The notion that modern country music is nothing less than a commodified product is stamped through Keith Urban like a word through a stick of candy.
He's youngish, handsome, has long hair, a way with the ladies, and looks set to overtake the likes of Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Alan Jackson and others too old hat and numerous to mention.
From Australia - where he has been garlanded with awards from Perth to Sydney via Alice Springs - Urban's country rock packs a vacuous punch. It's an amiable if wholly generic mixture of archetypal modern Nashville sounds and rock filtered through the ordinariness of a Bob Seger or a Bryan Adams (with whom, tellingly, Urban has toured as support).
For all Urban's filched routines, though, the venue is stuffed to the rafters with country-lovin' fans - fists hit the air, whoops interweave with shouts, moustaches mingle with guitar licks, bottoms of all sizes shimmy and shake. Yet the sense that the audience consists of the same people who would give genuine country acts such as Gillian Welch or Caitlin Cary the cold shoulder is hard to dismiss.
Like his female counterpart, Shania Twain, Urban's country/pop is big on style but bereft of substance. Snatches of Dolly Parton's Jolene, Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll, and David Dundas's Jeans On get the crowd going through their rebel-yell motions even more. However, using the general rule of thumb that you can figure out an artist by their cover versions, we can unscientifically state that what we have here is a clued-in guy who's a little bit country, a little bit rock'n'roll, and a whole lot dire. - Tony Clayton-Lea
The Cut - Teachers Club, Dublin
Tara Maria Lovett's new play begins as a whimsical love story and ends as a lurid melodrama. Its progression is structured into a number of short scenes, with past events interleaved with the present. The author can certainly write impressive prose, but does not create credible dialogue - the stuff of theatre - in this disappointing work.
Afric, a scholarship-educated woman aged 31, lives alone in a fishing village in the west. She falls for Joey, a likeable man who guts fish for a living. They marry, and she later learns that he already had a cancer from which he is dying. She cares for him up to the improbable ending, and lives on with her memories.
Before-and-after scenes alternate, with the couple moving into an intimate relationship, and with the illness taking over their lives. Her wedding present to him is a samurai sword - he has likened himself to a Japanese warrior - which is to play a part in his demise. Hara-kiri seems unlikely, given his terminally weakened state, but Afric seems to be disposing of body organs after he has died offstage.
She speaks in torrents, the kind of verbal cascades for which the word "logorrhoea" was coined, frequently incorporating jarring purple passages.
Noni Stapleton does well to mine a sturdy character from such extravagant material, and succeeds in making her relationship with Joey into a plausible attraction of opposites. Charlie Hughes, with relatively little to say, offers a well-rounded personality, although it is difficult to follow the rationale of his futile battle against cancer.
Together, the two actors, directed by Ann Russell for Whirligig Theatre Company, rescue some scenes from what could easily have been banality, but they are unable to do as much for the play as a whole. - Gerry Colgan
Runs to Oct 22
