Irish Timeswriters review the latest performances in drama and music

Days of Wine and Roses

Everyman Palace, Cork

In his re-telling of JP Miller's Days of Wine and Roses, Owen McCafferty keeps to the cautionary line evinced by the play's title: the weeping and the laughter, the love and desire and hate, the path that emerges from a misty dream but only for a while. That path may be disguised by addiction and obsession, in this case alcohol and horseracing, but at least it does emerge.

In this co-production by Everyman Palace, Galloglass Theatre and Civic Theatre Tallaght, director Conall Morrison sends the two characters, Donal and Mona, off at a headlong pace. They first meet at Belfast airport where, remarkably unencumbered for a young couple leaving Ireland forever, they fall into immediate conversation. It is Donal who offers the fatal hip-flask, it is Donal who obsesses about his career as a London bookie’s clerk and who later talks about his identification with Arkle as the inspiration for his own, very moderate, success. And, while Mona lapses into a housebound lethargy which can only be relieved by a drink and a laugh, it is Donal who accompanies her glass by glass (they don’t start drinking straight from the bottle until close to the end). The demon drink may be the villain here – although we are never sure exactly what it is they are drinking – but the writing of Miller and McCafferty combines to present two people who are very nasty indeed in their cups.

The inconsistencies of these personalities are convenient but eventually annoying. Why has Mona become so philosophically fluent? Why has Donal become so physically violent? And why is the delivery so unreflective, without pauses or hesitations, matching their breakneck march through London in the 1960s, during most of which they are both thoroughly soused? Despite the well-managed tension of the resolution it is all a bit didactic, the pace accelerated by the need for the cast to act as furniture removers and wardrobe assistants and by Sabine Dargent’s mosaic-textured screen projections.

Osgar Duke's sound design keeps things thumping along, supporting the conviction, energy and talent with which Martin Brody and Judith Roddy invest this Donal and Mona and which, it is hoped, will survive the production's tour of 19 more venues. Until Sat at the Everyman Palace, then on national tour until the end of November - MARY LELAND

Ó Euskadi go hÉireann

Coach House, Dublin Castle

Ambitious in their aim, to explore the musical connections between our musical tradition and that of the Basque region (also known as Euskadi), this challenging trio of Niamh Ní Charra, Ibon Koteron and Gavin Ralston, on a Music Network tour, managed to turn many assumptions about music on their heads through a forensically prepared repertoire. Any notions of this Basque/Irish concert resting on some cosy laurels, fuelled by a few shared reels or hornpipes, were quickly scotched by fiddle and concertina player Ní Charra’s admission that many tunes which they expected to gel simply refused to do so.

Ibon Koteron is an artful musician and singer, and a skilled practitioner of the traditional alboka (a double hornpipe) and of the infinitely more accessible three-hole whistle, the txistu. The Neolithic origins of the alboka are still audible in its rough-hewn clarion call. An acquired taste, it corralled punters into submission, much as the bagpipes or even uilleann pipes would do to an audience of neophytes. But when paired with Ní Charra’s concertina, and tempered by Koteron’s warm and unforced vocals, it gradually found purchase in an eclectic range of tunes that straddled both traditions with surprising ease.

Gavin Ralston's guitar accompaniment was well-judged, deliciously savouring the Cole Porter potential of The Rights of Man, a tune deliciously reinvented by Ní Charra's fresh approach. Borrowings from Carolan jousted with some of Koteron's own compositions and a raft of traditional Basque tunes, which at times whispered of both arabesque and African influences.

While Ní Charra and Koteron occasionally veered towards the didactic in their introductions, this was a musical exploration that respected its roots as much as its audience's appetite for charting the unknown. - SIOBHÁN LONG

Meltdown

Project Upstairs

The name of the game this year is recession, and in Paul Meade’s new play for Gúna Nua, seen in Dublin’s fringe festival, soccer is the prism through which it is seen. Focusing on four friends who have been playing a weekly match for 20 years, it alternates their dressing-room rows and banter with sequences of shadowy choreography and snapshots of their changing lives in the outside world.

At the heart of the action is Michael (played with assurance by Meade himself, who took over the role at short notice), whose marriage has failed and whose new life in an empty flat on a half-completed estate gives him a fresh perspective on Ireland’s boom and bust. As he tells Neil, who has been working as a builder on the estate, he realised his world was askew when the only piece of furniture he needed was an ironing board so as to iron a shirt to go to work each day as an investment banker.

With its understated reflections on teamwork, greed, glory, failure and "tantric football", this is an entertaining, well-acted 90 minutes about discovering the zen of the downturn. Now running at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, until Sat  - GILES NEWINGTON