A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.
Melody, Temple Bar Information Centre
One of the nice things about the proliferation of relatively small theatre companies that bloom on the outskirts of the Dublin mainstream is the way they sometimes cross-fertilise. A fine example is Deirdre Kinahan's wryly entertaining new play, Melody, which will occupy three different spaces around Temple Bar during the rest of August. It had its origins in 2001, when Semper Fi took over the Project for 24 hours to devise, produce and present four plays from scratch. It was directed at the time by Veronica Coburn, joint artistic director of Barabbas. And it is presented now as a 50-minute lunchtime piece by Tall Tales Theatre Company, who presented Kinahan's more ambitious play, Knockashee, last year.
The result of its passage through all of these hands is that Melody has been fine-tuned to a point where it is note-perfect. It is still a slight, feel-good, undemanding piece, as easy to digest as a bowl of minestrone soup. But it still has some of the improvisational energy of its origins with Semper Fi, and is brilliantly served by Coburn's eye for clownish potential. The mixture of devil-may-care attitude and precise, detailed physical direction creates a very pleasant cocktail.
The structure of Melody is simple - a bachelor and a widow, neither in the first bloom of youth, meet on a park bench to listen to a summer lunchtime concert. They gradually overcome their awkwardness, fall in love and seem set for happiness until revelations about their mutual involvement in the sex industry threaten a bad ending. Are they doomed to unhappiness? Do IRA men really go bird-watching in the rainforests of Colombia? Kinahan handles the obvious plot with a delicate, bittersweet humour, and the courtship dance is nicely choreographed. More importantly, the script provides a comfortable platform for the skills of Coburn and the actors, Maureen Collender and Steve Blount. Between them, they invest the piece with a lovely vaudevillian touch of bitter-sweet absurdity. Blount, the big, awkward lump from the Department of the Marine, forms a perfect counterpoint to Collender's prim secretary, and together they blend the clumsiness and the fussiness into a sweetly funny array of embarrassments. Coburn bolsters this physical comedy with Chaplinesque routines involving cartons of orange juice and chopsticks, and Blount in particular revels in the fun. Hangdog and hapless, he seems to come, as Melody itself does, from of a silent movie. - Fintan O'Toole
Melody runs at Dublin's Temple Bar Information Centre until Aug 21, followed by Handel's Courtyard and then The Lab until Aug 27
Presidents of the United States of America, Temple Bar Music Centre
Historians still puzzle over the irony epidemic that swept the 20th century to a close. When Kurt Cobain died for grunge, how could Generation X then pogo through 1995 to novelty punk about brain tumours and canned fruit? The Presidents of the United States of America never made any sense.
The trio came from Seattle but left angst behind. Chris Ballew on "bassitar" and Dave Dederer on "guitbass" managed to wring a melody from their hybridised instruments despite having just five strings between them. Though they were buffeted between ironic appreciation and novelty value, like a leaf caught in an updraught, the Presidents were always more goofball than arch. Their success was surprising. Their brisk demise, in 1998, was not.
So how strange it is to find the reformed group arriving to a heaving, sweaty, hero's welcome. The Presidents stand in shirtsleeves and striped ties, the uniform of middle-management, and drink in the acclaim. "Thank you, goodnight!" calls Ballew turning to leave.
But seriously folks . . . tearing through Video Killed The Radio Star (ironic cover of an ironic classic) through the chunky riffs of a gently ironic Some Postman and into the ironically infectious cat lover anthem, Kitty, the Presidents leap with elan into the gap between intention and meaning.
Many jokes succeed (a perfect freeze during Highway Forever, 57 ½ giddy power chords pummelling Naked and Famous into Lump) while others do not (the world's smallest invisible harmonica). But the crunch of their pop-punk makes it easy for fans to shout along with their doggerel lyrics and general absurdum.
Squatting down on Ballew's command during a cover of Shout, bounding to Peaches or beaming ironically along with We Are Not Going to Make It (they did, you see), the crowd grinningly pledge full allegiance to the Presidents - and, ironically, they really seem to mean it. - Peter Crawley
Art, Everyman Palace, Cork
Yasmina Reza's play Art is almost too famous for its own good, but this production justifies the claims made for its acuity and resonance. Translated from the original French by Christopher Hampton - no mean playwright himself - it is a sharp, funny and ultimately compassionate study not so much of art as of the art of friendship, and is given a sharp, funny and ultimately compassionate reading here by director Pat Talbot.
Three long-time male friends find that their bonds of affection begin to shred under the influence of a painting bought by one of them in an act interpreted as cultural affectation. This sundering of their relationship reveals each personality but also exposes their mutual antipathies, long disguised by a habit of camaraderie.
They explore each others' pretensions only to discover that these pretensions have now become characteristics. Provoked by the purchase of a picture which is ostensibly meaningless, their demand for meaning challenges the self-deceptions in which they have colluded; as they search the picture for different shades of white they reach a level of argument in which, as one says, the voice of reason is intolerable.
Talbot's brisk approach gives all this conversation a subtle dramatic focus which suits both the play and the cast, all three of whom manage the transitions from comedy to introspection and, ultimately, pathos, with skill. Kieran Ahern's often ponderous style is lightened as Yvan, Dan Mullane's Marc carries the moral questioning with elegance, and Mark O'Regan offers a Serge whose apparently petulant self-defence hides a need for affirmation.
In a play of accumulations, it all adds up, as do Pat Murray's layered, terracotta set, Paul Denby's lighting, Eoghan Horgan's annunciatory music and Sinead Cuthbert's costuming. But Everyman must attend urgently to its auditorium: during a play running for an hour-and-a-half with no interval, the all-too-human needs of the audience caused an insupportable banging of seats. - Mary Leland
Runs until Aug 27
