The Irish Timesreviewers sample stage fare of differing tones in Menopause: The Musicaland Conversations on a Homecoming.

Conversations on a Homecoming

Ramor Theatre, Cavan

Late in Tom Murphy's extraordinarily powerful and disarmingly subtle evisceration of a disenchanted Ireland, the ebb and flow of conversation leads to something pointed and direct. "God we're a glorious people alright," scoffs Tom, the intellectual cynic, played with a terse warmth by Don Wycherley. "Half of us gullible eejits, people like yourself, ready to believe in anything."

Andrew Bennett's Michael, the tortured romantic returned from America, admonishes the other half: "People like yourself, ready to believe in nothing." Set in the early 1970s (although refracting the mid-1980s, when it was written), Conversations on a Homecoming shows an Ireland curdled with grief following the assassination of John F Kennedy, embittered with the tyranny of the church and the absence of God, and directionless with the waning of socialism. What relevance can that situation hold for Ireland today? The answer, to judge by Nomad and Livin' Dred's absorbing and affecting production, is an enormous amount.

Watching this deceptively naturalistic play in which a drab Galway bar, caked with dust and broken dreams, is named, ironically, The White House, you are struck not so much by the play's prescience as its timelessness.

Friends cluster around their drinks and the night flows to a near- predictable, inebriated pattern, as Peter Daly's Junior traces it, the complimenting stage, the insulting stage and the singing stage.

Little happens between those stages, yet in their almost musical progression everything is revealed. There is an ocean of depth in Andrew Bennett's perfectly poised Michael, a failing, dissembling actor full of swagger and fidgets, yearning to recapture the progressive spirit of long ago. In Don Wycherly's Tom, whose hunched charisma and staccato delivery suggest he is impersonating the play's author (the dry wit of Tom's lines invites such an interpretation), lies the coiled frustration of stasis and defeat.

Between these characters is a shared desire for meaning, for untarnished ideals, for faith. And in an ever-more secularised, materialistic country (comically foreshadowed in the would-be cowboy Liam, excellently played by Michael Patric), that desire for spiritual succour in an agnostic age becomes more potent: even if the bottle is damaged we still want the wine.

Dense with ideas and allusions - the absent figure of JJ (who, like JFK or Christ, marshalled all to a progressive cause, then disappeared) is so dominant you feel he should be credited somewhere in the cast list - this is also a quintessential performance piece. Padraic McIntyre, an actor, a director and, it is now abundantly clear, an actor's director, has collaborated masterfully with an outstanding cast to plumb every thought and detail of Murphy's play. Drawing us into their sudden laughter, boozy unsteadiness, violent revelations and, ultimately, deeply moving, hopeful conclusion, this is, in the best sense, an intoxicating experience.

Until tomorrow, then tours

Peter Crawley

Menopause: The Musical

Tivoli, Dublin

"Outside it's nippy,/ but I'm hot and drippy./ I'm having a hot flush!" There was not a single empty seat in the Tivoli Theatre as Adèle King (Twink), Linda Martin, Una Crawford and Miquel Brown hit the stage with the absurdly fascinating and madly tasteless confection that is Menopause: The Musical. "To look less like a hippo/ I need a bit o' lippo/ on my thighs,/ oo-oo-oohhh." Menopause, billed as "a unique celebration of women on the brink of, in the middle of, or having survived, the change", puts new lyrics to melodies from hit songs of the 1960s and 1970s and, in the spirit of a raucous girls' night out, leaves no girdle unturned - it is all there, from midlife masturbation to vindaloo curries, from night sweats to stubborn cellulite, from endless dieting to endlessly critical mothers.

Currently running worldwide from Israel to Albuquerque, the show comes to Ireland complete with merchandising - including T-shirts, fridge magnets and "floozie coozies" (whatever they may be) - and it looks set to be a rip-roaring commercial success. The audience, almost exclusively women of a certain age, were, by the end of the night, on their feet and many, encouraged by the performers, joined a not-terribly-high-kicking line on the Tivoli stage, whooping it up in an almost tribal celebration of a kind of M&S womanhood.

This may not be everyone's cup of hot flush, but the well-miked performers are faultlessly slick, the music enjoyably familiar and the lyrics . . . well, the lyrics are hypnotically, bravely awful. Twink, in the spirit of Maureen Potter, had the audience rolling in the aisles - whether attempting to floss with a G-string or to restrain herself with a shocking pink vibrator. The dialogue, of which there is thankfully very little, could make a washing-powder ad seem Chekhovian and the little-black-dress finale was dismally predictable. But as a satisfied audience trailed out on to Francis Street, the chilly night was warmed by their appreciation.

Until Nov 10th

Hilary Fannin