Thin Ice - Bewley's Cafe Theatre
****
The material in Thin Ice is thin - a day in the life of an ageing ne'er-do-well actor - but Alan Ford's delivery is hilarious. Ford, whose cinema work includes Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and The Long Good Friday, transforms himself from Charlie Harwood, the irrepressible East London chancer, to Linda, Charlie's "gorgon" ex, telling a busload of people how he broke her 'eart.
The fact that Ford reads his self-penned script is at first discouraging. But in no time we are immersed in the vivid details of Charlie's ill-starred day. The episode where Charlie auditions for an ice-cream commercial is side-splitting, and the show closes with Charlie's zillionth one-night stand. The position is delicate on this occasion, as his coke-sniffing leading lady has arthritis in her hip.
- Katie Donovan
At 8 p.m., until Saturday
That Look - Bewley's Cafe Theatre
***
The tiny stage in Bewley's Theatre is cleverly divided into three for this family drama that spans 10 years. Iris Parks's short play reworks familiar material: the violent, bullying father whose disappointment in life is taken out on his family, and the mark of fear and resignation that this upbringing leaves on his children.
The half-serious debate between three of these grown-up children about whether to murder him is interleaved with chilling fragments from their past - on one side, the father's bitter pub monologues; on the other, his daughter Angela's contemplation of her hand-me-down Confirmation dress. Caroline Fitzgerald's inspired direction and strong performances by Frank Melia and Gavin Cleland (as father and son) lift the otherwise rather predictable script.
- Katie Donovan
Angels in America, Part I - Dublin Writers' Museum
****
Tony Kushner's award-laden Angels in America is unquestionably a major work of the 1990s, with manifold pleasures to unfold. But we'd no reason to expect that a neophyte Irish cast and crew on a shoestring budget could do it anything approaching justice. This lot, calling themselves You'll Be Sorry When We're Famous (no, I won't), have done just that.
With an intimate audience along the stage's two flanks, they handle both the play's subject matter - AIDS, love, sex, race, politics, etc - and its form - rapid scene changes, multiple points of focus - with real aplomb. The same goes for its tone, which is rarely grim or gritty, preferring witty (albeit black) dialogue, hallucinatory visions and a barrage of exciting ideas. The actors even appear to "get" most of the very New York allusions.
Part I, Millennium Approaches clocks in at just under three hours with an interval, but I've been at 20-minute meetings that felt far longer.
- Harry Browne
At 8 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until October 22nd.
Bimbo - Andrews Lane Studio
***
Jo is having an identity crisis, her best mate Brian is planning a sex-change operation, and the two friends cannot agree on the vexed question of what it is to be a woman. Through a combination of actors and puppets, Bimbo opens up a box of ideas marked Gender Identity and shuffles through the contents - but without saying anything particularly original. Although the script can be wearing as it veers between bombast and sheer bitchiness, its cultural observations are often biting and very funny. Niamh Maguire's feisty millennial feminist stands out as the strongest performance of the piece, but it is Rosy Barnes's puppets that steal the show. Their exaggerated, cartoon quality is what gives the play its edge, and with snappier direction and a more polished script (don't blink, you'll miss the end), Barnes's distinctive kind of theatre could mature into something fabulous.
- Heather Johnson
Coq au Vin - International Bar
****
The programme-notes make this sound somewhat weighty, if not solemn, but Jon Robin Baitz's short, two-part satire on the acting profession is absurd, touching and very funny. Staged without a set by Block One Theatre Company, the 50-minute piece presents two actors, desperate for work, who find themselves jigging about in furry yellow chicken costumes in a fairground revue. Terry (Gemma Doorly) is trying to make the best of it, to get in touch with his "inner chicken", while Michael (Sonj Byrne) is having none of it, preferring to rehearse the "All For Hecuba" soliloquy from Hamlet. Things might be worse, though: they could be playing a tomato, like one of their colleagues (Sean Hand), who is fired by the producer for asking "what's my motivation?".
- Helen Meany
At 1.05 p.m., until Saturday
Journeyman - Crypt Arts Centre
****
Tommy Riley is a boxer who had one shot at being a contender but blew it, and this impressive 75-minute monologue follows him through the many reasons for his failure and his ability to endure it. Set in a run-down gym in Philadelphia, the play explores Tommy's past while revealing his present. Behind him is the emotionally arid family life that drove him to the gym, ahead of him the more punishing aridity of failure.
Played by Ger Carey, Tommy comes across as a lot more interesting than the noble brute of too many other literary boxing portraits: he suggests Tommy's ambition is more a metaphysical quest than a simple physical one. Frank Shouldice's writing is impressively vivid, capturing the complexity of Tommy's character. Cutting 10 minutes might make the action flow better, but this is an absorbing and rewarding production.
At 9 p.m., until Saturday
The Christian Brothers - The Crypt, Dublin Castle
*****
This is the kind of theatrical gem which justifies Fringe festivals: a quirky, innovative and beautifully acted production that restores faith in the power of the stage and sends the audience out revived. In just over an hour, the remarkable quality of Australian actor Laurence Coy who, in his cassock, with its leather barely concealed in pocket, immediately establishes a threatening presence as the quintessential brother, works wonderfully with Ron Blair's taut and economical script. The audience becomes the schoolboys subjected to the brother's consecutive lessons in History, French, Christian Doctrine, even Physics, and such is the power of the writing, we can almost see the weals on the boy mercilessly victimised and beaten.
It's not a one-sided portrait of sadism, however: both Blair and Coy suggest the character's tortured humanity, a frustrated impulse toward transcendence, and redemptive humour, which leavens the tension. One not to miss.
At 7 p.m., until Saturday. Also 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday
Chasing Rabbits - Bewley's Cafe
**
Frustration is the only emotion this reviewer felt at the end of Mark Fletcher's one-hander, Chasing Rabbits. Not because the acting by Peter Hardy was poor nor because the production by Australian company, Springfield Productions was shoddy, but rather because they are lively and adequate respectively, and are ill-served by the grindingly unoriginal narrative hook of Fletcher's play.
In an unnamed Australian police cell, Hardy, the bluff Australian type beloved of beer commercials and soap operas, is being interrogated about a road accident which left a man dead in a smashed car at the bottom of a cliff. He insists he was a victim of road rage, but the victim of the crash turns out to be his father and the answer to the puzzle lies in their shared past. There are no prizes for guessing what that dark secret is and no new dramatic depths to be explored by seeing Chasing Rabbits.
At 1.05 p.m., until Saturday
Yip Yip Mix in the 21st Century - Temple Bar Galleries
****
`Mix' is right, for on Sunday night, Philip Jeck mixed his old vinyl records and collaging tape live on stage, achieving awe-inspiring noise, while the incredible Laurie Booth mixed martial arts, acrobatics, contemporary dance and capoeira (from which break-dancing evolved) in an hour-long demonstration of his unique dance-style.
With the audience on three sides of the white-walled Temple Bar Gallery, the bald, bearded and bare-foot Booth, in loose white tunic and trousers, showed superb balance and control as he moved with grace and dignity from one impossible acrobatic pose to another, raising himself from a prone position so that he all but levitated. Sometimes he seemed to battle invisible forces, sometimes undulating hands suggested homage to an eastern deity or an oriental potentate distributing largesse. Whether standing on his head, balancing on a pole or motionless in preparation for his next feat, he was utterly compelling.
- Carolyn Swift
Stacked - International Bar
*
Three Bags Full theatre company obviously wanted to explore their kitschy side when they selected two one-act plays, The Minneola Twins and The Adoption for production. The first is a Paula Vogel piece about identical twins who differ only in their bust sizes and their experiences with the school football team (as in, Myra's had 'em all, Myrna hasn't). The second is an exercise in the absurd by Joyce Carol Oates, who plays with the idea of a couple desperate to adopt just about anything. So far so slight - neither play is particularly distinguished but there could be opportunities for some fairly dark comedy given an intelligent staging.
Unfortunately this is not what we get with Stacked. Comedy, sure, but comedy of the most over-the-top, undergraduate type. The main players, Sonya Kelly and Mark Bates never settle for subtlety if they can get away with a cliched gesture or phrasing, with the result that Stacked has neither the kitsch kudos of commedia dell' arte nor the satisfaction of slapstick.
- Louise East
At 6 p.m., until October 16th
Night Just Before The Forest - Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD
****
If the open-mouthed figure in Edward Munch's painting The Scream could be given a script, it would probably sound like this harsh monologue by the late French playwright, Bernard-Marie Koltes. Alone on a city street in the rain, a hooded man stands, raging against the world.
Directed at an intense pitch by Jimmy Fay and performed with seething, unrelieved vehemence by Shane Hogan, this is a rant against all the people who have injured or slighted this man, the women who have betrayed him and all those who have simply "gone over to the other side". It's an unrelenting study of paranoid isolation, which is performed with such conviction and written so eloquently that we want to rush from the theatre, as far from this tortured soul as possible.
- Helen Meany
At 8 p.m., until Wednesday
Crime and Punishment - The Big Tent, Iveagh Gardens
**
The punishment? Sitting through this for almost two hours in a freezing tent. The crime? Shibboleth and Sinequanon theatre companies getting so carried away by their devising and improvising that they forget to stand back and look at the sprawling play they have jointly created. Dostoevsky's great morality tale about the student, Raskolnikov (Andreas Simma), who discovers the difference between theory and practice when he murders a pawnbroker, is given a high-energy treatment by these Lecoq-trained performers, with some flashes of inspiration. But it cries out for an external eye, for someone (the director, perhaps?) to knock some discipline into it and to channel these performers' undoubted physical skills into something more formed and focused.
- Helen Meany
At 8 p.m., until Saturday
The Kaos Importance of Being Earnest - City Arts Cenre
**
Well, the audience loved it. And this very talented, energetic young cast could not be faulted for commitment, but . . . a severe physicality is not at all suited to a performance of what is Wilde's wittiest play. In fact, it obtrudes so mightily it distracts from the dialogue wherein lies those bon mots that make Earnest the gem it is. What is difficult to understand is why Kaos chose to interpret the play in this way. Comedy of manners relies for its effectiveness above all on the rigid restraint of its characters for whom social style/appearance is all, regardless of the substance or context. Restraint is (literally in instances) thrown to the four winds in this production, with an incidental hilarity which has little to do with the play. Some of the characters suffer grieviously, particularly Lady Bracknell, who is so over-the-top in this production as to be risible. A possible beneficiary is Cecily Cardew, played with great comic gusto by Jill Norman. But all the others are diminished in a helter-skelter of sound and sometimes fury that adds nothing to this play of some importance.
- Patsey McGarry
At 8 p.m., until Saturday
***** - brilliant
**** - good
*** - more good than bad
** - more bad than good
* - bad
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