A look at what is happening in the world of the arts this morning.
Denis Leary and Friends
The Point, Dublin
Bafflingly huge, utterly characterless and a complete sell-out, the Point Depot may seem an atrocious venue for comedy, but it suits Denis Leary perfectly. The comedian/actor has always been a stand-up for the masses. From splenetic rants on MTV to a career largely defined by his use of the word "asshole", Leary is the patron saint of anybody who's ever been stuck in traffic, or wanted to shoot their boss. In short, his is the comedy of impotence.
His appearance at the Bulmer's Comedy Festival, however, was the comedy of laziness. "Denis Leary and Friends," he explained, offers the platform of his radiant celebrity to two comedians the audience had not paid to see. How magnanimous.
This also allowed Leary to concoct about 15 minutes of transcendentally meagre new material (Americans are fat! Homosexuals are gay! Women are contemptible! A routine that, astonishingly, required prompt cards). Let's not dwell on the accomplished misogynist, but lousy comedian Patrice O Neil.
Suffice it to say that his comic crescendo encourages women to imagine their sex organs mutilated, before his punchline: "How would you keep your man?"
It is near miraculous then that Dane Cook, the inspired and unquestioned star of the night, can still unearth laughs from the depleted strip-mine of American comedy. Cook may begin with violence, toilets and sex, but his imagination moves him further.
More than sex, he knows, "any guy here would rather be part of a heist". And more than that, "any guy would love to own a monkey".
Sadly, Leary must return to cash in his last chips of dignity, his final words instructing us to buy his forthcoming Christmas single. Denis Leary fans, even you deserve better.
Peter Crawley
Roses and Morphine
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
Memory is similar to history, wholly shaped by the way in which it is told, the person who is relating it, the prevailing circumstances in which it is summoned up.
Some memories are for treasuring and cherishing, others are best filed away out of sight and out of time. In writer/director Liz Tomlin's Roses and Morphine, Sheffield company Point Blank offered up a beautifully presented, pleasantly puzzling hour of converging and conflicting recollection. A wise librarian with a soothing voice and face is the keeper of countless memories, randomly catalogued and arranged in an ever-shifting maze of gleaming wooden boxes.
In turn a boy and a girl visit her archive, in search of the events surrounding an incident which has shaped their existence. It may be the same event, but each remembers it quite differently. Was it all about an escape from the cruelty and exploitation of a travelling circus and refuge in a candy-coated refuge in a forest, or was it something more mundane and sinister? Are they the babes in the wood or a pair of natural born killers?
The librarian (Jenny Ayres) is their guide and mentor, maintaining an air of gentle but firm objectivity throughout their ultimately fruitless quest.
In this beguiling ensemble piece Ayres, Chris Anstey and Emily Bignell fit neatly together, seamlessly combining lyrical text, intriguing visual effects and expressive physical performance.
The programme contains some rather pretentious guff about relativism and meaningful opposition to historical injustice, none of which is of any help in getting to grips with this pleasingly quizzical dramatic conundrum, a cautionary tale of what can happen when we go in search of "truth".
Jane Coyle
Daejin Kim, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Glazunov - The Seasons (exc).
Chopin - Piano Concerto no 2. Shostakovich - Symphony no 1.
The RTÉ NSO launched confidently into their Shostakovich cycle last Friday, balancing the first symphony, written when the Russian master was still in his teens, against two works imaginatively associated with it.
They began with what is probably the best known work of Alexander Glazunov, one of Shostakovich's teachers at the St Petersburg Conservatory.
The ballet scene, Autumn, contrasts frenzied bacchanalia with reflective nostalgia, and conductor Gerhard Markson made the most of these abruptly changing moods.
Next came a student essay less radical than Shostakovich's but in the same key: Chopin's F-minor piano concerto. Here, rough edges of callow orchestration were gently smoothed off, and Markson shaped an accompaniment that was appropriately focused, weighty, or transparent, and that remained in close sympathy with the sophisticated intentions of Korean soloist Daejin Kim.
His playing had all the clarity, delicacy, and effortless virtuosity that mark the most cultivated breed of Chopin interpreters.
Yet, even though both he and Markson seemed intent on the same, goal-directed reading of the piece, they didn't entirely rescue it from a certain aimlessness.
Few composers can have made such an assured start to their career as Shostakovich did with his first symphony of 1926, and Friday's performance made the reasons for this abundantly clear.
There was a keen sense of the composer's youthful iconoclasm, which, though apparently directed towards the decadent musical style of Glazunov's generation, nonetheless points the way to the bitter invective of maturer Shostakovich.
Technically, too, and especially in the helter-skelter finale, it was an account that augured well for the ensuing 14 symphonies, an enticing strand running through the NSO's current and next concert seasons.
Andrew Johnstone
Celtic Connections
The Coach House,
Dublin Castle
The glue that holds this Celtic Connections tour together is a heady concoction that's two parts Irish and two parts Welsh.
Clare accordion player, Josephine Marsh has forged a fruitful working relationship with Tyrone mandolin player, Declan Corey. Welsh fiddle and melodeon duo, Gareth Westacott and Guto Dafis were invited to bring their eclectic repertoire of post-revivalist hymn tunes and songs to the mix. Instead, the foursome have replenished the musical stocks of both countries, mining precious nuggets amid the highly distinctive differences that both sunder and seal the two traditions. Marsh's style is so understated that you'd be forgiven for wondering whether she wanted to be heard at all. Throughout the first half of the performance, she tiptoed around the repertoire like a parent who is loath to wake a slumbering child.
Imaginatively pairing Jackie Daly's Sweeney's Reel with a Cape Breton reel, her implacable countenance took from the gaiety of the piece.
Corey's mandolin was agog at every unexpected twist in the road, his appetite for invention satisfied by the challenges wrought by Toreth.
Welsh music may have been shackled in the public imagin- ation to the phenomenon of male voice choirs, but Toreth discarded the rule book with a bone-rattling set that swung from playful polkas to a magnificent breed of slow air: its medieval loping gait challenging our preconceptions of melan-choly, with its canny mix of mournfulness and aching optimism.
The Girl From Meidrim and Draen lured the richest sound imaginable from Dafis's melodeon, its melody lines countered and buffeted by Westacott's fiddle.
Both Dafis and Westacott contributed fine songs. Dafis's Her Mother's Daughter and Westacott's Grandmother's Cottage showcased the wide berth at which Welsh traditional song now rests, its stories offering elegiac pen pictures of a time long past. Josephine Marsh jettisoned her nervousness in favour of some fine playing during the second half of the performance, particularly on O'Carolan's Receipt, a delicious lullaby of a tune, partnered perfectly with a Welsh harp tune, Pretty Little Gem.
Siobhán Long
