Irish Times writers review events at the Dublin Fringe Festival.
Casio Tone
The Ark, Temple Bar
About 10 minutes into the performance, my young companion leaned over and whispered, "It's like the Sims music", and this fascinating physical production for children fell into place.
It's always the kids who have the real, quick cop on things. Suzy Homemaker (Rita Rodriguez) lives a very precise life in a very precise, surgically pure box, just like a Sims character. Everything is in order, everything has its place, even her musical enjoyment. Until a mysterious parcel arrives and her world is disrupted irreparably.
Rodriguez's performance in this production by Portuguese company Real Pelágio was nothing short of superb. She was the essence of a human Sims: a pleasantly mechanical being that went about its business of cleaning (with brushes attached to her feet, sponges under either arm), opening post, ordering food in - and everything, when it had served its purpose, was tidied and removed with dispatch. She sustained the entire performance, including her slow breakdown, with control, dramatic understatement and wit.
But Rodriguez's co-star was equally excellent: the set. Designed to magnify the vanishing-point perspective, this glossy white box provided Suzy with the non plus ultra of minimalist living spaces. It was fitted with sleek white doors of various shapes and sizes into which Suzy and the simple objects of her life came and went. A video screen functioned as a window into the quasi-outside world, and presented black and white visions of rain and clouds, the moon and an irate neighbour leaning down from the upstairs flat to complain about the noise. And not even these fixtures were permanent; everything but the item bringing Suzy's life down around her was, in the end, erasable. I half expected her to erase herself at the end.
As well as designing the set with Carlos Bartolo, the directors of the company, Sylvia Real and Sergio Pelágio, also wrote the ingenious script. Their attention to every detail showed in a nearly immaculate production. Bring your kids to see this one - they'll certainly never regard their computer games in the same way again. - Christine Madden
Runs until Saturday
The Battle for Laura Joyce
Focus Theatre, Dublin
Robert McDowell's short one-man play, currently filling the lunchtime slot at Focus, is a tale of obsession. Gordon is a junior librarian given the task of training Laura, a new entrant, and he falls for her immediately. But she is soon having an affair with the boss, Sean, and a covert battle for her affections begins.
We soon learn that Gordon is a wimp whose mind is filled with self-deluding fantasies. He persuades himself that Sean is one of those coarse, pseudo- macho men who somehow enslave women, and sets out to liberate his beloved. He believes that if he writes a book about her, she will turn to him in admiration, and adopts this idea as a project. Meantime, he must find ways of protecting her.
Gordon begins to stalk Laura, spending hours outside her house with binoculars trained on her window. He learns her routines, and knows that Sean now plays a major part in her life. When the couple go to Paris for a break, he follows them, staying in the same hotel. He accosts them in a restaurant, an intervention that proves disastrous. The story thus far puts considerable strain on credulity. Back home again, Gordon completes his book and tries to present it to Laura - and talk about your grand guignol. The ending goes so far over the top that it ends in a vertiginous slide into a dramatic abyss. That old devil, suspension of disbelief, abandons the proceedings, which promptly disintegrate.
The author, a well-known actor, plays Gordon with conviction, directed by Frank Shouldice. But neither can redeem the work's awkward structure or emotional excesses. - Gerry Colgan
Runs until October 18th
La Musica
SS Michael and John
Much of the work of Marguerite Duras is characterised by an unabashed concern with the trials and vicissitudes of the French writer's own life, her political involvement, her love affairs. This production of her La Musica appears to take its cue from the same principle of self-absorption and intimacy, with disappointing results. Even the considerable talents of Olwen Fouéré and Ronan Leahy cannot breathe life into the dreary dialogue of two estranged lovers who, having met one last time to finalise their divorce, cannot cease to torment one another with the agonising remnants of their passion.
Technically, this Siren Productions interpretation has interesting touches, most notably in its use of the large space and quasi-opulent features of its venue, a former church, to convey the sense of distance, artifice and sorry nostalgia which exists between the two, but the onstage music makes a negligible impact. The physical and emotional intensity of the production is undeniable, but it is built around a flimsy core. - Belinda McKeon
Runs until Saturday.
Such Stuff As We Are Made Of
SS Michael and John
Walking in to the space there is nowhere to sit. A naked man instructs us to sit in one part of the room and then performs a solo in which his two arms move slowly in front of his back. Everything seems magnified so that you see muscles tightening tendons that drag his bones to a new position. Other dancers move us to different positions in the room and we see bodies interacting, slowly writhing into new positions so that a head might suddenly belong to another body.
In the second part, the movement vocabulary changes as catchphrases from ads are intermingled with names of human atrocities. This is the stuff we are made of indeed: body and mind as battlegrounds for control. No review can do justice to this dance from the Lia Rodrigues company, which needs to be experienced live, in close proximity to its extraordinary performers. It is the best dance show in town. Go see it. - Michael Seaver
Runs until Saturday
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Swallow
Hugh Lane Gallery
One night, hearing his adored brother call his name from the icy deathtrap of a frozen lake, Cyril McAlune made the bleakest of decisions, and his life ever since has been gnarled by guilt and regret. Michael Harding's realisation of the watchful, embittered protagonist of his one-man show is riveting and incisive, difficult emotion permeating his every move and utterance as the rain saturates the farmer McAlune's useless Co Cavan fields, as the spilt blood of his wretched wife seeps into his kitchen floor. Directed by Judy Hegarty-Lovett, in a production by the Gare St Lazare Players, Harding has skilfully telescoped the vast vista of McAlune's misery into a raw recollection of one startling day, when his angry fear of everything alien to his rigid world crashes down to push him further away from those around him. This is a man deeply, irredeemably alone - for once, the Irish monologue is a warranted form. - Belinda McKeon
Runs until Saturday
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Ta Ra Teresa
Project Upstairs
The prospect of a Welsh- language play with "simultaneous translation throughout" was always going to be a daunting one, but the publicity promise of a mixed-media event examining "the loss which comes from severing the connection between language, land and people" created vague hopes of a theatrical originality that might rise to a tough challenge. Unfortunately, early fears were soon confirmed, with enormous screens covered in sometimes misspelt and occasionally obscured translations of the on-stage dialogue, and a story that lurched from tangent to tangent, adding to the inherent difficulties of this North Wales Stage production. Jumbled up in the mix are nationalism, incest, displacement, laughable symbolic film clips (empty coffins rolling down mountainsides, a sexually frustrated woman rolling around in piles of silk), references to Derrida and Orwell, and so on. But with the story's central relationships barely established, the earnest efforts of the actors to make sense of Aled Jones Williams's mish-mash of a play are stymied from the start. Translations this isn't. - Giles Newington
Runs until Saturday
Also on until Saturday at Project Upstairs is SNAP by Ger Bourke, Corcadorca's look at "the ingenuity with which people can remain cruel to each other yet tied to each other". In her review of the Cork production on September 27th, Mary Leland wrote that SNAP was "a play packed with resonance. The work of the actors is faultless, powerful, professional".
To book for the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival, which finishes on Saturday, phone 1850-374643 or go to www.fringefest.com.
