From ninja Shakespeare to a vivid snapshot of small-town Ireland, our reviewers rate the first batch of fringe shows

Asian Dub Foundation Presents La Haine ****

Temple Theatre

Shane Hegarty

La Haine is not a film that needs a new soundtrack. Mathieu Kassovitz's classic about a Jew, Arab and African crushed by system and culture in 1990s Paris had already used the sparse background noise of the banlieues and the music seeping from the speakers to great effect.

Yet in Asian Dub Foundation - whose politicised drum 'n' bass punk has always been music for cultural outsiders - it has found the perfect collaborators. On Monday night they played live over a screening of the movie, and the result was a revelatory experiment in audio-visual remixing.

Their soundtrack was one dark funk, always simmering, exploding when necessary. It emphasised its comedy and violence while drawing from La Haine's angry soul but never intruded, in arrogance or clumsiness, on what was onscreen. A film that didn't need a new soundtrack got one it deserved.

Bolt Upright ****

Players Theatre, Trinity College

Gerry Colgan

This ghost story has many fathers: legend, Seamus Deane, Henry James and others. A young woman arrives in a big house in remote Donegal to be governess to two children. The house is haunted by wraiths of a recent famine, creatures with ugly protuberances disfiguring their twisted bodies. She senses but cannot see them.

When she finds the children are involved in the sinister goings-on, the governess seeks help from the local priest, but in vain. She disintegrates beneath the intimidation of the dead and the living, and the end is tragic, the stuff of myth.

Angel Exit Theatre Company has a reputation for excellence in physical theatre, and it is maintained here in the acting, costumes, puppet children and image creation, directed by Acushla Bastible. Iseult Golden leads the cast of eight in a production that is superb on style but rather less substantial on content.

Runs until Saturday

De Bogman **

Andrews Lane Studio

Rosita Boland

De Bogman is Declan (Mairtin de Cogain), a Corkonian with a grand lot of hair and a nifty right fist. Be Your Own Banana's production is directed by Brian Desmond, with an acting cameo from both him and Sandra Morrissey.

The village Declan lives in is Everyvillage, with its eccentric friends, shopkeepers and the Mammy. De Cogain, a champion storyteller, plays all the characters, with frenetic determination, delivering lines so fast that many of them unfortunately get lost. De Bogman then fetches up in Philadelphia to pursue a boxing career, and the strained plotline, like Declan, is soon on its back in the ring, being counted out. De Bogman is gay! He has sex with his trainer! Lots of times! His dead mammy comes back as a ghost cow! Declan wins fights! Declan loses fights! More of the same! De Cogain is an energetic performer, but this rambling script does him no favours.

Runs until Saturday

Eeeugh!topia **

Project Cube

Michael Seaver

Supposedly existing in the space between two texts, Eeeugh!topia is heavily driven by the porn fantasy of a Taliban volunteer turned sex slave, with extracts from the Song of Songs as adornment.

Movement rather than text sets things up, with a motif of reaching above and behind as bodies criss-cross the small stage space. Other physical devices come and go during the multisection work without ever reaching any range of expression. Among hanging lights and nine toilets the cast of six suggest many metaphors, but although there are committed performances the fact that neither text nor movement becomes embodied only exacerbates the incoherence in structure.

It's not until the narrative kicks in towards the end and reaches its bizarre conclusion that we sense any impetus in direction. In spite of the ambition, the result, by a company of mainly former drama students from Trinity College, is disappointing.

Runs until Saturday

Freakshow? ****

Fringe Central, Temple Bar

Donald Clarke

Stephen Dee's curious and delightful installation, which pays tribute to the entertainers who performed in the freak shows of pre-war America, has already achieved the distinction of unnerving the host of The Late Late Show.

It would be unfair to go into too much detail about the image in the small box that so perturbed Pat Kenny last week, but suffice to say it answers an intimate question about the anatomy of Frank Lentini, the Three-Legged Wonder, that none of us would have dared ask to his face.

But Freakshow?, first seen at last year's Galway Arts Festival, is a serious business despite its jocular tone. Using photographs, film excerpts, text and Dee's justly celebrated comic sculptures, the show persuasively argues the case that the sideshows provided these singular individuals with dignity and a source of self-expression.

It is very funny, though. How could anything not be that purports to show us Arthur Askey's leg and George Best's old liver?

Runs all day, Mon-Sat, until October 11th

Grace Before Meals **

T36

Susan Conley

Una Woods's stylised text is given a stylish presentation: almost everything is in black and white, a reflection of the mindscape of our young narrator, Girl, played by Ellen Burns.A pre-teen who seems to spend quite a lot of time in her head, Girl speaks memory, telling herself things so she'll remember them, telling them to herself even as they're happening, as life is passing before her eyes. The result is sometimes lyrical but not terribly dramatic.

Motifs are repeated, perhaps to reflect Girl's synapses, which snap without seeming to fire in a relatable way. Her world is reduced to repetitive statements and evocations of images, creating a sensation of being mired in time. Woods uses words to elegiac effect but without much narrative drive, and one feels she is in love with the sounds that words make without being too bothered by whether they make dramatic sense.

Runs until Saturday

His Genius *

Players Theatre, Trinity College

Giles Newington

Opening night. Four people in the audience. Four female performers on stage. Four newspapers drop on to the set; the performers read, looking amazed. Something has happened. But what?

There are no words yet, as this, apparently, is visual theatre. A fabric moon hangs down. Words are projected on to the backdrop ("anxiety", "war" and so on). The performers don moustaches and bowler hats and tell us we are going to hear the story of Sweet William. There is singing, a wedding tableau, a funeral scene (whose, the moon's?).

There is something about ballot boxes. One of the audience laughs, making everyone else jump. William "cannot express himself", we are told, "so there is war"; the actors run around, whooping. There are monologues about living in a totalitarian world of one-syllable words. The actors mime cooking a meal, then it's the end. The lighting operator cues audience applause, the cast applaud the lighting operator. We leave the theatre and take a deep breath. It's tough on the fringe.

Runs until Friday

Mrs Cherry-Loola's Last Chance***

Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin Castle

Belinda McKeon

Office life, with its heartless tedium and crippling tension, has been a subject much touched upon by fringe productions in the past couple of years - further proof that behind every call centre there's an embarrassment of aspiring writers and directors.

Although subject to its own patches of tedium, this first show from the Dublin-based Gorgo Theatrics group sidesteps hackneyed approaches to the theme, with an engaging central performance by Armelle du Roscoat as the jittery, childlike secretary of the title.

Lily Cherry-Loola faces dismissal if she fails to meet a series of impossible deadlines. An imaginary friend, Trigger the horse, formed from herright hand and brought charmingly to life by the audio innovations of sound designer Michael McLoughlin, offers amusing diversion, but his mischievous, demanding nature leads to trouble, and to a surprisingly poignant denouement, as Lily realises that to take charge of her life she must destroy the routes from which to escape it.

Runs until Saturday

Revelations ****

Project Cube

Christine Madden

A promising start to the festival, Revelations takes us refreshingly far from the slowly unfolding family dramas of mainstream theatre here. Imagine Misery rewritten for the stage by Alan Ayckbourn and you've got the measure of this darkly comic piece by Darren Donohue.

Three men are locked in a hell-is-other-people relationship; there is no comfort within, nor security without each other. Man 1 (Nick Devlin), wheelchair-bound with a damaged leg, rambles almost incoherently (he speaks a bit too quickly - first-night jitters?) unless Man 2 (Paul Keeley) is tending him with his constricting, needy and menacing affection. Man 3 (Donohue) throws this sadistic- masochistic dependence out of balance - and suffers the consequences.

Under the direction of Peter Hussey, Devlin pulls off some impressive acting as the mute invalid, but it is Keeley's superb performance, an unsettling brew of childishness, sweetness and silliness but with bared teeth and a wolf's hunger, that makes this play extraordinary.

Runs until Saturday

Rum & Raisin *****

SS Michael & John

Amy Redmond

This co-production by Noggin Theatre Company and Tall Tales Theatre Company, set in a sweet shop in Trim, Co Meath, engages all of the senses. Connie, an awkward bachelor, son and heir to the business, works the shop with the help of Noreen, a conniving local woman with big plans for their future.

Informed by the commedia dell'arte style - comically exaggerated and physical - the acting is bold and often hilarious. Maureen Collander is sublime, a nasty Aunt Sally on acid; John Anthony Murphy is a strangely lovable Pee-Wee Herman from the midlands.

The surreal set and sound effects create a vivid snapshot of small-town Ireland, where this unlikely pair play out their power struggle. When tango dance hits the town, prepare for a truly menacing milonga. Writers Deirdre Kinahan and Alice Barry have inspired a seamless production in which the elements combine cleverly to create great theatre.

Runs until Saturday

The Tiny Ninja Theatre Company Presents Macbeth *****

International Bar

Peter Crawley

A few more cuts and it might become a trend: the vaulting ambition of epic theatre, conceived in miniature and enacted by a troupe of (presumably wageless) inch-high ninja figurines. But behind Dov Weinstein's gloriously iconoclastic approach is a startling seriousness of purpose.

Under the bleary focus of toy binoculars, the sight of floating witches, spinning ninjas and fridge-magnet banquets is so hilarious that you might miss the subtlety of his breathless but fluent reading and striking set pieces. And the rapid juxtaposition of humour and pathos is unerringly faithful to Shakespeare's play.

If there are quibbles, it is in the emotional range of his leads. Through Macbeth's moral decline Mr Smile grins on regardless. That one may smile and be a villain, I suppose. Still, on the intercultural fringe this US production of a Scottish-based English play with a, erm, Taiwanese cast is unmissable.

Runs until October 11th; no show this Saturday

Two Sisters And A Piano ****

The Space, Helix

Fintan O'Toole

If for no other reason than its disturbance of Cuba's iconic status on the Left, this is a much tougher play than its rather twee title might suggest. Although it features the eponymous siblings and ivories, it is essentially a political lament for the good intentions of the Cuban revolution. Its domesticity is enforced: the sisters Maria Celia, a writer, and Sophie, a musician, are under house arrest after a period of imprisonment. Maria Celia, inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union, has signed a manifesto calling for democratic change.

Written by the US-Cuban Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz, Two Sisters is, however, unusually subtle in its politics and dramaturgy. The sisters, skilfully played by Eva Alexander and Catalina Botello, are no plaster saints. And the representative of the state is no monster. Lieutenant Portuondo (Robert Cavanah) is all ambivalence: jailer and would-be lover, secret policeman and secret sympathiser.

Beautifully designed and intelligently directed, the play builds into a complex, thoughtful and gripping portrait of a society caught between fear of the future and the inevitability of change.

V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street ***

Andrews Lane Studio

Helen Meany

The pessimism of V. S. Naipaul's later writings barely touches this memoir of his impoverished childhood in Trinidad, a series of vivid vignettes of the survivors and eccentrics among whom he grew up. Under his mother's watchful gaze the boy spent his days on the street, where his curious eyes and ears led him to discover the bewildering thrills and disappointments of adult life. Trinidadian actor Jim Findley brings energy and humour to Stephen Landrigan's adaptation, playing a cast of local characters - including a dog - and switching accent and persona at speed.

With only occasional snatches of music to facilitate shifts in mood and tone, it would be a challenge for any solo performer to engage an audience for 90 minutes with material that is essentially untheatrical. That Jim Findley manages it is a tribute to his enthusiasm and versatility, but this remains, nevertheless, a less than satisfying experience.

Runs until October 11th

• Also running at the fringe, and reviewed on September 11th, is Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer (New Theatre), Aidan Dooley's "magnetic revelation of a fascinating character"

The ESB Dublin Fringe box office is at Fringe Central, 12 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 (formerly DesignYard). Telephone booking 1850-374643. The booking fee of €4 a ticket is waived if you book online at www.fringefest.com