Irish Times critics review performances at Cork Opera House and Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery

Jane Eyre

Cork Opera House

THE ARRAY of photographic and recording equipment assembled on stage for the City Theatre Dublin production of Jane Eyre prompts the question: what is going on here? It's a question heightened by comic distractions, such as the failure of the small video screen, and given greater emphasis by the realisation that anyone expecting this adaptation by director Michael McCaffery to serve as a version of the novel itself will be disappointed.

Although this rendering adds confusion to complexity, its three-hour duration is at least the result of an honest effort to cover everything. The fact that a few important things are left out, with very minor elements such as cloaks and portmanteaux left in, only goes to show how difficult a task McCaffery has set himself.

The heroine of Charlotte Brontë's novel is an independent but impoverished young woman, capable of interpreting the religious and social edicts of her time for herself, and resistant to all pressures save emotional and spiritual integrity.

Her character, and her fate in a world which placed little value on unmarried women, are the driving forces in a narrative which contains two immense rows. For most readers, character and fate are enough to make a tale worthwhile, but it is those two arguments which make this one so powerful. On stage in this production, these crucial conversations make it clear that the task of bringing dialogue, internal monologue, narrative progression and imaginary cause and response into a coherent dramatic shape are beyond McCaffery's powers of compression.

There are other disappointments. Lorna Quinn, as Jane, sees the word "passionate" as the clue to her reading, and performs accordingly and misleadingly. Also misjudged are the prancing gait of the young Adele (Phoebe Toal), the implacable accents adopted by Deirdre Monaghan as Aunt Reed and Mrs Fairfax, and Kieran Gough's final demented appearance as St John Rivers, all examples of an almost hysterical fidelity to the text. Gough is otherwise convincing as that ardent but unlikable clergyman.

Philip Judge, as Rochester, hampered by unheroic breeches (costuming is slapdash throughout), achieves the psychological subtlety essential to but missing from every other aspect of a presentation which, while it can't answer the original question posed by its setting, at least has the virtue of sending one back to the book. On nationwide tour until Nov 22. MARY LELAND

Fang, O'Toole

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Anon - Sai Shang Qu. Ian Wilson - Spillieart's Beach. Traditional - Yao Dance. Philip Glass - Company. Piazzolla - Nightclub. Toshiyuki Hiraoka - Three pieces for pipa and guitar. Bartók - Romanian Folk Dances.

In programmes such as this one with guitarist Michael O'Toole, Liu Fang is determined to bring together eastern traditional and classical traditions with their western counterparts via the medium of her instrument, the pipa. This is a Chinese lute, nearly 2,000 years old, made of wood with a pear-shaped body and five strings, held upright on the lap and plucked. Although novel to see, the pipa is familiar from its sound, which western ears know as a cliche of oriental colour in television and film. Readily identifiable gapped (pentatonic) scales, ornaments and bent notes featured in Fang's opening piece, the lament Sai Shang Qu, from the Chinese classical tradition.

Fang played with a captivating fluidity and naturalness that bridged the miles and centuries to an ancient tale of a broken heart.

Here, and in the traditional-style Yao Dance, whose increasing tempo demonstrated an easy virtuosity in Fang's flying fingers, the pipa was at home in its own native sound world. There were odd cultural clashes, however, in arrangements of pieces which had their own strong native colours, such as Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances and the tango-based Nightclub, by Astor Piazzolla (which actually came across very sweet all the same).

Trying to take the China out of the pipa is perhaps like trying to take the baroque out of the harpsichord. For either instrument, certain kinds of contemporary music offer the best shot at cultural neutrality.

The abstract response to the painting Moonlit Beach in Ian Wilson's brooding Spillieart's Beach (in his own special arrangement for pipa and guitar) is a case in point, being music where the composer's message subsumes instrumental character.

Something similar was evident in the minimalist economy of Company, by Philip Glass, despite the fact that the shortage of substance threw all the attention on the playing and the sound. MICHAEL DUNGAN