Irish Timews writers review the latest events in the arts world.

Days of Wine and Roses

Donmar Warehouse, London

Owen McCafferty is good at the wide-angle view - as he showed in his panoramic Belfast epic, Scenes from the Big Picture (2003). But in his new version of Days of Wine and Roses which opened this week at the Donmar Warehouse, he's dealing with a very small and already heavily over-painted canvas. He's hemmed in by JP Miller's 1973 stage version and in the shadow of the powerful 1960s Jack Lemmon/Lee Remick movie, also scripted by Miller.

Days is a story in which love conquers all - and alcohol conquers love. It's a 90-minute two-hander played with no let-up and no interval, gracefully directed by Peter Gill. McCafferty has transposed the tale from America to London. Young Donal and Mona meet at Belfast airport on the cusp of a new life - emigration to the Big Smoke. She's a teetotaller and he introduces her to his hip flask right there in the departure lounge. In London they fall in love, have a laugh, marry, produce a child. Donal works for a bookmaker, drinking socially and professionally; Mona takes to solitary whiskies when she finds herself stuck at home with their baby son Kieron. They inhabit a kind of limbo; London is for them benign anonymity, Westminster Bridge and friends who come round for endless drinks but whom we never see in this thinly written piece.

Things slide downhill at soap-opera speed; she begins to farm out the child to neighbours; his beloved job is on the line. They tear each other apart. In Donal's words "we were like movie stars; we glided, now we stumble." He persuades Mona back to "a normal type of living" and for a while tea replaces the barley. But only Donal musters the strength to stay sober.

The powerful performances of Donal and Mona (Peter McDonald and Anne- Marie Duff) drew the audience into the desperate destructiveness of alcoholism ("Oh no", gasped a voice behind me as Mona produced a secret seductive bottle as Donal was winning his battle to dry out). But, overall, there is a lack of context in the play, an odd sketchiness which made this an evening where the actors took the honours - Duff full of loveable impulsiveness but terrifyingly addicted and McDonald mixing charm with grim violence.

"They are not long, the days of Wine and Roses," says Ernest Dowson's poem. Sadly, McCafferty's neat re-working of this dated play is unlikely to make them much longer.

Bernard Adams

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Eden

Everyman Palace, Cork

The enormous cast peopling Eden is, with two exceptions, off stage. Those two are Billy and Breda, a married couple trapped by the expectations of their time, or circumstances, or environment.

In this presentation by the Irish Repertory Theatre of New York, it is easy enough to understand Billy's raging fantasies of sexual conquest, given that, in relation to a wife who has been overweight (although to an unspecified degree), he is impotent. A tiny bit of motivation and a capsule of Viagra would sort out a problem which, due to pharmaceutical progress, is almost obsolete, but then there would be no play.

But Billy is also a foul-mouthed drunk, and by investing this character with an admittedly transient sympathy, Ciaran O'Reilly does great service to playwright Eugene O'Brien. Catherine Byrne's role as Breda, the unhappy but loving wife who has lost weight in order to rediscover herself and re-engage her husband, is more appealing but thus begs the question - why had they married in the first place?

There is not much time to worry about this as director John Tillinger has directed this two-hander with such skill that its sedentary nature is almost un-noticeable; the lighting by Howell Binkley and a flock-wallpapered setting by Klara Zieglerova support the crucial sense of time passing. Both players, in their revelations of self-hood and their evocations of all those others, name by name, who throng the pubs and streets of their town, perform with terrific conviction.

There is another question to be asked: here, as with other "confessional" plays, there is no given reason why Billy and Breda should be disgorging their personal histories so directly to the audience. They're not at counselling, or confiding to a friend, or examining memories,and they are certainly not talking to one another; there is no narrative bridge between them and us. Perhaps O'Brien should have worked a little harder at giving us all a reason for being together?

Runs until tomorrow, then tours

Mary Leland