The Irish Timesreviews The Ghosts of Versailles at Wexford Opera House and One is Not a Number, Cork and Green Day in Dublin

Wexford Festival Opera: The Ghosts of Versailles Wexford Opera House

John Corigliano— The Ghosts of Versailles

Wexford Festival Chorus and Orchestra/Christie

Laurence Sterne would probably have liked the idea of The Ghosts of Versailles. It's an opera full of Tristram Shandy-esque interventions and sidesteps into the impossible. It's all a matter of worlds within worlds and concocting unlikely crossovers that take the idea of a play within a play that extra mile or three.

The ghosts of the title include Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette.

Beaumarchais can not only write and stage an opera in this ghost world, and change it as it unfolds before our eyes, he can enter into its reality and become a character in it. On top of all of this, he can promise to change the course of history as he and we have known it.

So Beaumarchais, in William M Hoffman's clever libretto (leaping all over the place from Beaumarchais' La Mère Coupable), not only gets to fall in love with Marie Antoinette (whose life he hopes to preserve in his re-writing of history), he also gets to mingle with Figaro, Susanna and Almaviva and a host of other characters known from his plays and their treatment as operas by Mozart and Rossini.

The operatic past is almost perpetually present in Corigliano's music. The Ghosts of Versaillesis a referential but not reverential score, with the dizzying zaniness of a Tom and Jerry chase. It heaps on a pile of references that opera-lovers will delight in identifying and leaps from musical style to musical style with gayest abandon. It's shamelessly colourful and sentimental, and borrows stock gestures from so many sources across the centuries that the description eclectic seems inadequate.

The jokeyness of the musical approach is consistent and extreme. When Marie Antoinette finally makes an operatically heartfelt declaration of love for Beaumarchais, it’s rudely followed by some blatant pastiche. You weren’t taken in by that, were you, the composer seems to be saying.

The Ghosts of Versailleswas premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1991 and made it to Europe for a premiere in Hannover five years later. It was conceived for the oversize space of the Met and that company's equally deep pockets.

Wexford Festival Opera’s production, which opened the festival on Wednesday, was the European premiere of a newly revised version, scaled down in ways that should enable a greater number of opera houses to accommodate it.

James Robinson’s alert and highly entertaining production, with sets by Allen Moyer placing the action in and around a theatre and stylish costumes by James Schuette, was first presented by Opera Theatre of St Louis last June. It’s both elegant and manic and, with elaborate videos by Wendall Harrington and exceptionally subtle lighting by Paul Palazzo, actually manages to be both busy and clear, so that every moment of the complex action makes sense.

The cast is an extremely strong one, with Laura Vlasek Nolen's pastiche Turkish Samira and Maria Kanyova's Marie Antoinette clear audience favourites. The playing of the Wexford Festival Orchestra under Michael Christie was as brilliant and adaptable as the score demanded. Wexford Festival Opera runs until Sunday, November 1st MICHAEL DERVAN

One is Not a Number

The Granary Theatre, Cork

Throughout Gary Lydon's compelling performance in One is Not a Number, it is possible to sense the relish with which writer Billy Roche compiled this character.

In a script drawn from Roche's short story collection, Tales from Rainwater Pond, the single player reflects on his life in a seaside town where his club foot excludes him from all the boyish and then laddish activities for which he hungers.

In response to this exile, to the taunts that scar his childhood and to his brutish parents, Matty uses his victimhood as a weapon; he is cunning, observant, retentive of all he sees and hears and malicious to the core. The telling of this metamorphosis from child to demon is layered like a ziggurat.

Roche’s writing, even where Matty’s obsessive passion for a local girl, also an outsider, is stitched into the pattern, has an unsentimental fortitude. The subtlety of depiction is not sacrificed to possibilities of romance, and although the likelihood of the narrative stumbles with the introduction of a visiting surveyor and his relationship with Matty’s idealised love, the tension is twisted rather than diminished. Lydon is too seasoned a player to make his relish obvious.

Directed by Johnny Hanrahan of Meridian Productions, he reveals Matty bit by bit, exposing the contradictions and complexes, the desires sacrificed to survival and revenge in a personality for whom, as he says, “Cain is the boy I adore”. Winnowing his voice down to a thin, jovial sneer with both menace and longing lurking behind the words, his work here is faultless.

Design by Bernadette Roberts gives him a carapace of disintegrating duffle coat under which he shrugs from upturned boat to the looming shadows of Kath Geraghty's lighting, dragging his elevated boot around like a beached anchor. Until October 31st, then tours nationally to November 20th MARY LELAND

Green Day

The O2, Dublin

As Green Day’s lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, says himself, “boy, have we come a long way from playing in a small upstairs venue in Dublin”.

Indeed, they have. When Green Day played the Attic (above the now demolished White Horse pub in Dublin) in the early 1990s, few in attendance could have predicted that, almost 20 years later, they would be one of the most successful rock bands in the world.

Exciting, yes; strident punks, yes. But a globe-straddling, multi-million selling crossover punk/pop act on friendly terms with U2? Who in their right minds would have thought that?

Remarkably, the band members haven’t changed too much – contract the space of the O2 down to the size of a small or medium venue and you still have a punk band with a pocket-rocket frontman, some very fine punk/ pop songs, and an attitude that occasionally sizzles with spiky (if hardly threatening) anti-authoritarianism.

Green Day seem doused in conflict, though: how does any band remain true to its credible punk roots while simultaneously putting on a stadium show that will appeal to a mostly young and teenage audience?

Cue a mid-show pantomime section that shamefully dumbs down the politically charged, supremely effective material of 2004's American Idiotand this year's 21st Century Breakdown(which are easily two of the best albums of this decade).

Aside from the fact that such a waste of time and a display of nonsense (including far too many call-and-response episodes and cover version snippets) savaged any notions of this being a truly great rock gig, there were many high points dotted throughout.

The tough yet melodic music, for one, referenced classic punk rock touchstones from the Ramones to Stiff Little Fingers, while Armstrong’s sense of connection with the audience was simply terrific and astutely back to basics.

Was a full two hours and 20 minutes of Green Day too long? Frankly, yes.

Value for money doesn't always equate with the actual quality on offer, and if they had cut out the gristle, they would have been so much more persuasive. TONY CLAYTON-LEA