Theatre: Saints above, the circus has come to town

Saints and Singing;Rebellion

Belfast Festival

You rather expect a Robert Wilson work to have a certain poetic obscurity, but his faintly barmy 100-minute Saints and Singing, which transferred here last week from Berlin's Hebbel Theatre, seems utterly designed to please. Cruising into the Belfast Festival on a tidal wave of hype, this sequel of sorts to Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights sees Wilson once again knocking heads with composer Hans Peter Kuhn and a slew of young Italian and German actors.

The text is again by Gertrude Stein; her relentless streams of free-association wordplay are amplified by Wilson's own stage trickery and a feel for Learish absurdity.

Threaded through with the choral reprise of "Saints and Singing" - a jingle motif somewhere between Kurt Weill and the Nolan Sisters - Wilson/ Kuhn fashion their abstract, choreographed drama in cycles of prologues, landscapes, still lifes and portraits, according to an underlying structure that really need not concern anyone. Instead, just sit back and bear witness to a superb, flowing dream continuity of actions and interactions on the mostly bare stage, as the team lightly probe vague themes of alienation and relationships.

The shifting patterns of rhythms and routines, silences and stillness, were constantly punctuated by the groundswell of Kuhn's music from the live three-piece band, often complemented by instruments and singers among the actors themselves, both on and off stage.

There were moments of strange, stabbing beauty, such as the poisoned- cup Last Supper opening scene, that were sustained at a high, deadpan pitch; the pompous intensity often suddenly punctured by a wink or a plastered- on cheesy grin - or blown away by a slapstick explosion, such as the closing routine of bullfrogs hopping and ribbeting at the audience.

It was this constant clowning and, frankly, taking the piss, that gaves the piece the feel of a highbrow circus; one tot of about three, sitting near me, was lapping it up loudly. However, just sometimes, behind Kuhn's pleasurable pastiche of cabaret, ragtime, jazz and European folk traditions, the careering movements and scrappy comedy had all the coherence of a range of theatre games and well-worn devices; a set of modernist archetypes and dream-images of the theatre, simply rearranged in a new permutation - giving it the feel of stylised entertainment.

Elsewhere at the Festival, I had to don a separate set of aesthetic goggles for Rebellion, a musical re-enactment of the United Irishmen's Rebellion of 1798, as told by that peculiar legendary figure, Henry Joy McCracken, the Presbyterian merchant's son who was hanged after leading the ill-fated assault on Antrim Town.

Though it was mounted by Dock Ward, one of those big community ventures that have ballooned under the Festival banner in recent years, considerable professional resources had been deployed here in terms of musical direction, costumes, set and big, battle-happy lighting.

Ken Bourke's script owed much to Stewart Parker's Northern Star - just as the staging ideas owed a lot to the last Rough Magic production of that play. However, subtle this production was not - and that's not altogether a bad thing.

The result was something like a Celtified Lloyd Webber rebel musical (by the musical director Mark Dougherty), with director Paddy McCoey steering it all from congested history curricular dialogue to big clambake scenes with costume crowds dry-gulping foamy tankards; from the much-relished comedy of the salty-mouthed drunk to the stark martyrology of our hero, etched against the backdrop of Cave Hill.

For all the supposed inclusiveness of McCracken as a symbolic figure - a Presbyterian leader in a French-inspired revolution that united "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter" against the British Crown - there was no escaping the deep green hue of this show.

Heavily refracted through more recent history, the resonances were all there: martyrdom, the Republic, the oaths and proclamations towards Irish freedom, the sassy women taunting the redcoats, the house raids and arrests, the rebel ballads - let alone the final messages over McCracken's twitching corpse: "The struggle was worth it" and "The battle has only begun".

As one character remarked of the burgeoning secret societies of the time, "There are so many writers' and artists' groups in Belfast, it's more like a cultural, rather than a political revolution."

But since when has culture not been political - particularly in Belfast?