Le Costume

Tivoli Theatre

Can Themba's play, here translated into French, is set in a multicultural suburb of Johannesburg once known for its improbable gaiety and bohemian lifestyles. The authorities bulldozed it in the 1960s and exiled the author, who died of despair and alcohol a few years later. But even as a kind of poor man's paradise, Sophiatown had its serpents, and the play examines a species called marital infidelity.

Philemon and Matilda seem a devoted pair, but she has taken a lover. The husband discovers them, and the interloper flees, leaving behind the eponymous suit. Philemon's revenge is to adopt the abandoned clothes as a third party to the marriage. The suit dines, sleeps and exercises with the couple. In time, it becomes so familiar as to be almost invisible to its hosts, and Matilda tentatively seeks to restore some normality to her life. Then, out of a deep unhealed wound, he inflicts a great betrayal, resulting in a final tragedy.

Peter Brook brings to the production the sense of a modern folk tale, giving it an illusion of simplicity. It is, however, the kind of simplicity reached only by many journeys through complexity, emerging shorn of excess and elaboration. At some 75 minutes, it is hardly a miniature, but it has that sense of pared-down perfection one associates with the word. Like the suit, the director's ideas are near invisible but all-controlling.

His actors give him flawless performances. Isaac Kounde and Karen Aldridge as the couple are graceful and magnetic, stumbling through a maze of emotions. Hassane Kouyate and Tony Mpoudja play many other roles, encompassing both sexes, with a sense of fun and versatility.

This is a play that runs the gamut of emotions, beguiles with music and bewitches with sleight-of-hand stagecraft. Fight for tickets.

Gerry Colgan

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Woyzeck

Gaiety Theatre

The problem with experimental theatre is that, sooner or later, experiments must have results. As the elements of what is called experimental theatre have been iuse for well over a century, audiences are entitled to expect that confident discoveries will have been made.

One of the heartening things about the startling version of Georg Bⁿchner's Woyzeck that arrives in Dublin from the Betty Nansen Theatre, in Denmark, is that it is not experimental. It may break with realistic drama. It may address itself more to the senses than to the conscious mind. But it does not rely on shock or novelty.

It is, on the contrary, a highly traditional piece. Robert Wilson, its director and designer, presents a synthesis of the modernist revolt against theatrical realism. The text, albeit in a skeletal form, is a homage to the astonishingly precocious Bⁿchner, the father of dramatic modernism. The techniques Wilson employs are founded on those of the figures who revolutionised 20th-century theatre: Gordon Craig's flat screens, Adolph Appia's evocative lighting, the Bauhaus movement, Merce Cunningham's choreography.

As all of these techniques have been in use since at least the 1920s, Wilson's Woyzeck ought to be no more difficult for a contemporary audience than, say, Citizen Kane is for a movie-goer or a Picasso painting is for a tourist in a gallery. That theatrical modernism is still seen as terribly strange is largely the fault of a theatre culture that has continued to look for applause purely on the basis of its experimental status.

The great pleasure of this production is that it dispenses with this comfortable cop-out. It asks to be treated for what it is: a finished, extraordinarily accomplished summary of what modernist theatre can and can't do. In that sense, it exposes the limits as well as the delights of a way of making theatre. One of them is an inability to deal with complex texts. Though there is no definitive text of Woyzeck (Bⁿchner died at 23, while the play was still fluid, and there was no production until 1913), the form used here is minimal and oversimplified. Equally, the use of actors as living marionettes creates a certain coldness.

The payback, though, is sensual. Wilson's designs of costumes, sets and, especially, lighting are astonishingly eloquent, not least in the restrained precision that controls his extraordinary inventiveness. The Danish cast shows an awesome mastery of singing, movement, mime and clowning. The elements are combined with a fluidity that sweeps away all doubts and hesitations and commands total attention.

Above all, the coldness that is inherent in the form is counteracted by the ravishing songs of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Waits's characteristic combination of Brechtian cabaret, bluesy lyricism, archaic carnival and hard-edged alienation is perfect for the strange, displaced story of Woyzeck's disintegration. All the burden of making connections and making sense falls on the songs, and they bear it with an exhilarating lightness of step.

Fintan O'Toole

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Washday

The Ark

Washday is a superb piece of theatre for young children: magical, playful, colourful and imaginative. Joanna Williams transforms the everyday chore of laundry into an adventure, artfully moving from her downbeat role as a washerwoman to that of the animated narrator of the tale of Captain Appleton, who travels to a tropical island to steal magical waterfall spray.

The children were charmed when her laundry basket turned into a sandy island and when she asked for their help to unfold her sheets and duvets, transforming them into a waterfall, rivers and a wonderful sandy beach. They enjoyed being sprayed with water when torrential rain came to the island, and shouted "cool" when Williams conjured up a snowstorm. They laughed with glee when she surfed the waves on her ironing board and sailed the sea in her basket.

The props and puppets were the most striking features, and Williams used them fully. From time to time, the young audience were distracted, but Williams drew them back in. You knew they would never see laundry in the same light.

Sylvia Thompson

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