Listening:To the new M83 album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming. Sounds terrific.
Ridiculously nostalgic for:Engine Alley. The Kilkenny band have re-formed and play at Whelan's, Dublin, tonight.
Catching:The Absolut Gallery at Galway Arts Festival. Galway Shopping Centre is an unpromising site, but the space is excellent and the visual art within is varied but of high quality.
Mourning:Lucian Freud, whose meticulously detailed paintings made the 88-year- old, who died on Wednesday, among the world's most influential artists
Looking forward to:A bumper bank-holiday weekend of gigs: Morrissey at Vicar Street on Friday, The Minutes at Castlepalooza on Saturday, and Rodrigo y Gabriela (with support from Gemma Hayes) at Marlay Park on Sunday.
Underwhelmed by Peter Pan
JM Barrie's Peter Panis a classic tale of the late Victorian period, when the concept of childhood as we know it today was invented. The new musical adaptation at Grand Canal Theatre, in Dublin, suffers from a conflicted approach to the material.
The story is updated to contemporary recessionary London, where it is “not economical” to read stories. In principle, the modern retelling has the potential to work. However, Robert S Moss’s dialogue in the opening scene is horribly stilted. The initial confusion is only compounded by the fact that, even from a distance, Wendy (Katie Ray) and John (Harry Francis) seem to be long beyond adolescence, while Daniel Boys as Peter Pan looks every inch of his 32 years. Is there some ironic intention in casting adults in the role of children who don’t want to grow up?
The first flying sequences are enough to dispel concerns. The aerial elegance and (almost) invisible mechanics are impressive, and when the children arrive in Neverland to meet Peter Pan’s Lost Boys the dramaturgy picks up too. The pirates, led by the alternately cruel and cowardly Captain Hook (Ben Richards, pictured) and an unrecognisable Les Dennis as his sidekick Smee, provide a welcome source of humour in what is otherwise a po-faced adaptation of the story.
Even composer Robert Scott finds room for a bit of levity in the pirate chorus number, using cabaret riffs to enliven the excessive balladeering of an otherwise unremarkable score, and to allow the audience to laugh at the pirates’ brave posturing when they are really all softies at heart.
But, as yet, this new musical version of Peter Panstill seems to be unsure where best to focus its energy. When it is happy to use old-fashioned theatrical tools, like costuming, puppetry and three-dimensional scenery, it works really well at capturing the magic of Barrie's story. It says a lot that the greatest gasps of delight from the under-12s in the audience were not for the clumsily spotlit realisation of Tinkerbell, or for the flying, but for the arrival of Nanna the oversized dog, the tick-tocking crocodile and the pirate ship in the penultimate scene.
With a little more faith in traditional illusion, this staging of Peter Panwould be dramatically improved. This is the theatre, not the cinema, after all.
Sara Keating
– Runs until August 6th
Loving 'Controlled Falling Project' at Galway Arts Festival
Archimedes, algebra and elite acrobatics. ThisSideUp’s Controlled Falling Project stole hearts and minds in Galway this week, with a level of skill and imagination that even festival veterans haven’t witnessed before.
In describing their apparently effortless approach to synchronised hand-balancing, pyramid-building and various antics on the Russian bar, the teeter board and the German wheel, the three Aussies – James Brown, Casey Douglas and Christian Schooneveld-Reid – pointed out that they’ve been involved in gymnastics since the age of five.
The three played human guinea pigs for mad Prof Archimedes, conducting an experiment into the limits of physicality in his 1930s workshop, complete with chalk, blackboard, measuring tape and figurines. Without a proper stage and tiered seating, NUI Galway’s Bailey Allen hall isn’t the ideal venue, but the physics-defying performers didn’t seem to mind when much of the audience took to the aisles to see more.
During the postshow discussion last Tuesday it took one younger audience member to ask the obvious question about injury. The trio touched wood – as in their heads – and explained the nature of calculated risk.
All three are graduates of the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne, and bachelors, they added, to laughs.
Lorna Siggins