Theatre: Soup or splendour?

Colin Murphy enjoys the simplicity of the lunchtime play at Bewley's Cafe Theatre before heading to André Previn's production of Tennessee Williams' Streetcar for the whole opera shebang.

Bewleys Café Theatre has succeeded in lowering the bar for professional theatre in Dublin. And that's a good thing. In Bewleys, the combination of a hearty broth and a grand bit of writing and acting regularly makes for a satisfying hour, where the same play, staged in one of the more established theatres, with all the palaver of getting into town in the evening, might be less agreeable.

Colin Thornton's Moonlight Mickeys is whimsical, clever, over-elaborate and occasionally very funny. It is staged with typical panache by Drogheda's Calipo theatre company, directed by Darren Thornton. It's not the finished work of an accomplished playwright, but it's short and entertaining, and likely an instructive outing for a writer early in his career.

The "Moonlight Mickeys" are two brothers, Big Mickey and Little Mickey, who get caught up in the civil war on the Irregulars side, are imprisoned by the Free Staters and plan a jailbreak. Two actors play the brothers and the assortment of grotesques with whom they come in contact. The onstage action is intercut with silent movie footage projected on the back wall, beautifully shot for the play, showing the parallel story of Big Mickey's fiancée. This is a very clever (and simple) idea, wonderfully executed. (There is too much film in Irish theatre these days but at least Calipo know how to use it.)

Ultimately, the freewheeling comedy in Thornton's script doesn't sit easily within the confines of a play (it's more comic sketch material) but the performances – by Peter Daly, Colin O'Donoghue and Janet Moran – are nicely pitched and the play rollicks along entertainingly. And the soup is yum.

Opera Ireland are at the extreme other end of the scale – so much so, as Tom McGurk remarked interviewing André Previn recently, that most people are probably scared of going to the opera. The tuxedos and ticket prices are a little off-putting, but no art form should be the preserve of a clique. So while some of the comrades show their solidarity by camping at Corrib, we deliberately dressed down for the Gaiety.

And this is an opera of one of America's greatest plays: Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. That is a problem for much of the first two acts. Lines written to be traded at speed are sung with excruciating languor so that they sound banal, or simply daft.

The play is infused with the jazz of New Orleans – respecting this, writes André Previn in a programme note, would be like introducing a balalaika into an opera set in St Petersburg. The converse of Previn's argument is also valid: if the jazz is integral to the play, than perhaps the play is incompatible with opera. Both the jazz and the spoken accent give the play its location, and with these diminished, the play is somewhat disconnected. And while Orla Boylan's voice is captivating, her Blanche DuBois conveys neither the fragility nor sexual hunger of Tennessee Williams's character.

However, the production gradually leaves these problems behind. Even truncated (for the script is heavily edited for the libretto) and sung, Williams's lines are extraordinary and, by the end, the sheer quality of the opera and the performance has resolved earlier dilemmas about the point of adapting Williams' play. This is not Tennessee Williams' Streetcar, it is André Previn's: a very different beast, but it has its own beauty. There's no soup included, but it has to be said: the bar is raised high.