Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events

An Inspector Calls, Everyman Palace, Cork

As with several of JB Priestley's works, or at least those which have survived, An Inspector Calls is a mystery play masquerading as a social drama. The set designed by Jim Queally for this Everyman Theatre Company production is wonderfully solid with reassuring panelled walls, alcoves, sconces and carpets, all as fervently middle-class as self-made magnate Arthur Birling whose celebratory dinner party is interrupted by the eponymous visitor. It's 1912, and a time of peace and selective plenty beckons. And then the doorbell rings.

A policeman has come to question each member of the family about his or her relationship with a dead girl and although the oak veneer does not peel away from the walls under his scrutiny, it might as well do so, as this group of complacent people is denuded of assumptions about themselves. So far, so very good, for director Michael Twomey has wrung performances as solid as the set from his cast. Chief among these is Alf McCarthy as Birling, who - while sustaining admirably his version of a North of England accent although all around him are loyal to Received RADA - sets the tone of imperturbable self-satisfaction. Impeccably costumed by Sheila Healy, the players need just a little more naturalism in gesture and voice, just a little more reflection in delivery, to step from the reliable to the terrific, but the only disappointment in this production is that having established the social context it misses the evanescent, the way in which life can be revealed as a film rather than a fabric, porous rather than impenetrable. This is no fault of David Lumsden as Inspector Goole, whose acute reading achieves a coalition of presence and prophesy, policeman and phantom.

It's true that, written after the two world wars but portraying society just before the first of them, the play is over-burdened with its premonitions of global disaster; the inspector's business is not just to puncture the class-ridden customs of a particular time but to make the connection between conscience and consequences. But the theatrical conviction lies in the domestic tragedy and in the question left with the Birlings: did that girl die? Was that a police inspector, and did he call at all? And then the telephone rings. Mary Leland

Lott, Johnson, NCH, Dublin

Thursday's recital in The Irish TimesCelebrity Concert Series explored the theme of Fallen Women and Virtuous Wives. Soprano Felicity Lott and her pianist Graham Johnson ranged from Haydn and Mozart to Poulenc, Hahn and Noel Coward. Johnson, who founded The Songmakers' Almanac over three decades ago, is an astonishingly resourceful researcher and constructor of programmes.

Nothing seems too obscure to evade his attention. He devises programmes where you can always expect the unexpected. Thursday's bore all his fingerprints of juxtaposing the familiar and the rare, and the printed programme contained his informative notes.

At the end, though, this programme was interesting and provocative not only for what it included, but for what it left out.

All you have to do is turn things around the other way. Can you imagine anyone offering a full-length recital programme about men - Heroes who lost and won, say - without including a single piece by a male composer and managing just a single text by a man? The token woman represented by her creative work on Thursday was Edna St Vincent Millay, whose The return from town was set by Arthur Bliss in 1940.

Performances followed the bias in the choice of repertoire. Johnson is a colouristically resourceful pianist. In his company, Lott often sounded like a rationally neutral conduit, although her evident pleasure in the act of performance, and her savoir-faire in the physical presentation of a song often masked the interpretative plainness.

The evening strayed well off the normal programme path for song recitals, and into the area of musicals and cabaret. The more cabaret-like the music and the singing, the better things sounded, and, judging by the applause, the more the audience liked what they were hearing. Michael Dervan