Reviewed today are The Weir at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, Lloyd Cole at Whelans in Dublin and Croon at various venues in Cork City

The Weir

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

On a bitterly cold night in the most sparsely populated county in Ireland, where would two middle-aged bachelors go in search of warmth, company and a few laughs? Jack and Jim have been treading a path to Brendan's bar for many a long day, as is witnessed by the easy familiarity of their relationship and the pause-punctuated shorthand of what passes for conversation between them. But, unknown to them, this night is destined to be like no other, when the chat will flow as easily as the liquor and truths will come flooding out, which, for all the years of friendship, have never been shared before. Conor McPherson's much-performed play is, in some ways, the antithesis of theatre. It turns its back on conventions of plot and structure to present, quite simply, a night in the pub. Events begin with the arrival into the empty bar of Lalor Roddy's kind, curmudgeonly Jack, who helps himself to a drink and counts his money carefully into the till. He is joined by James Doran's affable Brendan, a younger man whose resigned demeanour hints at life passing him by. The door opens to admit Miche Doherty's sweet-natured, innocent Jim, who lives with his elderly mother in a state of alcohol-induced contentment. They joke about the imminent arrival of the year's influx of German visitors, who will provide interest and curiosity. But there will be another new arrival before the night is out. Valerie, an attractive woman from Dublin (Paula McFetridge), has come to live in the village and is being taken around the tourist trail by the local boy-made-good, David Heap's swaggering, big talking Finbar.

In an effort to impress and welcome the newcomer, tongues are loosened and tall tales are swopped, feeding and overflowing, one from the other, like the waters of the town weir, whose construction remains one of the major sources of pride in this isolated Leitrim community. Director Fiona Buffini has crafted a wonderfully cohesive evening of storytelling from a perfectly matched ensemble of actors. The phrasing and authenticity of accents, the shifting dynamic of relationships and the sincerity of the playing wraps persuasively around the mounting tension of McPherson's writing. As tales of fairies, ghosts and graveyard hauntings give way to revelations of terrible, real life tragedies, Fiona Watt's nicotine-stained set, subtly illuminated by Tina McHugh's fading and rising lighting, closes in, throwing its arms around this company of victims, offering solace and healing. This is a vintage Lyric production to cheer and cherish.

Jane Coyle

The Weir is at the Lyric Theatre until February 28th. Box office tel: Belfast 90381081.

Lloyd Cole

Whelans Dublin

It's been a while since the words "Lloyd Cole" and "pop star" cropped up in the same sentence. In fact, few singers have vanished off the radar so emphatically as the one-time king of observational rock. In the mid-1980s Cole notched up a string of top 10 hits; today most of us would be hard pressed to name one or two of them. Gone, nearly forgotten - you wonder why he carries on.

Happily, Cole isn't in the least bitter at having fetched up in pop's twilight zone. Now resident in the United States, he contentedly puts out the occasional album and performs whenever the whim takes him, playing to a small but fiercely loyal core of diehards. There are worse ways to spend middle age.

On his new tour, Cole - paunchier than you remember but still every inch the urban sophisticate - gives his back catalogue an acoustic face-lift. This is to take a terrible gamble with your material. Stripping a song to its essence is like forcing it to stand naked before the world, every bulge and blemish exposed. You are all but inviting an audience to point and laugh.

However, Cole's confidence in his music is well placed. Two decades on, the hits retain their sparkle. The breadth of literary and cinematic references crammed into Rattlesnakes, for example, is astonishing; you didn't know whether to sing along or scribble notes. Ultimately, though, it was your heart rather than your head that Cole won over: the devastating chorus of Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? would turn granite mushy.

Inevitably, there was a foray into Cole's recent work. As any fan of a once-popular artist banished to "where are they now?" status knows, such interludes are often the perfect excuse to nip to the loo. At best the current stuff comes off like a soulless re-tread of old glories, at worst an embittered repudiation of the performer's salad days.

It was a pitfall which Cole deftly side-stepped. While bereft of the slinky melodies and killer hooks of yore, cuts from 2003's Music in a Foreign Language sounded wistful and affecting. Here was a singer determined to move on, although many devotees would settle for a life-time of Rattlesnakes pastiches. You left tempted to declare Cole back in business. But of course the truth is he had never really gone away to begin with.

Ed Power

Croon

Various venues, Cork City

Just as the audience for Croon is invited to engage directly and freely with the elements of this collaboration between Johnny Hanrahan of Meridian Theatre and Daphne Wright of the National Sculpture Factory, so the willing audience may indulge the same amount of interpretative freedom. From an evocation of the crooner phenomenon at the plushly-carpeted Douglas Vance Room in the Metropole Hotel where Jack Healy latches onto an old microphone while a choir (directed by Nicole Panizza) harmonises a Tom Moore melody from a bathysphere, to the suspended pillars of the Everyman backstage boards, themes come and go as if energised by random allusions, make of them what we will. The connective tissue of narrative here is both too enigmatic and too long to offer cohesion. Cormac O'Connor's sound thuds with industrial doom and Cindy Cummings enacts a cycle of preparation for the coming of A Man. As the scene is enveloped in a nuclear chill, it's a case of take your metaphoric pick - Beckett or the Bible. This impressive episode sends the audience back to the Everyman Palace where Jan Dierderen careers on stilts through a temple-door setting of pillars: he touches the columns and they move; for moments the cataclysmic soundtrack and Lucy Carter's lighting design send shock-waves of Samson-like possibilities. Deliberate or not, there is something very powerful about the notion of the temple tottering. Wright's structural work is visionary, she handles her materials with confidence and flair and provokes sensations both of recognition and uncertainty. Although earlier Beckett doesn't just spring to mind but batters down and tramples all over the imagery, here the script is a litany of Proverbs - meanings at your own discretion. So while we're still waiting for The Man - here called Baxter - I think too of where we began and of Douglas Vance, the ebullient former manager of the hotel on which he stamped his personality: perhaps this is what our promenade is all about - connecting.

Mary Leland