COLIN DUNNE

25/2/09, Barbican Pit.

1 hr, no interval. One man show, Out of Time, by the Irish dancer.

We'd seen him in a Fabulous Beast production at the Pit last year: a spectacular dancer with a gift for self-parody and a witty spoken delivery.

This one-man show was almost exclusively dance. It was sweaty: he changed his clothes two or three times. And sometimes it was breathtaking. He put microphones on his shoes to create a rhythm as infectious as Fred Astaire, and danced along to an audio track which was either his own pre-recorded steps or perhaps a delayed echo of his actual steps. Either way it created highly intricate sound patterns (full marks to Fionan de Bana, who designed and operated the sound). At other times he slowed the steps right down, deconstructing the dance.

The only speech came in a routine called "rashers and sausages", the mnemonic dancers use to remember the rhythm of one particular Irish dance, which Dunne used as the jumping off point for a wonderful, rather surreal verbal riff that was genuinely funny as well as mirroring the relentless overlapping patterns of Irish dance.

Highlights: the video of traditional dancers, several filmed in television studios in the 1980s, with audiences in a circle watching rapt as dancers in beautiful shiny brogues and three-piece suits went through their dazzling paces, arms at their sides, faces set in a mask of concentration. There was one (apparently silent) film of four men dancing in a row and taking solos, filmed at some agricultural event, wearing tweed suits and in one case plus-fours.

The best clip was of a ten-year old Dunne in brown kilt on Blue Peter, showng why he'd won some Irish dancing trophy. At the end he was interviewed, and spoke up smartly if a little breathlessly in a perfect Brummie accent, for that was where he came from. Today the adult Colin Dunne speaks a mid-Atlantic Irish-American English which slips and slides often (though with considerably less discipline than his feet).

On You Tube I found videos of him dancing in Riverdance, of which hewas clearky a star. Yet this show makes no mention f that except elliptically, in a line about some of the finest Irish dancerrs selling out. I thought he was talking about Flatley. Maybe he was talking about himself.
He's technically astonishing and I couldn't fault the staging, but I didn't quite see the point. Perhaps more narrative and context would have helped, or no narrative at all, just a virtuoso display and even more sweat-soaked shirts.

THE PITMEN PAINTERS

30/1/09, National (Lyttelton).

Very good. Thankfully lived up to expectations, having been exceedingly well reviewed on its original appearance in the Cottesloe last year. It's a transfer with the original cast, none of whom I'd heard of, from Live Theatre in Newcastle which commissioned the play from Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall.

The true story of the Durham miners from Ashington who came together for art appreciation classes under the auspices of the Workers' Educational Association in the 1930s; were lucky enough to have as their tutor Robert Lyon, who later became principal of Edinburgh College of Art, and decided they should "learn by doing"; and who turned out to have real talent, continuing to paint long after Lyon had moved on (the last one died in the 1990s).

They meet in a hut, display their work on easels, comment and criticise. We see the pictures projected onto screens hanging in front of the back wall -- not only their pictures, but other work with which they come into contact as their fame starts to spread and they're picked up by the cognoscenti, taken on a trip to London (Lyon travelling first class, the rest of them third) and encounter the work of people like Ben Nicholson and an exhibition of Chinese painting.

It started strongly: one reviewer complained there were too many easy jokes, but I'm a sucker for easy jokes. The comedy was rooted partly in class distinctions: Lyon's middle class values, the miners' Geordie dialect, both baffling to the other. It partly sprang from character: the organiser of the class is a petty rulebook bureaucrat. It partly came from politics: one young lad is unemployed and the organiser tries to exclude him on the grounds that the class is run by the Workers' Educational Association, and he's not a worker; the token Marxist insists he stay, arguing it's not his fault he's a victim of capitalism's cyclical nature - that got a big laugh from an audience staring down the barrel of the credit crunch.

The more thoughtful second half was punctuated by seasonal fusillades of coughing during the quieter scenes, which was a shame. The play asks what it means to be "an artist": one of the most talented of the group, Oliver Kilbourn, is offered the chance to escape the pit and become a full-time painter by a local Lady Bountiful; he eventually declines, because (I take it) accepting would mean cutting himself off from his subjects and his community, the source of his inspiration.

There's a nice scene when the group visits the exhibition of Chinese paintings. The miners are knocked out. Then the toffs, including Lyon, arrive; they are dismissive - they think it's formulaic, derivative. But by now the miners are confident of their own judgement. To Lyon's surprise they stick to their guns, arguing forcefully that this is folk art, just as what they do themselves is folk art.

Upstairs in the Lyttelton foyer they'd mounted an exhibition of the group's work, almost all (it turned out) by Kilbourn, though there were one or two by James Floyd, a truly naive painter who produced spectacularly colourful pictures of whippets and allotments and the other paraphernalia of life in a mining village, and a few by Harry Wilson.

Kilbourn's early stuff is reminiscent of Sickert. His paintings of life down the pit play with light and shadow, like his wartime paintings of blackouts and "dimouts". His later painting, full of sturdy figures who might have come out of a Stanley Spencer, include sequences devoted to women's work including washday. He seemed to my untutored eye a genuine talent, whose work is also a personal record of a vanished world. One of his paintings is below.