A selection of arts reviews

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Patrick Lonergan

Irish audiences should be very familiar with Eugene O'Neill's great autobiographical "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood". It received one of its earliest English-language productions at the Abbey in 1959, and has been an important part of our repertoire ever since. Yet under the direction of Garry Hynes, the play seems unsettlingly new again - at times feeling as sharp and surprising as a sudden slap in the face.

James Cromwell is cast as the patriarch, James Tyrone. His moral core has been worn away by the endless repetition of roles: loving husband, matinee idol, stern disciplinarian.

Tyrone's obsessions mirror those of contemporary Ireland. His fear of poverty means that he invests in property while neglecting his family's needs - and his tragedy is that he could have been great but chose to become wealthy.

But this play is not just about Ireland, and this production is not simply about Cromwell: he, Marie Mullen, Aidan Kelly, and Michael Esper deliver one of the finest ensemble performances I've seen on an Irish stage in years. As the Tyrone family, they act not as four individuals but as one deeply dysfunctional unit: they display astonishing levels of skill in mirroring each other's gestures, and in echoing each other's rhythm and tone.

Hynes's direction demands that we observe the pantomime of rebellion and resignation that the family members perform silently in response to each other.

And, as Francis O'Connor's set makes clear, these characters are constantly performing: a doorway becomes a proscenium arch, a light bulb becomes a spotlight, and the portrait of Shakespeare is positioned centre stage, as if sitting in judgment over actors and audience. The production thus becomes a painful stripping away of layers of performance: a process that is painful and demanding but, in the end, extraordinarily beautiful.

At the Town Hall until Sept 29.  At Dublin Theatre Festival Oct 3-13

Goethe Institut

There was a Fringey, mischievous paradox between the venue's Georgian grace and the programme's experimental music for piano and electronics. Pianist David Adams - who took all comfortably but diligently in stride - was introduced as the "piano-wire technician".

The music was like a gentle but often bland introduction to the genre. Taped electronics were straightforward - hammering, drilling and other samples from a DIY project in George Higgs's Shelfless Sonata; an engine-like throb in Neil O'Connor's Close Your Field - while the perhaps style naif piano parts had an almost uniform simplicity. Linda Buckley's glacier-inspired Joklar was suitably icy.

We were told that Jelkub Grogleen was born to a radio technician in Antartica, his music "intercepted by chance as encrypted radio signals". Too good to be true? Regardless: the piece ascribed to him, involving three people plucking strings inside the piano, was the one that secured the audience's fullest attention. (One show only)

Michael Dungan

Back Loft

The stripped space of the Back Loft generates most of the atmosphere in this brief performance, in which light and shadow play leading roles. Somewhere between an installation and a dance-theatre piece, the staging by the Italian company Gruppo Nanou takes elements from film noir, with a nod to Bertolucci's The Conformist. With minimal dialogue and fragments of narrative, the emphasis is on imagery and mood.

Four men dressed in black and white circle the body of a young woman, their object of desire. Bare torchlight evokes interrogation scenes and a murder investigation, taking crime writer James Ellroy's memoir, My Dark Places, as a starting point. Short sequences of movement venture into the eroticised macabre, as voyeurism and fantasy overlap. And before you have a chance to mention David Lynch, it's over. Not given a chance to develop beyond these well-worn poses, it seems a prologue to something that never happens. (Ends tomorrow)

Helen Meany

Axis, Ballymun

Anyone with a love of theatre should get themselves to Ballymun tonight for the final performance of an extraordinary one-man production by Polish actor and writer Bartosz Porczyk.

Language is not a problem - the show is translated very efficiently by autocue titles over the stage and while certain nuances may not be apparent to a non-Polish audience, anyone can enjoy the innovative, literate and perceptive script, and the brilliant music of the eight onstage musicians.

The leash of the title refers to the constraints of love, authority, politics or religion. Exploring these themes through song or monologue, Porczyk's technique is highly impressive - he changes from an old man to a romantic fool, from a burglar to a glamorous and tender-hearted prostitute, with a minimum of props and costume. His voice, both singing and speaking, is equally adaptable. The standing ovation on opening night was well deserved. (Ends tonight)

Noeleen Dowling

Incarnat ****

Samuel Beckett Theatre

The truth hurts in Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças's Incarnat, where pain is equally corporeal and metaphorical. In the intense, provocative dance, eight steely performers face each other in a circle, united and strong, gaining momentum as they form kaleidoscopic patterns, stomping with rhythmic force.

As soon as they break that cohesion, chaos ensues, and each one's personal drama unfolds rather grotesquely. One at a time they release blood-curdling screams, self-inflicted wounds, violence, vomiting and mental and physical degeneration until the question naturally arises, "Why do I have to watch this?"

The answers are exactly Rodrigues' point as she toys with perceptions of death and violence, while pointing at an underlying truth: events like these happen daily, worldwide, often on our TV screens, and we watch with detachment.

Though the constant blood and pain may have been a bit too jarring for this reviewer, it authentically revealed the horrors humanity is capable of inflicting on itself.

(Ends tomorrow)

Christie Seaver

The Dublin Fringe Festival ends tomorrow. See www.fringefest.com or call 1850-374643