His language is rich and expressive, but he is never verbose His view of human existence is that “man is God’s mistake”. The Almighty took his eye off the ball for just one second and look what happened!Demons are creatures of myth, and a dybbuk is a spirit of a dead person that takes possession of a living body, but the production is also heavy with the weight of real history The playing space is a square surrounded by layers of books. In pools of light the actors create complete family histories; complete strangers get involved in bizarre happenings and accept responsibility for matters over which they have no control. It seems as though Jews are regarded as a family, with special responsibilities for each other, wherever in the world they might meet up. In New York their tattooed numbers from concentration camps are shown like a badge of a doomed secret society.The plots unfold in an exhibition of the art of storytelling. A story will end or simply collide with the next; each new tale starts cold and has to weave its own spell, and each has its own fascination. A mad woman calls at a flat for no other reason than that she came from the same region as the occupant.

The flat occupant gets abusive phonecalls from the woman’s husband and her mother, while the woman has an epileptic fit. A young man desperately tries to matchmake his mother to a stranger on a coach tour. Watching the play is like overhearing scandalous gossip on a train. These stories have an irresistible ring of truth.The fact that this awkward scenario works is due to the power of the acting and direction. I salute the ten actors involved and the director, Mike Alfreds, for a delicately balanced production.`Demons and Dybbuks’ is at the Northcott (01392 493493) until 21 March, prior to a national tour.. This is an adroit piece of revival-work by Andy Arnold’s Arches Theatre Company, their UK premiere of this decade-old Sebastian Barry drama coming between his Royal Court hit The Steward of Christendom, and his new play Our Lady of Sligo, currently in rehearsal at the National.

It’s a typically ambitious venture from a producing house that subsidises itself by doubling as a successful night-club venue, and the production imbues Barry’s joyously heart-tugging lyricism with the drama and emotional resonance it merits.
In a marvellously fluid blend of present action, flashback, reminiscence and apparitional dream-sequences, the play tells the story of elderly bachelor brothers Josey and Mick, living together on a remote hill farm on the Cork/ Kerry border – a meagre, 40-acre birthright too small to divide. Their mother having died when they were boys, leaving them to the untender care of their bitter, black-tempered father, they have spent their lives almost entirely apart from women, becoming to one another the closest to spouse and helpmeet each will ever know – while remaining exactly what they are, unschooled men cut from old traditional cloth, and with nary an eddy from any sexual undercurrents to trouble the waters between them.At once achingly elegiac and richly celebratory, Barry’s portrait of their relationship, and the lives and times that have shaped it, endows each character with a subtly distilled eloquence of voice, boldly poetic and heartfelt while never remotely overblown, thanks to its firmly-planted roots in Ireland’s musical colloquialisms. Whether in Josey’s hilariously extended bedtime prayer, soliciting individual blessings on virtually their entire complement – extant and departed – of friends, relatives, farm animals and worldly goods, or Mick’s almost unbearably poignant speculations about the unknown girl he might have married in America, had he been free to emigrate, writer and cast reve al the depths of profundity in these variously simple lives – lives untouched by books or luxuries, yet redolent with an ardent, unashamed love for nature’s diurnal panorama and graced with an overriding tenderness.Not that Barry paints any pastoral idyll; those aforementioned depths also include wells of unexpressed pain, regret and longing, much of it centred on the brothers’ half-articulated grief for the female comforts they’ve been denied, and the guilt-tinged loneliness and frustration that the other cannot assuage, but also piercingly glimpsed in the supporting roles of their parents and neighbouring acquaintances. It’s a testament equally to Barry’s script and Arnold’s production that these multiple dimensions are so eloquently realised, the dialogue gliding between exterior and interior realms with wonderful ease and vividness.While all eight players acquit themselves with distinction, Bill Hickey and Donncha Crowley’s central performances as Josey and Mick are nothing short of inspirational, though in the gentlest, unshowiest sense possible, making rhythm, gesture and silence count for as much as the words themselves, illuminating the power of their mutual compassion with an intensity that repeatedly pricks the eyes and prompts a smile at one and the same moment.Until 21 March (0141 221 4001), then at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 25-29 March (0131 228 1404)Sue Wilson. That the noted Estonian composer and reclusive mystic Arvo Part is a big fan of the Righteous Brothers was previously unknown, but in the second of two Part-works arranged for piano and violin the influence of “Unchained Melody” was plain to hear. All it lacked was a boozy tenor, going, “Oh, my lurve …” Perhaps it was the recent hit version by the blokes from Soldier, Soldier on TV that had first captivated Part, via satellite relays of UK Gold. Fitkin – once a minimalist, but now sounding more maximal with every new piece – is one of the most important of our younger composers, and both the programme and the method of presentation for his own ensemble seemed designed to get away from received notions of classical music as stuffy or un-cool.

The group’s avoidance of the “informal” classical muso’s uniform of Paisley waistcoats was a plus (they were all in black, natch), but there were minuses, too: no programme-notes, musicians introduced by their first names only, and an amplified sound for the sextet that would be wearyingly treble-heavy even for a fan of jangly guitar bands.
As well as the Part, there were references to another of minimalism’s big cheeses, Steve Reich, with a two-man version of that old favourite “Clapping Music”, and the totemic presence on stage of a marimba. Fitkin’s own music came across as often ingratiatingly nice: well-mannered meditations for two clarinets, violin, cello, piano and tuned-percussion, delivered with a sprightly gait almost as French as Poulenc. Only in the final and notably longer than usual piece, “Ironic”, described by the composer as “a bit of a monster”, did the music really challenge. “Ironic”, however, demanded more of his listeners, and his group, than they may be able to take without compromising the easy, congenial air of this performance.Phil Johnson. Classical music:

Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn
Royal Festival Hall, LondonExpectations for an authentically “Beethovenian” experience from the 101-year-old Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn were disappointed on Sunday afternoon by a pretty unmemorable last leg of the orchestra’s current tour. The band itself produces a warm body of tone, with brass and woodwinds stealing a qualitative lead over the strings. The concert opened to a fairly vigorous account of the Egmont Overture, though the principal conductor, Marc Soustrot, had nothing to say about the piece that hasn’t been better said countless times before.

After Egmont we heard a fitfully successful Violin Concerto, where the soloist was Raphael Oleg, 1986 winner of the Tchaikovsky competition. The Violin Concerto is a sticky interpretative hurdle: play it too broadly, or with excessive reverence, and it sounds repetitive and uneventful; play it too fast, and the musical point tends to lose focus. The trick is to balance emotion and architecture, spirit and spirituality; and although Oleg could – and sometimes did – draw a warm thread of tone from his bow (his account of the slow movement’s glorious central melody was indeed ravishing), he invariably sounded either impatient, over-intense or indifferent.True, an intrusive fit of audience coughing rather spoiled the Larghetto’s opening measures, but most of the problems harked back to an uninvolving first movement, where soloist and orchestra seemed oddly incompatible.The last “official” item was an energetic but untidy performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where Soustrot’s first movement fluctuated between genuine brio and banal bombast and the noble slow movement passed by like a tired processional. The Scherzo’s blustery trio was less than pristine and the explosive transition into the finale lacked tension. Elsewhere, blurred articulation and over-hasty climaxes meant that the sum effect was undistinguished. The orchestra from Beethoven’s home town might at least have graced us with key repeats in the Scherzo and Finale; but, no, this was just another routine Beethoven Fifth. Fortunately, an encore offered us a glimpse of Soustrot’s potential.A movement from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin will have struck some listeners as a bizarre follow-up to Beethoven’s Fifth, but the Minuet was graced by sensitive phrasing and attractive woodwind playing – and explained the presence of a harp, which, till then, no one had had reason to play..