A review of the Dublin Fringe Festival and reviews from the world of the arts.
Biscuits Of Love
T36 Teachers' Club
This gentle love story about the 17th-century marriage of the duke and duchess of Newcastle is also an attempt to re-create the era of the English Civil War, Cromwell's Protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy. The couple at its centre, the horse-obsessed William and his independent-minded philosopher wife, Margaret, take us through the phases of their decline and revival, from war to exile to reclamation of their lands and, finally, to the fame Margaret craves. Although the staging and movement are quite inventive, and the telescoped set is a clever metaphor for the ideas being explored at the time, this devised two-hander from the Quiconque theatre company remains ponderous, and the question of why these characters are supposed to be interesting never quite goes away. It is all very civilised, though, with biscuits passed round for anyone who is flagging.
... - runs until Sunday
Giles Newington
The Chair Women
Project
This Anglo-Hiberno-Polish collaboration, between the Scarlett, Pan Pan and Ludowy companies, obscures international borders behind the snow of television static, throwing Werner Schwab's scatological Austrian satire into the global crapulence of reality TV and surveillance culture. Written in the early 1990s, Schwab's short play features three women trapped in a mock TV studio. The fantasies of these women - beautifully embodied by Jasmina Daniel, Joanna Brookes and Gráinne Byrne - hop from pious banality to touching naivety to shocking obscenity and back. Pan Pan's Borgesian tunnel of camera lenses and video screens does hold a satirical sting, though: the bracing start of them watching us, watching them, watching us.
... - ends tomorrow
Peter Crawley
Like Watching Paint Dry
Arthouse
From two artists who ask to be known together as ) + ( = a0 come two hours of conceptual theatre, merging silence and a barrage of sound and word fragments in a darkened basement. At first this work doesn't sound like the liveliest way to spend a fringe evening. And it's not. Instead, it's surprisingly beautiful, slowly drawing you into exactly the state of reflection on art, theatre and the self that is rendered impossible by the frenzy of a festival - or, indeed a city. Anthony J. Faulder-Mawson's sound manipulation, though lacking fluidity, underlines Ursula Mawson-Raffalt's painstaking, yoga-like movement. This is not theatre for those who demand action or entertainment: two hours is a long time to spend watching something so simple. Put another way, it's a long time to spend with yourself. And that, you sense, is the point.
... - runs until Sunday
Belinda McKeon
Luck Helps Those Who Dare
Focus Theatre
This ironically titled, speechless and comparatively brief one-woman show features Coca Bloos, winner of Romania's best-theatre-actress award. She plays a character who lives out an evening in a life of quiet desperation to a backdrop of popular hits, some of which underscore or reflect her actions. Meaning is so absent from her life that ritual and repetition have come to replace all sense. The woman, who works in a stationery office, has nothing but her routine, which she clings to with tragicomic obsession. Bloos relishes the role, stylising its absurdities with pursed precision for comic effect. Soon, however, Luck Helps Those Who Dare descends into the banal, quickly losing its humorous flavour and risking collapsing into tedium. This is not helped by a worthy, heavy-handed message at the end.
... - runs until Sunday
Patsy McGarry
The Man Who
SS Michael & John
If you've read the case studies in Oliver Sacks's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat the question that arises early in this adaptation by Peter Brook is whether anything can be gained by recycling them in a series of short theatrical scenes. By the end of this understated and well-acted production the answer is yes. The physical proximity of the characters reminds us that personality difference is only in the neurological details and that even the smallest change in perception can undermine assumptions about identity and reality. Cumulatively, the episodes, in the form of consultations between patients and doctors, add up to a sense of fragility and mystery that is hypnotic. The cast of four is impressively precise and restrained, with Paul Congdon's monologue about living with Tourette's syndrome particularly striking.
... - runs until Sunday
Giles Newington
PamElla
Project
This production of Alice Barry's one-woman show has been seen before; now it has been edited and amended, along with new direction, from Maureen Collender. Alice Barry plays PamElla, a woman with an endless capacity to fool herself. Her Pam side is a droll Irish ingénue, temping in London for a law firm: her Ella side is her brash, sexy, fantasy self. Barry, who gives a terrific, assured performance, is particularly good as the receptionist hopelessly out of her depth in a world where social events are defined by the canapés they serve. The script still lets her down, however. Flashbacks to PamElla's childhood don't convince as explanations for her obsessive behaviour, and the play's trite, unnecessary melodramatic conclusion undermines the entire show as a result.
... - runs until Sunday
Rosita Boland
Sediments Of An Ordinary Mind
SFX
The movement started before the dancers stepped on the white floor. Volkmar Klien's slowly shifting composition set an uncertain base for his brother Michael's choreography, predicting the restless movement to follow. The dance floor set the boundary: offstage dancers glugged from water bottles, but once they set foot on the floor they directed their energy at fulfilling tasks based on Joyce's stream of consciousness. Entrances seemed random at the time - less so afterwards - as concentrated bodies thought and moved, sometimes picking up on another's gesture and passing it on. With stillness never an option, the changing number of dancers onstage is the only variation in texture. Michael Klien doesn't necessarily embrace randomness, but he trusts his methodology to articulate his vision, however it emerges. ... - runs until Sunday
Michael Seaver
Topdog/Underdog
Project
Tall Tales Theatre Company, pursuant to its policy to promote female writers, offers this Pulitzer Prize play by Suzan-Lori Parks. Two brothers, black Americans, are sharing a one-room apartment rented by the younger, Booth. He is a petty thief who hopes to become a three-card trickster like his senior, a renowned exponent of that con. But Lincoln has quit and is now working at a bottom- grazing job in which he can be and is replaced by a wax dummy. Lincoln returns to the street game. Booth is tortured by his failure with women and by his general sense of inferiority. Although bound deeply by family affection, the two come to a climactic confrontation. Their whole lives converge in one momentous night, and the rest is pure catharsis. The two actors, Chuk Iwuji and Anthony Ofoegbu, directed by Karl Shiels, are extraordinary. One for the must-see list.
... - runs until October 23rd
Gerry Colgan
Under Observation & Tenderised
SFX
Echo Echo deserve better than a freezing SFX with an audience of four, but a thinly spread festival means there'll be nights like this. In Under Observation Ursula Laeubli's performance presents an interior through constantly changing exterior movements while a video projection magnifies her body. Performing on both sides of a scrim allows her to highlight these conflicts, her figure appearing both live and in the projection. In spite of a projected computer screen and various chairs there is a certain amount of theatrical understatement in Stephen Batts's Tenderised, for three male performers. Uncomfortable and uncertain, the male identity is written, verbalised and embodied; although not needle sharp, the work takes a swipe at quite a few truths along the way.
... - runs until Sunday
Michael Seaver
OTHER REVIEWS
Confusions
Old Museum, Belfast
Without light there can be no shade - a fact Alan Ayckbourn has proved in his witty socialcomedies. Here he proves it many times over, stringing together five one-act plays whose situations are rooted in the everyday life of Middle England. Each time the initial set-up is comic, with Ayckbourn gently poking fun at suburban preoccupations and petty squabbles before deflecting our laughter into the darker corners of the human condition.
A wife with two children and a philandering absentee husband remains in her dressing gown for days on end, forming relationships with other adults through baby talk and scolding; a travelling salesman relieves the boredom of life on the road by pathetically chatting up unattached women at anonymous bars; two bourgeois couples in a restaurant discover that a spot of marital infidelity must be measured against the drive for promotion; a village fête turns to chaos when private grief is accidentally aired over the public-address system; and the park bench becomes a place where everyone wants to talk but nobody wants to listen.
Within the devised framework of a cheesy 1950s radio station, Radio Bruiser, director Lisa May and her cast - Marcia Cassidy, Richard Clements, Simon Imrie, Sharon Morwood and Drew Thompson - have crafted a slick, assured entertainment, punctuated by exemplary performances, which range through 22 characters. In traditional Bruiser fashion, the actors remain onstage throughout, contributing offstage voices and a dizzying array of sound effects with pin-sharp timing.
Together they respond brilliantly to that old theatrical maxim: get them laughing, stop them laughing - and there's the drama.
Ends here tomorrow, then touring to Lisburn, Downpatrick, Coleraine, Coalisland, Armagh, Derry, Cookstown and Kilkenny
Jane Coyle
Terrorism
Granary Theatre, Cork
The cleverly interlocking episodes of this revue-style Russian play are almost self-contained exercises in kinds of terror: the airport bomb, the bedroom control freak, the locker-room bully, the office hierarchy. They offer a view both comic and chilling: weak as the individual may be, and powerless against anonymous malice, violence has its own attractions. Recent Irish history has shown how the appetite for violence is hard to subdue, and in this play the Presnyakov brothers explore not only the psychic disruption caused by random, large-scale terrorism but also the prevalence of violence as an insidious domestic resource. Although director Adam Curtis uses music for the excitement that should have come from the competent but relaxed cast, he imposes enough pace to enliven the text.
Runs until October 16th
Mary Leland
