Irish Timescritics give their verdict on recent art events

Macbeth at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway

This is the fifth Second Age production of Shakespeare's Macbeth in 10 years, its appearance timed (as always) to coincide with the Leaving Certificate curriculum. It certainly offers much that teachers will value: it will help students to visualise the play's action, will stimulate in-class debate and, aside from some unnecessary cuts, is generally faithful to the text. As theatre, however, it's ill-conceived, poorly produced and utterly uninspiring.

The problems start with David Shannon and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú, two usually excellent actors who seem directionless in the leading roles. There is little unity between movement and speech from either performer, and both struggle with tone and rhythm.

Shannon spends much of the play expressing his character's feelings not by acting but by shouting, while Ní Mhurchú audibly wheezes between many of her lines - though it's not clear whether this is from affectation or exhaustion.

The supporting cast, meanwhile, seem to have been immobilised from the neck down. They walk on stage, and stand awkwardly until they deliver their lines (often inaudibly), speaking as if they're still reading from the script. This creates the impression that they are not so much performing in a play as posing for a group photograph.

This depressing lack of subtlety and nuance is evident in Alan Stanford's other choices as director, particularly his interpretation of the text. One of the play's major features is its exploration of ambiguity and equivocation. Words have multiple meanings, characters have conflicting motivations, and the dividing line between the irrational and the supernatural is never clear. But everything here is stupefyingly literal, especially the presentation of the witches, who are given far too much agency in Macbeth's downfall.

Ultimately, this Macbeth feels like the theatrical equivalent of a grind school: it might help students to pass their exams, but it's unlikely to stimulate their imaginations, foster their creativity or further their education. Perhaps the average Leaving student doesn't want to be told that ambiguity can be positive, that there's always more than one "right answer" to a question. But I can't help feeling that they deserve much better.

Macbeth tours to the Everyman Palace, Cork, from next Tue to Fri and then to the Helix, Dublin, from mid-February to mid-March Patrick Lonergan

James Blunt at the RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin

James Blunt himself described it as a "cattle shed", with 6,000 people crowed into a venue reminiscent of the bad old days, when concerts were less than 10 a penny and punters were low on any promoter's priority list. Ironically, in this post-property boom era, the aircraft hangar of the RDS, betraying little of its Dublin 4 location, was little more than a holding pen (complete with tarmac flooring), bereft of comfort. It was an ill-judged setting for an audience of whom a surprising proportion looked likely to be more familiar with pension plans than Manolos.

Blunt peddles a line in saccharine warbling that has slain the masses with ease. He trades in cliche-ridden language that has nothing to do with subtlety or emotional insight. Opening with Give Me Some Love and Shine On, he reminded us that he does fragile and pretty better than anyone these days, and his lip-synching audience chewed up every moment with relish.

Faithfully tripping through his second CD, All The Lost Souls, stopping by I Really Want You and Annie, Blunt put in a workmanlike performance that was note-perfect and a faithful facsimile of the recording. He and his band seem to believe that what the punter needs is simply a duplicate of the disc they have at home, rather than any hint of a three-dimensional interpretation of that material.

Back to Bedlam came up for air too. Proudly boasting that You're Beautiful was the number-one wedding song (notwithstanding its subject matter, unrequited love), and that Goodbye My Lover (replete with its refrain, "I'm so hollow") was the number-one funeral song, Blunt bludgeoned each to death, eking every last drop of emotion from his anthemic albatrosses. I'll Take Everything introduced a welcome whiff of dissonance, the first hint that Blunt's backbone might be made of something other than jelly.

A cover of Supertramp's Breakfast in America thankfully served as a signpost to what might be possible: the song's high-octane delivery was countered by its pedestrian lyric, the antithesis of every doom-laden, Prozac-fuelled rhyming couplet from Blunt's own back-catalogue.

After a generous four-song encore, Blunt was home, done and dusted, with enough fodder to fill the soundtracks of countless nameless mid-afternoon TV series, should the CDs ever stop selling by the container-load. Siobhán Long

For the Love of Mrs Brown at the Olympia, Dublin

The Irish Mammy breaches the last taboo in For the Love of Mrs Brown, the latest episode in Brendan O'Carroll's popular multi-formed fiction based on the adventures of Agnes Brown and her ever-growing family.

This is the fourth instalment of the theatrical saga spawned by the success of O'Carroll's radio sketches, novels and DVDs. A self-deprecating programme note by the author jokes that the stage translation is designed to "eh, cash in". However, the Mrs Brown enterprise seems made for the theatre, from the pantomime quality of O'Carroll's performance as the eponymous heroine to the opportunity that theatre offers for improvisation.

In fact, O'Carroll's spontaneous asides are the strongest element of the show. These last-minute deviations from the script are designed to trip up and test the other actors, who manage to recover from their potential humiliation with various degrees of success. Fiona O'Carroll, as daughter-in-law Maria, copes best, every off-putting question thrown at her met with a shrug, a cheeky response and a stifled smile, while her father wipes his eyes with Mrs Brown's handkerchief, an essential prop that masks his own hysterics.

Unfortunately, the real script is not remotely as amusing. The adolescent toilet humour, laboured puns, visual simulations of erections and "the wheelbarrow position" are tired gags, over-played and repeated to deadening effect. When Mrs Brown is centre-stage - pining for a hunky sex slave on the internet - it is all fairly tolerable, but the supporting characters are so crudely drawn that their multiple entrances and exits serve only to facilitate gags in which the characters have little chance of distinguishing themselves even as mere fall-guys to the stand-up Aggie, let alone winning laughs of their own.

With the sliced-open sitcom set, the cheesy theme tune that punctuates the scenes, and the canned laughter from the audience, which reverberates on cue like a scarily authentic echo of Mrs Brown's own distinctive cackle, For the Love of Mrs Brown is a thoroughly unchallenging piece of popular entertainment. It is not much better than anything you'd find on TV these days. But it's actually not that much worse. Runs until Feb 9

Sara Keating