a reminder of just how easily Earle can hit the bullseye in contemporary political songwriting.

With a backdrop of anti-war slogans bolstering the tightest of quartets, The Dukes (augmented by Earle's son, Justin, on keyboards), at times they faltered beneath the weight of their political platform. Fact was, Earle seemed hell-bent at times on maxing the reverb and minimising any communication with his audience.

But even he abandoned his own rules of disengagement from the opening chords of the first of two encores, ripping into a further 25-minute set that spanned everything from The Truth to I Remember You and the rejuvenated The Galway Girl, a song rendered all the more resilient for being stripped of accordion and fiddle, instruments that defined its original faux-Celtic identity.

Mercifully he's turned his back on that maudlin Celtic newgrass he championed during his Transcendental Blues period. Earle's latest incarnation is as wily and hard-edged as his most home-grown albums have always been. It's the skin he's most comfortable in, pushing eardrums and conscience to the outer limits. At least that's what the (mostly male) punters seemed to believe as they peeled themselves from the rafters long after he'd left the stage.

Siobhán Long

Hugh Tinney, NSO/Markson at the NCH, Dublin

^{Meistersinger Prelude - Wagner.}

^{Piano Concerto No 5 - Prokofiev.}

^{Night on the Bare Mountain - Mussorgsky/ Rimsky-Korsakov.}

^{Firebird Suite (1945) - Stravinsky}

The National Symphony Orchestra starts its first US tour in Florida on tomorrow, reaching New York on the 13th to take part in Carnegie Hall's Great Performers series. The orchestra's three pre-departure concerts gave Irish audiences a chance to sample the touring repertoire. International touring is widely regarded as a valuable stimulant, and the NSO's playing at the NCH would seem to bear this out.

The Prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger was delivered with a spring and even at times an airiness that rescued it from the clotted gravitas with which it's often handled.

Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain, in Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration, had atmosphere and bite, and Stravinsky's last orchestral revisiting of his early Firebird ballet, the 1945 suite, had colour and magic.

Hugh Tinney was the soloist in Prokofiev's rarely heard Fifth Piano Concerto, the one work of the evening's programme that is not being taken to the US. The piece dates from 1932, before the simplification of style that is most popularly represented by Peter and the Wolf and the ballet Romeo and Juliet. The concerto has a dry, acidic sparkle, as if the composer were emulating the mechanistic world of a player piano. It's not at all difficult to relate to more successful works in earlier and later styles. It's just that it lacks the punch of one and the tunefulness of the other.

Tinney played it with style and point, and with evident relish. Yet even in his safe hands, it still sounded like a piece with lots of activity, but where not much happens.

Michael Dervan

Callino Quartet, RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, Dublin Wind Soloists/Mark Duley at the NCH, Dublin

String quartet in C minor, Mass No 2 in E minor - Bruckner

Bruckner's Quartet dates from the years of his apprenticeship and sounds rather as if it was written to rule. The usually vivacious Callino Quartet didn't enliven it much, though they did manage to bring an attractive lightness to the third movement Scherzo.

The Mass No 2 is scored for eight-part mixed choir and a wind band of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and trombones. The combination of the very large RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and the 15 Dublin Wind Soloists made for some striking sonic effects, but the work as a whole doesn't escape from the 19th century, in spite of the composer's admiration of Wagner.

The straightforward settings of large sections of the Gloria and Credo sound almost perfunctory in comparison with the elaborate Kyrie and Sanctus, but Bruckner was eager to please the bishop, who wanted a return to a simpler style than prevailed. It is hard not to feel that the composer might have chafed under the limitations.

Mark Duley brought a sense of liturgical occasion to the performance, though the National Concert Hall is not the best of venues for creating a devout mood, and the Benedictus and Agnus Dei got close to a religious intensity.

The contribution of the Dublin Wind Soloists kept the Mass sharply in focus, reinforcing the light and shadow of the generously toned Philharmonic Choir.

Douglas Sealy