Reviewed: Cork Midsummer Festival, Depeche Mode and Sonic Boom / EAR
Cork Midsummer Festival: Chatroom Everyman Palace, Cork
Trying to excavate some extra dimension from Chatroom, some hidden lode of meaning, is in the end a fruitless exercise. There isn't anything more to this piece of work by Enda Walsh than is offered, very competently and honestly, by the young cast directed for Boomerang Theatre Company and the Everyman Palace by Donal Gallagher.
Framed as a discussion between teenagers gathering in different groupings and settling into opposing alignments, the play - performed originally as part of the NT Shell Festival last year - has its darker moments, concentrated on a credibly subdued performance from Michael Bate. His adolescent misery is identified as potentially suicidal by a malicious couple who plan to persuade him to agree to what would be murder by remote control.
A video sequence indicates the outcome, its fuzzy, lurching images something of a surprise, given that the most diverting aspects of this production are the thumping soundtrack and the backdrop mingling of screen-saver icons and iPod technology. While he can't be blamed for directorial decisions, the feeling is that, with the talent and commitment at his disposal here, Enda Walsh really should try harder.
Until tomorrow - Mary Leland
Depeche Mode Point Theatre, Dublin
They've been one of the biggest bands in the world since the 1980s, and while their recent albums are offering a dwindling hit-to-miss ratio, they are still a stunning live act. Were Depeche Mode and U2 separated at birth? In many ways, though, Martin Gore, Dave Gahan and Andrew Fletcher are the dark flipside of Bono and the boys, what with the drug addiction, near-splits, and song titles such as A Pain That I'm Used To and Suffer Well.
The production design for this sold-out Point Theatre performance looks like a return to 1980s aesthetics. The three keyboard stands are housed in grey plastic half-doughnut-shaped enclosures with inset headlights. They look for all the world like props from an am-dram production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Gahan, wiggling his tattooed torso, manages to remain the riveting centre of attention.
The early part of the set is flat, as tunes from the lacklustre recent album Playing the Angel predominate, but Depeche Mode have more than one secret weapon in their back catalogue. Gore takes lead vocal duties on a few songs, including a lounged-up Home, but it's when Gahan returns that the whole performance becomes intoxicating. In My Room, John the Revelator and I Feel You are thunderous and propulsive, and you haven't heard Personal Jesus until you've heard thousands of fans "reaching out to touch faith" in unison. When Enjoy the Silence follows, Gahan doesn't even bother to sing the chorus, he's too busy turning the crowd into an arm-waving Depeche Mode-appreciation machine. - Davin O'Dwyer
Sonic Boom / EAR Crawdaddy, Dublin
Building a career out of a simple drone is not an easy thing to do, but Pete Kember has managed to do a lot with drones. As Sonic Boom, the Rugby native was once the driving force behind drone merchants Spacemen 3. While his partner in that band, Jason Pierce, went on to play with gospel choirs and orchestras with Spiritualized, Kember was content to plough his own creative furrow with the Experimental Audio Research (EAR) ensemble project, often exchanging guitar-based drone for electronic-based drone.
The challenge behind such music lies more in making the live performance interesting than in the actual creation of the music. What can sound stunning on Donal Dineen at 2am can be rather less compelling performed by a gaunt man twiddling knobs at a sound desk. And Kember twiddled knobs with his back to the audience, either a defiant gesture or a sign of his awkward stage presence.
In the world of experimental ambient electronica, visuals are key. Sonic Boom's visuals have names like Pollock Globe, Strings Oscillo and Needles 1 to 3. Kaleidoscopic effects, falling stars, Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic patterns and spinning wheels worked fairly well with the music, and it might have been an approximation of what Aldous Huxley saw while on mescaline, but there was little on screen that the iTunes visualiser can't do better.
It wasn't all Kember, though - his EAR acolytes appeared for a few tunes, mixing things up with a guitar and vocoderised vocals. But the climax was Kember presenting an interminable drone-fest, pure pulsing sound with occasional squawks and bleeps, while roulette wheels spun around on the big screen. It was impossible not to think that some chemical assistance was necessary to fully appreciate the performance. That or 3D glasses. - Davin O'Dwyer
