Irish Times writers review events at the Dublin Fringe Festival.
Bag Of Monkeys, International Bar
Giles Newington
Two men enter a London pub, order their pints and sit silently at adjacent tables until one of them gabbles something loudly to himself, thus disturbing the other's reverie. Within a few minutes they are philosophising away, toasting "drinkers, talkers, listeners" and discussing the incomprehensible ways of women. They are, as they admit, clichés. After Charlie (Paul Bredin) has had his say about his misunderstandings with his wife, his wry companion Billy (Sean Donegan) gets going on an anecdote of his own, quite well told and leading to a gentle twist in the play's tail. Unfortunately, Darren Murphy's script for this Penny Dreadful production adds little in the way of humour or insight to the bare bones of a story that is too slight to carry a piece of theatre. It is nothing more than it appears: a mildly amusing tale told by some bloke in the pub and forgotten by the time the next round is ordered.
Runs until Saturday
Blue, Project Cube
Rosita Boland
Three students at the end of their schooldays, Danny (Corinna Cunningham), Joe (Kevin O'Leary) and Des (Matthew Keenan), live by the rarely blue Atlantic, their previously entwined lives and friendships coming apart like fraying rope. "You feel the ocean touch hands with you, like some friend you forgot to lose," Des says. In different ways each of the three lacks the solidity of dependable family life, and, by default, they have unrealistically invested their needs, fears, expectations and hopes in each other, achieved by clever use of flashbacks. The ocean they grew up beside contains their collective past and the possibilities of their future, elusive as the colour of the title. Ursula Rani Sarma marvellously explores adolescent tensions and vulnerabilities in this funny, moving, lyrical and sometimes dreamlike play that ebbs and flows in silence and noise like the tide, casting up images like seashells as it unfolds.
Runs until October 18th
Broadcast, Project Cube
Donald Clarke
This shrill exercise in impassioned posturing seeks to bombard us with all the noise and confusion of modern broadcast media and, in the process, confront us with our inadequate and patronising attitudes toward disability.
Does a hissing multimedia cacophony ensue? Sadly, no. Broadcast, as performed by Donal Toolan, who uses a wheelchair, comprises four broadly drawn monologues interspersed with short video clips, each of which features the sort of wearing caricature that used to infest 1970s student agitprop: the posh lady charity worker, the intellectual, the newsreader.
Toolan, a broadcaster and campaigner for the disabled, has a beautiful, actorly voice and a great talent for impersonation. But the script, which he devised with Viki Wreford Sinnott, is hopelessly weighed down by its hectoring tone. There are moments of poignancy, but my main impression was of feeling well and truly told off. And I can get that at home.
Runs until Saturday
Don't Take Your Coat Off!, Crypt Arts Centre
Fíona Ní Chinnéide
The ageing dependant in an armchair or bed is hardly a new figure on the Irish stage, but the tyranny of guilt and duty is refreshingly absent in this first play by Rob Keogh. Instead grandmother and grandson hurl loving abuse at each other in a gentle, well-paced exploration of the shifting dynamics of dependence.
Particularly fine performances from Eileen Fennell as fearful, ailing Nan and Rob Power as her affectionate grandson, Paul, compensate for the many questions left unanswered. The presence on stage of Nan's ghost (Amy Conroy) as ethereal narrator is less convincing, as she bears little similarity to her older self in either movement or language.
Veils, murmured rosaries and strains of piano contribute to what is a sentimental production from Dark Horse Theatre Company. Suspend your cynicism, however, and this simple story of love and need remains extremely affecting - as the embarrassed sniffles in the audience testify.
Runs until Saturday
Greatest Hits, Bewley's Cafe Theatre
Donald Clarke
My English teacher always told me that great works of literature ask questions rather than answer them. And, as far as I can judge, Thomas McLaughlin's sinewy new two-hander indeed offers no solutions. But, as I haven't quite worked out the questions it may or may not ask, I can't be sure.
In a scenario reminiscent of that in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter we join two Northern Irish colleagues in a sparsely furnished room. One (Laurence Lowry, good) wears a suit and reports from "the board", the other (Owen Mulhall, excellent) wears a bomber jacket and the seasoned scowl of the harshly used. They might be salesmen, but they are probably killers.
Although the dialogue is securely crafted and the tension dispensed responsibly, the play is never quite odd enough to touch on the surreal or rooted enough to make any kind of real sense. Director Ann Russell makes of it what she can, but McLaughlin, a talented writer, has done better.
Runs until Saturday
Gulag Ha Ha, Players Theatre
Belinda McKeon
In a stark space, lit only in patches by interrogating torchlight, four characters are stripped to their underwear; imprisoned, degraded, endangered. The question of who, or what, can hold us against our will, and of what can be taken away from us, is skilfully
explored in this piece conceived by Dubliner Jason Craig for Banana Bag and Bodice, the New York-based ensemble of which he is a member. Although the performance is deeply physical in form, wrapped in the mesmerising live music of David Malley, and although identities frequently switch in a disjointed narrative, still a strong sense of storytelling pulses through. The young cast evokes power games and torture chambers, childhood memories and adult terrors, tentative friendship and terrible loneliness, the power of creativity faced with even the hardest of materials and the harshest of scenes. Depth and texture are sealed by Jessica Ojala's superb lighting design.
Runs until Saturday
Kevin McAleer: Chalk & Cheese, Project Upstairs
Donald Clarke
"I wouldn't have seen it with my own eyes if I hadn't believed it," Kevin McAleer says of something more than usually unlikely. That sense of a man reordering the world to his own knotted logic has always been at the heart of McAleer's comedy, and it has rarely been employed to more agreeable effect.
Throughout his career the Tyrone man has plucked away at the Ulster persona and drawn out certain strands - literal-mindedness, suspicion of authority, terror of pretension - until they are revealed in bald absurdity. If David Lynch remodelled Jeffrey Donaldson, this is how he might appear.
Although there is no huge development in style, McAleer has rarely been quite so inventive in the imaginative curlicues that decorate his surreal rambling. And if the show does become too unhinged in its final 10 minutes, it is somehow appropriate that it dissolves weirdly into the ether rather than doing anything so mundane as to just stop.
Runs until Saturday
The King Sweeney, Crypt
Christine Madden
Productions such as these painfully reveal the need for fresh style and impetus in our theatre. This company of young and hopeful actors - wishing, one assumes, to follow in a great tradition of Irish drama - presents a play in which nothing happens several times, but without Samuel Beckett's acute sense for dramatic direction. Three brothers and a girlfriend come together to record their family history. God knows why. They tell the girl and each other anecdotes from their childhoods and swear a lot. It feels as if you've wandered into the UCD smoking lounge, and devices such as sparring between two of the brothers fail to add tension. The cast should see Fabulous Beast's Giselle, at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, then rethink their direction.
Runs until Saturday
Morphia Series, Arthouse, Temple Bar
Christine Madden
Eclectic, bizarre and sometimes very creepy, Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham's well-named show pushes you to the edge of your seat as it goes through its 25-minute run. As you enter this intimate performance, you get a jewel-like canapé and a small glass of dessert wine to take with you to a dark room filled with night sounds of crickets chirping. At first it's as if you've crashed someone's garden party. But then Herbertson's dark silhouette appears in a box brimming with mist and her hand becomes a snake's head, her arm its long, stiff body. At times robotic, at others wraith-like, Herbertson's effective movement and choreography are set off imaginatively by superb lighting. Any more detail would give away too much. A disarming, memorable show.
Runs until Saturday
One For Sorrow, Bewley's Cafe Theatre
Amy Redmond
This 45 minute two-hander from Skipalong Theatre is a simple but poignant coming-of-age story. The focus is on 25-year-old Doreen, who is deeply affected by her mother's premature death. She has spent her life caring for her father and younger sister, Eileen, in Tipperary, where her only comfort is to pore over childhood photographs and ponder her dreams of her mother. Eventually she finds courage to break away from the family and head to Dublin. Mary Kelly, as Doreen, gives a touching performance; Noni Stapleton plays six characters, confidently morphing from pensive middle age to youthful exuberance to urban neurosis. Written by the actors, the play has a rushed ending but offers interesting character sketches - and what it lacks in staging or plot development it makes up for with subtle performances. A promising pair.
Runs until Saturday
Panama, New Theatre
Belinda McKeon
In this fast-paced comedic spree from off-Broadway playwright Mike Folie a murderous fortysomething speeds towards California in search of the medicine that will grant him eternal life. He takes with him his bashful wife, a galling pair of teenage hitchhikers intent on altering reality with computer programs and an elderly couple whom he takes for his parents and has attempted to burgle. But they don't mind - they're eager to get to California to visit Happy Days, the new Samuel Beckett theme park at Disneyland. The Tangent Theatre Company's second production is dedicated madcappery. Folie's gags are often lazy and the talents of Sam Young's cast strikingly varied - Jason Nelson and Liam McGonagle stand out as the fiery geriatrics - but between them they still clock up a very respectable quota of chortles.
Runs until Saturday
Pas Moi, Andrews Lane Studio
Helen Meany
Lisez mes lèvres. Yes, this is Beckett's Not I in French. This production, performed by Beatrice de La Boulaye and directed by Maud Chougui, departs from the usual staging of the play, whereby all that is visible is the actor's mouth. Here we see her whole body, held still, her face whited out like a clown's.
An old woman wants to remain silent but is compelled to speak, with great difficulty. She cannot use the word "I" but refers to herself in the third person, interrupting herself, repeating phrases. The emphasis on the mobile mouth remains - it stretches and grimaces, seeming to have a life of its own - but some of the impact is lost. Although it is moving to see the moisture slowly dripping from her eye, creating a grey triangle in her powdery mask, it seems contrary to the remarkable austerity of this work, in which so little is given to us.
Runs until Saturday
Severance, Players Theatre
Susan Conley
Edge21 mounted an ambitious production with video footage, projection, an atmospheric soundtrack and a safety harness, but poor use of them detracted from rather than enhanced Annemarie Curran's script. Anything that livens up the one-man monologue is welcome, and using shots of a Ferris wheel spinning colourfully in the background as Severance (Pol Penrose) remembers his first meeting with his future wife seemed a promising start. Rob Broderick's music and sound design was also potentially interesting, especially as theatre-makers generally ignore the power of sound, but the delicate, sometimes stylish script was overwhelmed by bells and whistles.
Runs until Saturday
Threeplay, T36
Gerry Colgan
This production of three playlets, each by a different writer and with the same three actors, sounds innovative but in fact is not. If there is a linking theme it is quite obscure. The first play has a husband and wife who have lost the urge. A mysterious female clown, hired for a children's party, shows them the way to sharpen their libidos. Next an army deserter during a war finds refuge with two odd sisters and has an affair with one of them. The war's ending sets off sinister events, and it ends in anticlimax. Last is a surreal story about a couple visited by a mysterious woman offering a free holiday with menaces. It makes little sense. Christine Hughes directs Dermot Byrne, Jacqueline Corrigan and Valerie Greene, who cannot redeem the low-flying scripts by Jamie Watt, Kester Dyer and Iain McGowan.
Runs until Saturday
Ubu Roi, SS Michael & John
Peter Crawley
Vulgar, crude and savagely funny, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi is the progenitor of the theatre of the absurd and a psychological touchstone. Articulate Anatomy's extraordinary adaptation shows how far theatre and society have come since 1896. Condensing five lurid acts into an hour of sinewy physical theatre, director Emma Colohan thrusts Jarry's Shakespearean parody into a cage. The audience peer through the mesh at royal usurpers and infantile despots. Tyres, trolleys, tortures and taxes stack up as debauchery and warfare escalate. The adept ensemble amuse and unsettle, straddling the tiny gap between idiocy and id. You emerge with an anxious giggle at Jarry's evolutionary logic, faithfully and frantically served by this daringly physical production.
Runs until Saturday
Also on until Saturday are Paris, Texas, POC Productions' "superbly subtle" enactment of Wim Wenders's film (City Arts Centre) and Gagarin Way, Prime Cut's "inquiring and entertaining voice . . . examining, exposing and entertaining" (Helix), both reviewed previously
