Unfringed Festival, Limerick

I’m in a hotel corridor, being stared at by a man in an anorak. “I’m not an actor,” I say, and he visibly relaxes. We’re in Limerick’s Boutique Hotel, waiting for

Memory Deleted

, from Anu Productions, to begin – and it’s already clear that telling the real from the imaginary is going to be difficult.

With the 10 other people in the audience, we've been instructed to wander around before the play begins. Any room with an open door is part of the performance, we're told, but everything else is just part of the ordinary life of the hotel. In one room, there's a chambermaid, sprawled on a bed while an abandoned Hoover wheezes nearby; in another, a mother rocks her child. Both scenes seem obviously performative. But what about those other two chambermaids folding sheets in the corridor? Do they look nervous because they're part of the performance? Or are they uneasy because they're not actors and are shy of our scrutiny? So before Memory Deletedeven begins, we've been confronted with the ideas behind the performance: we face the tension between the real and the imagined, we carefully watch people who are often invisible to us, and we realise that the apparently impersonal space of a hotel room can contain stories that are deeply intimate.

We’re eventually led into one such hotel room, where nine actors enact overlapping stories in a variety of styles. At the play’s core are two intertwining narratives about a man’s past and present lovers. Those stories are performed with a simple dignity that has the regrettable effect of making other scenes feel under-developed by comparison. Those using dance, for example, are suggestive but never fully evocative. And although the occasional use of monologue provides engrossing imagery, the tone is over-familiar.

Yet the merging of these styles and stories has a startling impact, creating the impression that the life of the hotel over several months has collapsed into one moment. Director Louise Lowe is therefore doing something genuinely innovative with theatrical form, showing a remarkable ability to impose coherence on the fragmentary. Run concluded