Fringe reviews

Fringe Festival reviews

WISH I WERE HERE **

Smock Alley Theatre

Four characters go on journeys, their stories and dialogue overlapping to form a propulsive narrative that landscapes their memories. The characters are elemental – a forest ranger who keeps stamps; an art critic who longs for the ocean; and a high-flying businessman – and connect in conversations with a child.

The show starts neatly, with the usual announcements woven into the script, the actors bursting into the suitcase-strewn stages as late arrivals, flustered and harried as the dialogue takes off at a rattling pace. After this, though, the plot seems to lose direction, and what little we learn about the characters is not enough to make them substantial or to evoke our empathy. There are prolonged periods of choreography, as characters shift between picture frames or dance around suitcases, and there is quite a lot of call and response dialogue. The aim, perhaps, is to disconcert and unsettle. Too often, though, it comes off as contrived and overwrought.

Runs until tomorrow

– Laurence Mackin

MAXIMUM JOY **

Smock Alley Theatre

THEATREclub’s play is, in their words, “about a girl trying to be in a show”. It’s actually two girls, but one remains asleep for 90 per cent of the play.

The other, may or may not be Doireann Coady, engaged in a Godot-esque cycle that borders on OCD. She bathes, dances to 1960s music, smokes cigarettes and makes houses from paper cups.

These repetitive tics are initially without language, a muted routine punctuated only by YouTube clips and Sonic Youth videos. Then she murmurs, mutters an aside and finds her voice – but no answers, something that extends to the audience.

A record on repeat intones “the only security you’ll ever have in your life is your ability to perform” and Coady is a confident performer, who does vulnerable and comedic (the wonderfully timed Carpenters moments) with a hair flick, but the narrative feels flat, structurally chaotic and doesn’t do her justice.

Final show tonight

– Sinéad Gleeson

THE NEXT TWO DAYS OF EVERYTHING ***

Project Cube

For a man so unassuming that even his name won’t indulge a single capital letter, a smith certainly gets around. With just a candle and xylophone for company, his brief monologue takes us from Oslo to Dublin, Lisbon to Singapore, treading softly through environmental and political concerns while leaving an impressive carbon footprint.

His everyman insights are deliberately short of expertise or provocation, yet so unadorned they become gently hypnotic. He worries about oil, climate change, war, the economy, and living in the looming shadow of catastrophe.

But he sees two sides to every story: corporations with forward-thinking energy policies, Buddhist monasteries with gift shops, a world confused by individual culpability and broad exculpation.

His words will not change your life, but they quietly reflect how our lives are changing. It is the big picture created from small moments.

Runs until tomorrow

– Peter Crawley

ADVENTURES OF A MUSIC NERD (NOT SNOB!) ***

George Bernard Shaw

Adventures of a Music Nerd (Not Snob!) is musical therapy for performer Ronan Leonard, who charts his personal history through significant songs from his album collection. Framed for the audience as a game of musical bingo, we mark his memories with an X as the music he plays evokes moments of darkness and joy in his life. It is an unusual format for the theatre confessional and the unusual venue, a derelict double-decker bus in the beer garden of a pub, adds to the quirky feel of the hour-long event. The material, however, is more traditional (a boy’s coming-of-age through music), but some of his admissions of self- loathing and negativity push the boundaries towards the truly uncomfortable. Overall it feels embryonic rather than complete.

However, there are worse ways to spend an evening than with a music nerd whose passion overrides the human impulse for self-preservation.

Final show tonight (sold out)

– Sara Keating

CITY WEST SIDE STORY **

Bewley’s Café Theatre

There is no writer credited for the conception of City West Side Story, so I can only assume that the show was devised by its three performers, stand-up comedians Eleanor Tiernan and Fred Cooke, and singer Nicola Gainey. Stand-up thrives on recognisable stereotypes but over an hour the paper-thin characterisations in this musical drama become increasingly crude and less and less funny. The set, a back-drop of cartoon symbols of the Celtic Tiger, gives the whole affair a thrown-together feel, while the performances range from solid (Gainey) to deranged (Tiernan) to downright weird (Cooke). The biggest problem, however, is that the gags about cocaine, expensive sandwiches, mocachinos, etc have been heard so many times before. “Ireland needs an intervention,” City West Side Story: The Musical concludes, well so does this script, whose attempt at social satire is better suited to the Laughter Lounge than to a traditionally framed piece of theatre.

Runs until tomorrow (sold out)

– Sara Keating

I AM A MAN ***

Top floor, Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre

“I’m thinking of rearranging the gum. into a cascade of strengths,” says Una MacNulty’s checkout woman in this one-person play. For anyone who has ever worked in a shop, this will strike a chord: the effort of trying to carve out a niche of individual value amid the relentless monotony of the checkout – even if it is just colour-co-ordinating chewing gum. Writer Iris Park moves from the particular to the global, as her main character discovers a picture of a striking worker from 1968 in Memphis, his plaintive placard giving the play its name, and forcing the checkout woman to face up to her own invisibility. This lunchtime play, with its dull beeps and electronic trills, and the same customers’ slavish devotion to the same products, all with the petty bitchiness that goes on between the aisles, makes for a clever and effective 40 minutes that will make you shop next time with wonder.

Runs until Saturday 25th

– Laurence Mackin