Same Same But Different at the Project Arts Centre is reviewed by Sara Keating,Alabama 3 at Tripod in Dublin is reviewed by Laurence Mackinand Summer Chamber Classics - Dresden NCH, in Dublin is reviewed by Michael Dervan
Same Same But Different
Project Arts Centre
What would you do if you were the last person on earth, is the question posed by Locus Theatre Company's inspiring production Same Same But Different. As three female performers emerge from the audience, the threshold between worlds is immediately broken. This is a performance about the borders between life and death, the rituals by which we separate them, and the capacity of the human will for survival.
The world has been decimated by a deadly plague, and these three women are the last people on earth. At the beginning of the performance, the stage is almost bare, but for a pair of discs stacked one on top of each other like the altar of an ancient temple.
The women move towards it, struggling against each other, as if existence itself is a competition and the world has room for only one soul. However, life as they remember it is chaotic, and soon Marcus Costello's set is littered with the mess of memories and the muddle of grief. As the scenes develop, the three performers enact various post-apocalyptic possibilities.
Will the last person on earth be an anarchist destroying the symbols of authority now authority no longer holds any sway? Or will she be paralysed, a paranoiac, unable to draw breath for fear that she will die? Will she be stoic, embracing death as a natural end? Will she be suicidal, and unable to wait for the inevitable? Or will she dress herself in her finest clothes and drink champagne and toast life's grand finale?
Director Caroline McSweeney exercises tight control over the performance piece, devised by the director alongside the dexterous and charming actors, Katrine Bøegh Nielsen, Ditte Marie Laumann and Tora Balslev Jespersen. Denis Clohessy's sinister sound design echoes Marcus Costello's lighting design, which veers ominously between the creepy and comforting as the rituals being enacted become more and more carnivalesque.
Same Same But Different is an inventive, clever, and witty piece of physical theatre. But more than that, it is an enlightened understanding of death as a rite of passage similar to birth. This life. The afterlife. Same. Same, but different.
Runs until tomorrow
Alabama 3
Tripod, Dublin
Don't be fooled by the name: there are more than three people in Alabama 3, and the founding members hail from the less than swamp-shacked suburb of Brixton.
Many years ago, Rob Spragg and Jake Black decided to don Persil-white suits, speak only in American accents and conquer the world with a mixture of the US's finest musical heritage forced into a shotgun wedding with some keen-edged acid synth sensibilities.
Tonight, they take to the stage with typical aplomb - eight musicians, resplendent in white cowboy suits, matching hats, sunglasses, and with rhinestones and sequins duly polished. Three dancers that wouldn't look out of place in a Wild West brothel complete the onstage entourage. Rob Spragg, aka Larry Love, initially holds all the attention, working his long limbs and lanky frame around the microphone and inciting the crowd to testify.
When Black, or the Very Rev Dr D Wayne Love to his followers, makes his appearance, he looks every inch the deep-fried southern Baptist preacher, his hair slicked back over a perspiring forehead, his belly swollen from too much good living, and an accent that ought to be cooling itself somewhere on a Georgia verandah.
The Rev sermonises between songs, but thanks to the sound and his somewhat reeling accent, it's hard to follow. If he were to produce asps and demand that they all nibble on our necks to prove that the Lord would protect us, it wouldn't seem out of place. And the congregation loves it.
Tripod's usually excellent sound was less than perfect. Although the band has no bass player on stage, the sound is low-end heavy, with the keyboards and bass-line backing tracks swamping out much of the sweet country guitar licks. Alabama 3's sound certainly defies genres or easy classification. However, the rhythms in the tracks vary little and the pacing is largely standard, which means a lack of dynamic in the set as a whole.
For all that, many of the tracks have an anthemic quality that keeps the crowd bouncing and rolling for the duration. Woke Up This Morning, the theme tune from you know what, is dispensed with early enough, and is lapped up by a crowd still raw from the demise of everyone's favourite gangster family. R.E.H.A.B. and Bulletproof are relentless, and new track Lockdown, from their new album, MOR, keeps the punters happy, and will no doubt go some way to keeping these Alabama boys in Stetsons for some time.
Summer Chamber Classics - Dresden
NCH, Dublin
Schumann- Stücke im Volkston. Lieder für die Jugend Op 79 (exc). Wagner- Wesendonk Lieder. Shostakovich- Quartet No 8
The programme pianist Finghin Collins chose for the last of the Summer Chamber Classics series he programmed looked rather strange on paper and sounded even stranger in performance.
The works he chose by Robert Schumann were of that minor kind which call for maximum care in performance. Fünf Stücke im Volkston (Five Pieces in folk manner) for cello and piano are written in a disarmingly direct style that needs spot-on characterisation if the music is not to sound either unduly repetitive or thin. Collins and cellist Thomas Carroll didn't quite seem to have the measure of the music, and although they took the lead and deferred as required, the balance between the two instruments never quite worked.
Alison Browner's sounded rather earnest and schoolmistressy for my taste in a selection of Schumann's Lieder für die Jugend (Songs for the young). She made the very act of singing sound rather difficult and laboured.
In Wagner's Wesendonk Lieder, too, it was hard to enjoy the clear evidence of her familiar musical intelligence and artistry through the barriers created by a lack of intonational certainty. And it was disappointing that an institution such as the National Concert Hall should neglect to provide either texts or translations of the songs being sung.
Collins's accompaniments, however, were at all times caring and sensitive.
The Carducci Quartet closed the evening with a performance of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, written "In memory of the victims of fascism and war" after a visit to Dresden in 1960. The quartet gave the music some extra touches of romantic gloss, and in the process softened some of the piece's essential bleakness.
On the other hand, their playing gave full expression to the work's outbursts of vehemence.
