Fringe Festival Reviews

The Irish Timesreviews a selection of performances from this year's Fringe Festival

Basin ****

Blessington

In an unsettling opening sequence, choreographed by Emma O’Kane, tens of figures burst forth from the apertures of the Gate Lodge at Blessington Basin. Dressed in costumes from different eras, we sense the layers of history that have brought us here; the palimpsest of the thousands of stories that have enriched the small public park’s history.

Inside the house, the audience moves among the ghosts: the children playing games in the wardrobe, the saint in the hotpress, the bride in the shower trapped by her own nerves. Imaginatively lit by Sarah Jane Sheils, Basin is a living, breathing installation piece – imagistic rather than narrative-based – but the traces of furniture, lightly sketched in by artist Owen Boss, and original scorch marks conspire to suffuse every level of the house with a haunting.

Outside the house, the autobiographical elements of director Louise Lowe’s conception are brought into confrontation with contemporary life, Maeve Fitzgerald’s haunted drug-addict providing the link between two worlds. Basin then becomes a promenade piece, where short plays by Gary Duggan, Jessica Traynor and Lowe herself bring light to the lives whose stories will enrich the tapestry of Basin’s still unfolding history.

In a production this ambitious not every idea reaches fulfilment, but director Louise Lowe’s overall vision resonates long after the park gates are closed. Ends Fri

Sara Keating

Aerowaves ***
Project

The mixture of acts in the Fringe's Aerowaves shows mean you can be elated and deflated in the space of an hour. This year was no different with Caroline Simon's wonderfully witty Pieceand Busy Rocks' gimmicky Throwing Rocks.

Simon dragged us into her make-believe performance where she – a long-legged, hot pants-
wearing heroine – dances with the dashing male lead amidst champagne fountains and 100 children singing Ode to Joy. The reality is less romantic: she remains dressed in dowdy grey and black on Project's bare stage for the half-hour. In the end we learn that dull, everyday objects in her life have been exaggerated to create her fantasy story, a bit like Verbal at the end of The Usual Suspects.

In contrast there was little guile in Throwing Rocks, where two performers present Pilobolus-like deconstructions of the dancing body, but without wit or adventure. Run concluded

Michael Seaver

F.L.O.W./Essais Emission ****
Smock Alley

Dutch performing artist Neel de Jong has the presence for this sort of thing. Enveloped in a blindingly white duvet coat, patent heels and sunglasses, could she be a stray celebrity wannabe from a reality show? Improvising in her “Fabulous, Lucky Outrageous World”, she advances tentatively on her audience with a quizzical look, Perhaps she knows one of us? She meditates in word and movement on the seamier side of the entertainer’s life; the let down, loneliness, and tawdriness of it all.

Underwhelming, but you do wish she wouldn’t leave so soon.

Parisian singer Perrine is an original. A talented eccentric troubadour with a portable electric picnic hamper of technology around her neck, mixing, overlaying, downloading and backtracking her own soundscape.

She bows to the folk tradition and then deftly turns it inside out and her voice, soaring and falling, harks to Sandy Denny and also Sinéad O’Connor, with its vulnerable melodic clarity and the ethereal poetic storytelling of her songs in French and English Seona Mac Réamoinn

The Infant **
St Mary's Abbey

When a pair of (government?) agents – absurd and Pinteresque boors – find a drawing that seems to pose a threat to world order, a circular story, too allusive and repetitive to be called a plot, begins.

Maisie Lee’s production for Mirari competes against the space of St Mary’s Abbey. It drains the production of atmosphere and also presents the company with a series of logistical difficulties: black-outs are impossible, the cast must walk across the playing space to assume positions, and the grandeur of St Mary’s history makes Robert Bradish’s set look flimsy and cheap.

Oliver Lansley’s play is about political paranoia, and the hysteria that seems inevitable in humanity; after destroying two innocent people’s lives, the agents and the audience are no closer to a resolution. The structure is ultimately very clever, but in this misguided production the play fizzles out like a damp squib. Ends Sat

Sara Keating

La Clique Up Late*****
Spiegeltent

All the performers are “available for casual sex after the show”, the moustachioed Mario, Queen of the Circus, promised the audience at the first of this year’s new late-night weekend shows from La Clique.

Apart from that generous offer though, this “cheekier, bolder” version of the company’s spectacular but intimate burlesque circus was only slightly camper and more explicit than the treats this charismatic company have been serving up for the past three years in the Spiegeltent.

The atmosphere of anticipation among the packed crowd was in no way diminished by a prolonged wait for Frodo the rubber man's return from the Late Latestudio before the show could begin, as this, we knew, is a company that delivers.

Starting on a high with the insouciantly brilliant strongman duo The English Gents (this year revealing their underlying Irishness), the roster of breathtaking acts passing across the tiny round stage gave us acrobatics, unicycles, hula hoops, contortions and, perhaps most exhilaratingly given the confined space, the high-speed gyrations of the Skating Aratas.

Wit, spectacle, artistry, great music – sadly, it's the final year at the Fringe for this "dysfunctional family" of virtuosos who are now having to deal with international success, so do whatever juggling you can to get tickets. La Cliqueruns until Sat at 6.30pm La Clique Up Lateis on Fri and Sat at 9.30pm

Giles Newington

Starvin***
Project, Space Upstairs

Performers Emma Fitzgerald and Áine Stapleton sit at the side of the stage through most of Starvin. It's a position they also occupy as choreographers. This isn't hands-on, strung-together kind of choreography, but seems a loosely constructed framework for the four naked dancers (and one clothed musician) to bring their own artistry to the work. It's risky business, in particular when adhering to a slowly paced rhythm throughout.

For every moment of simple beauty – like a plaintive duet for the creators, where time seemed to freeze as they stood face-to-face before gently touching – there were minutes that were less engaging, like Jan Ritsema’s final overstated solo. Patient viewing is needed to be rewarded by these snippets of magic. Run concluded

Michael Seaver

Wondermart***
A supermarket near the Box Office

Supermarket interactions are not often artistic endeavours. Unless, that is, they come courtesy of Rotozaza, the folks behind last year's Fringe hit Etiquette. This year, they're arming the willing with an MP3 player and sending them into supermarkets, skewing this everyday retail experience through the simple mechanism of a voice in the ear. As you, the sole audience member, wander through the aisles and follow instructions, you are commanded to engage with packaging, labels, the bright lights, your fellow shoppers, and the shelves of clamouring products, on a whole new level.

Information about the insidious geography of supermarket design and how consumers make their conscious and unconscious choices is interspersed with invocations to stop, look, feel, touch and even contemplate some light-fingered theatrics of your own. The concept is clever and the result an altered engagement with the commonplace, the quality of which depends entirely on the level of participation from each individual audience member.

And though Wondermartdoesn't quite match the imaginative orchestrations of Etiquette, it still succeeds, like the best of theatre, in shining a new light on the quotidian of human experience. Bargain retail therapy. Ends Sat

Fiona McCann