Irish Times writers review In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at City Quay Car-Park, Or Press Escape at the Project Space Upstairs, So Long, Sleeping Beauty at Bewley's, Tales from the Northside at the International Bar, The Gods Are Not to Blame at the Project Upstairs and Snap at the IAWS Warehouse, Cork.
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields*
City Quay Car-Park
Helen Meany
plenty of time to speculate on the potential of City Quay car-park: what a fantastic setting for an open-air opera, a dance spectacle, a party - or anything other than this inert production from Hana Bi Theatre Company.
The uncredited translator must take a lot of the blame; the text by the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès has been rendered into stilted, lifeless dialogue, so it is perhaps understandable that the two performers, Hope Brown and Lauren Salaún, seem unable to animate it. They appear to be utterly disconnected from the words they are declaiming.
What's it about? The chance nocturnal encounter of two men who may or may not want something from each other: conversation, confrontation, sexual satisfaction, violence. The possibilities are explored in abstract terms while they prowl around each other stagily, ignoring the space behind them. Just walk away, we want to scream - before the audience does.
Runs until October 11th
Or Press Escape**
Project Space Upstairs
Peter Crawley
The hollow trickle of Edit Kaldor's keypad resounds like a tumble of logs while a huge computer screen chronicles a life mediated through technology. For the appropriately-named Hungarian artist, Edit's installation/
performance is a game of drafts: archiving her dreams, continually revising her "to do" list, attempting to compose letters, downloading cartoons, checking her security web-cam, brainstorming an "enterprise", and negotiating with threatening e-mails from Irish immigration.
Initially, the construction and revision of her world (where the backspace key renders everything impermanent) is grippingly voyeuristic, building an intertextual portrait of the artist through "web-link narrative". But what a tangled web she weaves.
Kaldor invites larger questions; in the age of instantaneous communication, why is she unable to express herself, establish human contact, or simply log off? As sighs and yawns punctuate the monotony of her thesis, however, the audience realises long before Edit that there's a world outside her Windows.
Ends today
So Long, Sleeping Beauty****
Bewley's Café Theatre
Gerry Colgan
Mahon's first play is a bitter-sweet story of the souring side of love. A man is killed in an accident, and his wife finds a bundle of letters from his gay lover, paralleling their marriage. After a while, she phones the man, and they meet. She gives him the letters, and they talk about their lives.
After initial hesitations, they open up to each other. She feels that she has spent 30 years of marriage in a self-effacing vacuum, hardly knowing her partner. He mourns the loss of the one love in his life. The woman in particular reveals more than is probable. They warm to each other, but cannot part as friends; too much history.
There is an excess of contrivance and sentiment in the story, but it has an engaging difference and elicits delightful performances from Bernadette McKenna and Philip Judge, directed by Michael James Ford.
Runs until Oct 25th
Tales from the Northside****
International Bar
Fíona Ní Chinnéide
The International Bar is already in costume as Kenny's Northside Inn, the setting for Ronan Carr's highly entertaining evening of tall stories and talking pints. Your host is the barman (Paul Ronan) who serves up romantic musings and grisly ends to various wretched characters in a series of clever, surreal scenes: the dejected man (Luke Griffin) in conversation with his pint (Ronan Carr); the deliberations over a dud time-machine sold to the barman by H.G. Wells; the Irish Times food critic who habitually bludgeons his "beautiful companions" to death for devouring profiteroles. Although once or twice the humour falls flat (yes, like a bad pint) closing time comes all too soon. Packed with the "poxymorans" and "funny peculiar" moments that punctuate life, Tales from the Northside is a fine blend of good fun, fortified with puns and more than a measure of truth. Get there early for a seat at the bar.
Ends today
The Gods Are Not to Blame***
Project Upstairs
Amy Redmond
Leading Nigerian playwright, Ola Rotimi, wrote The Gods Are Not To Blame in 1968 during the dark days of the Nigerian civil war. Overtly political, it uses the Oedipus story to address contemporary issues in Africa and is a sharp warning to people to take responsibility for what is happening to them. This hugely ambitious project from Àrà m Be, led by Bisi Adigun as the volatile King Odewale, refreshingly underlines the original function of the Fringe to develop new Irish companies. All 40 performers are of African descent and some speeches are hard to follow. The use of drumming, dance and mime, as originally billed, would have compensated for these incoherences and heightened the drama. Mojisola Adebayo as Queen Ojuola has the necessary emotional depth, Larry O'Neill Ojedale as Baba Fakunle is a convincing prophet but it is Kunle Animasaun as Alaka who shines.
Ends tomorrow
Snap
IAWS Warehouse, Cork
Mary Leland
The ingenuity with which people can remain cruel to each other yet tied to each other is explored in Snap, a new play by Ger Bourke presented by Corcadorca. Maire Hastings and Sean Flood are the long-married couple whose marriage is dominated by the wrongs done to them as children. These, in the fairly recent past in fairly rural Ireland, are not given any psychological interpretation; the couple and their children have to live with that legacy and deal with it as best they can, which is not very well. Watching this sadness and helpless, agonised violence infect the marriage is to encounter a familiar kind of endurance. Nothing is gained from it, there is no transformation except the weary satisfactions of revenge, yet there is a sense that this is something known, recognisable, our own. These are uncomfortable truths.
Ger Bourke's script has been worked over during "a period of development" with the help, among others, of Barry Cassin and Ann Byrne. What has emerged from this process becomes, in the grip of Hastings and Flood, a play packed with resonance. Their work is faultless, powerful, professional. They construct the intimate connection that supports the resilience of the marriage and bring a subtle conviction even to the weaker elements of the scenario. Director Pat Kiernan establishes the domestic reality of Davy Dummigan's tilted stage, set in the vast and dreary waste of a disused warehouse where the enhanced voices echo in the gloom. Tough love, I think they call it.
Ends Oct 4th, and then at the Dublin Fringe Festival
T he ESB Dublin Fringe Festival box office is at 12 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin (formerly DesignYard). You can book by telephone at 1850- 374643. The fee of €4 a ticket is waived if you book at www.fringefest.com
