Pregnant?! ****
Project Upstairs You're what?! Following a night of passion with a bunny rabbit, Japanese performance artist and confirmed animal lover Mamoru Iriguchi finds himself "with litter". So begins a beautifully surreal journey through the landscapes of worry, childhood memory, fairytale and complicated psychology, all told with the arch simplicity of PowerPoint animations.
As an ever-changing scenography enswirls his body with graphics sweet and crude, Iriguchi enters a womb of his own creation.
That this involves moving back in with his mother (literally – his residence is renewed via her cervix) should give Freudian followers plenty to stroke their chins with. But the endless consideration of Iriguchi's material and its deceptively breezy delivery swaddles you in amusement and affection. By the time we join cute rabbit skeletons in a traditional pub located somewhere in the spinal cortex of his mother, and naturally connect its blissful nonsense with parental and sexual anxiety, the miracle is not that you have entered someone's body, but spent some time in Iriguchi's wonderful head. Peter Crawley
Group Therapy For One *
O’Connell Bridge to Harold’s Cross
After meeting on O’Connell Bridge, director Grace Dyas takes us on a Dublin bus to Shane’s house. She assures us that Shane is a nice guy and lists all the reasons why. Apparently, when we get there we will only see the bad side of Shane. Even allowing for the possibility of irony, Dyas’s preamble is worryingly mawkish.
Shane Byrne greets us and invites us into his "front kitchen", as he calls it. Thus the awful, meandering, content-less, mediocre, spurious confessional begins. Group Therapy For One lacks any of the qualities one would normally associate with the idea of performance. Shane talks about how analytical he is. If only there were analysis. He chats about his show, but there is no event. There is a chasm between telling an audience what you're going to do and actually doing it. This is one parlour game that falls embarrassingly flat. Avoid. Patrick Brennan
