A look at what is going on in the world of the arts.
Des and Rosie on the Luas
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
The material is mostly new, but the style and attack remain the same. Fans of Rosaleen Linehan and Des Keogh know what they want, and vice versa. The mix is one of broad comedy, pointed satire, musical numbers and send-ups of public figures, with politicians to the fore. Material is, as always, mostly by Fergus Linehan, sharp-witted as ever.
It opens with a medley called Longing for Love, which takes in a number of toe-tapping tunes, and happily pillories some asking-for-it victims. Ex-minister Jim McDaid, for instance, gets to be "King of the Road". This is followed by a Mastermind session in which the person in the black chair is one Gerry Adams, who has ways of managing the score.
The first half also has a take-off of the once-notable Delia Murphy with "The Spinning Wheel" - the show makes a joke of its own longevity. There is a hilarious vignette in which the duo pose as today's school-kids, depraved beyond their ages. And there is a bowdlerised French chanson spiked and spiced with malicious references. Act two begins with a familiar act; two aul' ones who wander on stage by mistake, and gossip away. There is the artistic director who left a million quid on the Number 14 bus - and it wasn't handed in.
Life under Mary Harney is dismissed as an awkward position to be in. In-vitro fertilisation leads to entendres for which double is an inadequate multiplier. So does an item on rugby with its loose scrums, and a version of Mary Coughlan singing the Alternative Medicine Blues. There's lots more, directed by Caroline Fitzgerald, and with lively music by Trio Con Brio + 1. The legend lives.
Gerry Colgan
Runs to Sept 24
Her Big Chance
Bewley's Café Theatre
There are no small parts, they say, only small actors. And though she measures out her career in soap-opera bit parts and cherished memories on the margins of a Roman Polanski film, there's nothing small about the pneumatic eternal ingénue Lesley (Janet Moran).
Unswervingly optimistic, Lesley is mercifully spared from self-knowledge, remaining perfectly oblivious to a realisation that would shatter anyone's self-belief. Namely, she is a character in an Alan Bennett monologue.
First broadcast in 1988, Bennett's gentle and wry Talking Heads series delivered a procession of Britons in sad decline. But where Bennett allowed some characters a dawning realisation of their hopelessness, he could never mete out such punishment to Lesley.
Her big chance is a movie bound for "the overseas market" and her indefatigable "ideas about the part" begin while she is asked to audition in her bra and panties.
Bennett never writes with condescension, yet his irony can be cruel. When even her character's name isn't considered important ("It is to me," Moran cries. "It's all I've got to build on!") Lesley witlessly succumbs to her own soft-core exploitation, feeling artistic triumph at the very moment of her professional nadir.
It would be easy for an actress to maintain a knowing detachment from such a figure. But Janet Moran honours the role with endearing innocence and perseverance, never sharing a wink with the audience, while deftly conveying each member of the film crew.
Allowing the humour and poignancy of her situation to shine through in every line Moran is, literally, achingly funny.
The monologue, of course, is the dramatic form of loneliness and in the chinks of the play's comedy director Michael James Ford refracts such isolation in half-finished ironing and a depressingly sparse living room. In one gently fading light, Ford and Moran present the ultimate predicament of the actor in character: so perfectly concealed. So unbearably exposed.
Runs to Sept 10
Peter Crawley
Talk to Me Like the Rain
And Let Me Listen
Focus Theatre, Dublin
This short (35 minutes) play by Tennessee Williams was written in the 1950s, and early productions tended to group it with others of his. Alone here, and lacking any wider context, it makes for a rather slight offering, an exercise in words rather than drama.
It opens with a man and a woman in a dingy hotel room in New York. He is lying comatose on the bed, dressed only in his shorts. She is wearing a nightie and dressing-gown, and it is obvious that they have a sexual relationship - perhaps in marriage - and that it has arrived at the end of a rocky road.
He begins to speak of his life as an alcoholic, his loss of memory of the immediate past, and of the cruelties inflicted on him in this city, where he has been beaten, burned and left in a bath-tub filled with ice cubes. His money is gone, and he asks the woman, in the words of the title, to converse with him. In obvious psychological pain, she begins the long monologue at the heart of the play.
She now wants only to escape to some small hotel on the coast, where she can live on welfare cheques, have an old housekeeper to mind her, and age to grey and then white until she has virtually abandoned life.
Her words are couched in prose of lyrical escapism, not the speech of a person on the edge, about to end a relationship. The man says relatively little, also in quasi-poetic words.
If the stand-alone play is weak, this is not to decry the strength of the acting by Lenny Hayden and Ann Sheehy, directed by Mary Moynihan.
Runs to Sept 10
Gerry Colgan
