A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics

Breathing Corpses

Project Cube, Dublin

LAURA WADE'S chilling play, Breathing Corpses, opens with the discovery of a body in a dingy hotel on a roundabout on the outskirts of an unnamed English city.

Chambermaid Amy (a charming Amy Fleming) sighs rather than screams. “Not again!” This is the second corpse she has found this week.

It has become such a regular occurrence that the other hotel staff have started to call Amy the angel of death.

From this promising opening, Wade’s drama works backwards, reanimating the dead victim – the early-50-something Jim – and charting the final days of his life in reverse order, until the only real crime in the play is actually committed.

The reversed timescale is a clever device that serves to increase rather than deflate the tension in this disturbing, highly original 80-minute piece.

Crooked House’s production presents the play as a series of short sharp scenes and a veritable army of stagehands make the scene changes – facilitated by Ciarán Aspell’s impressive multifunctional set – as smooth as possible despite the tight space in Project’s Cube.

Performances are uniformly excellent, with Jillian Bradbury’s cold, savage Kate commanding particular opprobrium.

Cathy White, meanwhile, elicits sympathy as empty-nester Elaine, and Nick Devlin is quietly moving as the suicidal Jim.

Director Peter Hussey uses the resources of sound and music designer Ross Mac Mahon to increase the menacing atmosphere of Wade’s tense, terse writing, allowing it to bleed outwards from the stage to the theatre itself.

This complements the greater threats to humanity in the modern age that Wade reminds us of, as the corpse of Saddam Hussein and the dead body of a young girl litter the invoked off-stage world.

In particular, the unsettling final scene reminds us that all the characters in Wade's play, like humankind itself, are merely breathing corpses; that in the broader, philosophical scheme of things, living is merely waiting to die. SARA KEATING

Until August 30th

RTÉ CO/Wilson

NCH, Dublin

Glinka– Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. Liadov– The Enchanted Lake. Glazunov– Scène de ballet, valse, Pas d'action, Mazurka. Stravinsky– Firebird Suite (1919)

THIS SUMMER lunchtime concert with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra was devoted to the Russian stage, starting with music from 1842 by Mikhail Glinka, the father of Russian national music, and then leaping half a century to three works composed within 12 years.

The concert was also another opportunity to see the work of John Wilson, appointed principal guest conductor earlier this year.

Tyneside-born, he comes to Ireland with a reputation as much for arranging as conducting, and having earned international recognition as the man MGM hired to replace the lost score for The Wizard of Oz.

This entailed watching the movie hundreds of times so he could write down every note.

He conducted quite differently in different parts of the concert.

I had to revise an early scribble during Glinka's overture to his opera Russlan and Ludmillathat his means of extracting the score's inherent energy and excitement was to mirror physically what was in the music.

It was the same in The Enchanted Lake(1909), a tone poem Anatoly Liadov rescued from an abandoned opera.

Here the grace of Wilson’s slow, wide gestures looked as though they were actually shaping Liadov’s dreamy, fairytale soundscape.

Then Wilson appeared to alter his technique. Gestures were more conservative, more economical in dance music excerpts from Alexander Glazunov's 1898 opera Raymonda,yet he continued to extract the same focused sound and delicate colours from his players.

You couldn't help but miss the sweep of full symphonic strings in the final item, Igor Stravinsky's second suite from his 1910 ballet, The Firebird.

Otherwise the Concert Orchestra and Wilson produced a good performance with some refined solo-playing, especially on bassoon and above all French horn.

It is Stravinsky pre- Rite of Spring– lyrical, perfumed and Russian-impressionist – yet it builds to a thrilling climax which Wilson, still in economy mode, calibrated and released to a tee. MICHAEL DUNGAN