Fringe reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of Fringe events

I LOVE GUNS**

Smock Alley Theatre

Even the company name, Stam vs O’Neill, sounds less like a collaboration than a showdown. So it proves in performance, with “writer” Gert-Jan Stam and “actress” Jody O’Neill locked in an opaque power struggle, waged in words. Soaked to the skin, as though freshly liberated from a carwash, they sit on either side of a desk, follow a script, and trade positions as creator and creation, leader and follower. The words seem rootless and out of sync though; he tediously dismantling the mechanics of writing (“I am behind my computer now”), while she enquires into her nascent character (“In what ways did I try to become an artist?”). Are they on the same page?

There are dark, elliptical meditations here about control, gender and the power of words (expressed in recurring motifs of guns and ballistics) but not much to connect or ground those abstractions. The confrontation begins to feel like a deadlock, an anatomisation of artistic process without a more significant target. Still, worth a shot.

Runs until Saturday

– Peter Crawley

THE WORK THE WORK ****

Project, Cube

Dance duo Fitzgerald Stapleton are back home with New York praise ringing in their ears. Their Chocolate Factory-commissioned The Work The Workexudes choreographic confidence, even though it grapples with insecurities and the abuse of the female body image.

Well, not exactly grapples, because that’s not the Fitzgerald Stapleton way. Instead, they are happy to let images, speech and sound hang out onstage and leave the coalescence to each individual viewer. Although they regularly perform naked, here the exposure is a more loaded re-articulation of their spoken anxieties and stammering movements. There are also moments of childlike inquisitiveness – “What happens to the words we don’t use?” – and some real divilment, so The Work The Work retains the duo’s bemusement at everyday life. And ultimately it once again shows how the personal statement is far more powerful than the political.

Last performance tonight (sold out)

– Michael Seaver

LITTLE ILIAD ****

Smock Alley Main Space

Little Iliadis a tiny treat of a show. Essentially it stages a lost fragment of Homer's Iliad, in which the unheard of hero Philoctetes confronts Odysseus and Achilles' son Pyrrus about their justification for continuing to fight the Trojan War.

In this inventive production by One Reed Theatre, the debate is staged as a conversation between friends; one of whom, Evan, is live with the audience; the other, Thom, who appears projected upon two miniature human-shaped statues via Skype. Listening in through headphones, the audience is simultaneously invited to share the friends’ privacies and distanced from their relationship, which swings from awkward small-talk to uncomfortable intimacy. But the 40-minute performance is more complex than a commentary on friendship and subtly draws parallels between the ancient epic and modern context of American involvement in Afghanistan with surprisingly powerful effect.

Runs until Saturday

– Sara Keating

RETURN ***

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre

I’ve been swimming in the sea of their stories for years, says spoken-word artist Polarbear of his family and his Birmingham background, the meat and veg of this one-man show. The production is essentially seanchaí-style storytelling, but Polarbear narrates as if the story is a screenplay, setting scenes and detailing motifs and lighting. Projections flicker behind him, snatches of occasional dialogue or words instead of set pieces – it’s clever and deft, but underemployed.

The story itself is lean and nicely executed; some of the story’s imagery is perhaps a little familiar, and there is a sense that if Mean Streets was made in Brum with Ken Loach behind the camera, it would sound and feel like this show. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is grit and heart in this show, and it’s well worth catching; a bit more development could make it a very strong piece of theatre indeed.

Runs until Friday

– Laurence Mackin

DELICIOUS O’GRADY *

Smock Alley Main Space

There were people in the audience on Monday night who found Colm O’Grady’s one-man show funny. I was not one of them. I did not laugh when words like “c**t” and “bollix” were thrown in to spice up weak material. Nor at Mr O’Shite, the school-master, who was less a character than an excuse for a puerile pun. Nor at the many jokes about pigs and potatoes. Nor at the visual gags about paedophile priests. I almost joined in laughing at the bicycle striptease when boxer shorts revealed a potato-sack thong, but the grand unveiling of O’Grady’s penis for the fourth time in an hour snatched any chance of a smirk from my face.

Delicious O’Grady is cheap, offensive Paddywhackery. If that is your thing, you are welcome to it.

Runs until Saturday

– Sara Keating

WORLD’S END LANE *****

The Lab

The moment I step out of Anú Productions extraordinary World's End Lane, still reeling from its conceptual complexity and emotional wallop, three young women approach me and ask about Foley Street. What kind of area is it? This must be part of the show.

I give a quick 100-year history of a once-notorious red-light district, the 1920s battleground for ruthless madames and religious zealots, where the ghosts of desire and destruction inhabit a fitfully regenerated present.

Over the last thrilling, terrifying and utterly transfixing hour I have not learned this history, but lived it; dumbly obeying and following strangers, listening to scandals, confessing secrets, conspiring with an anguished junkie, feeling unnerved and giddy by the one-on-one intimacy of Louise Lowe’s production, agonising over my role as either participant, voyeur or non-intervening citizen, tumbling finally from its enthralling mesh of then and now in a daze of different perspectives.

The women thank me, but they’re just flat hunting. They ask me to pray for them… I leave the show, but it doesn’t leave me.

Runs until Saturday (sold out)

– Peter Crawley

THE CAPPUCCINO CULTURE ***

Smock Alley Boys School

Oh là là. More coffee in the Fringe (no, not the Fringe’s other coffee act, nor the 47 coffees needed a day to keep going). This time it’s a game show – another game show. It certainly has the verve and kick of caffeine, yet retaining the off-hand informality of a coffee date at a cafe.

The show takes us on a virtual tour through Dublin (erm, déjà vu?), pinpointing locations as a starting point for multilingual, muticultural guessing games, which are raucous and full of friendly energy ­ and sometimes uncomfortable when they highlight prejudices of all kinds. Good nature and affection for Dublin and Ireland animate all the proceedings. Yet it still feels unfinished, more of a party game than a theatre production. Randomness is an element of the show, but perhaps more rehearsal or a stronger through-line is needed. It’s a bit of a weak cappuccino, but served up with such charm it’s hard to complain.

Runs until Saturday

– Christine Madden

GREENSTICK BOY ***

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre

"Punk really does have a lot to answer for." In Maggie Cronin's short play Greenstick Boyit is responsible for the broken heart of M, the heroine of Cronin's short, bittersweet monologue of growing up in the East End London suburb of Daggenham or 'Nam, "as veterans like to call it" in the late 1970s.

Thatcherite End of Empire Britain is a heady place for the Irish M, whose participation in local feiseanna is non-ironic. If it is “not cool to be Irish”, it is also not cool to have a boyfriend who is a heroin addict, and the inevitable tragedy that follows M’s entanglement with D is the core of Cronin’s play, despite its tendency to drift around other less important themes.

A careful edit and greater attention to sense of place in the present-day memory format of the performance would create a stronger emotional impact from this promising material.

Runs until Saturday

– Sara Keating

SEX, LIES AND THE KKK ***

Smock Alley Studio

Abie Philbin Bowman tends to see things upside down. So, on the jubilant night that the US elected its first black president, he reached the Klu Klux Klan for comment. This is the springboard for a stand-up routine about racial and sexual stereotypes, in which Philbin Bowman uses his cerebral comic’s toolkit – research, a quick mind, irony and the reductio ad absurdum – to expose the illogic of prejudice.

It’s comedy with a purpose, if not precision (his first excited tangent comes, endearingly, about five seconds in), and though he has some killer one-liners – on Pope Benedict as a Bond villain, whether homophobes should be allowed to marry, or the KKK’s internet homepage disclaimer that it isn’t a dating website – he tends to wring several more lines out of them.

In other areas, though, he doesn’t go far enough: too assiduously right-on to be truly provocative, his riff on monogamy as an unnatural condition comes couched in fretting apologies, as though he doesn’t expect his audience to keep pace with such radical sensibilities. Now who’s being stereotyped?

Runs until Saturday

– Peter Crawley