POP/ROCK
The Academic
Whelan's, Dublin 8pm €13.50 whelanslive.com
This Mullingar band have been working shows at festivals and smaller venues. Their blend of clever pop/rock hooks with a fresh-faced attitude can only be the start of bigger and better things. It’s academic, like.
THEATRE
Contractions
Bewley's Café Theatre @ Powerscourt. Ends Oct 31 1pm €8-12 (light lunch €4) bewleyscafetheatre.com
Romance may not be dead in Mike Bartlett’s wryly dystopian satire, but it has been defined to within an inch of its life. Anything “which is perpetrated with a view to advancing the relationship toward love” is forbidden, an officious manager (Aisling O’Mara) says: they are a threat to corporate efficiency. This is bad news for Emma (Danielle Galligan), who is in the early stages of such a perpetration with a colleague, and so begins an Orwellian tale of institutional invasiveness and eroding personal resolve: the relationship is denied, confessed, comically evaluated and increasingly subject to the manipulation of the company. Performed by recent Lir graduates Galligan andO’Maraand revived by Compass Theatre Ireland, Bartlett’s satire tends to over-amp points that might have remained more slyly unsettling. But it’s sharper on the gradual dehumanisation of a system in which people live to work.
