The Fringe takes off

As Dublin's Absolut Fringe festival begins, Rosemary Mac Cabewatches dance hit the streets, while our reviewers rate the opening shows

WHEN WE arrive, alone, in couples or in groups, at the junction of North Earl Street and Henry Street on Saturday afternoon – during a glorious two-hour sunshine spell in Dublin city – the lines are drawn. Red ropes are laid carefully in a square around a "stage" on which Irish dance theatre company Ponydance is preparing its show, on the first day of Dublin's Absolut Fringe festival.

Ponydance's Leonie McDonagh is first on the scene, asking punters to come closer. "Don't be shy," she says and, spotting me on the phone, asks my name. "Rosemary," I answer, and resume my conversation with our hardworking photographer. "It's just starting," I tell him, and McDonagh, picking up on the gist, announces into the microphone: "Rosemary's waiting on her date!" Oh, so it's that kind of show.

For a little over a fortnight, Absolut Fringe – a festival of music, dance and theatre – will take over Dublin and Ponydance's street spectacle is but one of the events that took place on Saturday to mark launch day. An audience gathered, some forewarned, others curious at the growing crowd, to take advantage of the free theatre.

McDonagh narrates the story: her friend is on her way; she has a date; she's nervous.The "friend" (Paula O'Reilly) then dances her way through her nerves, with a mid-routine costume change to boot.

There is dancing, there are high kicks, there is underwear on show from McDonagh and Ryan O'Neill, who distracts the audience as O'Reilly changes – in a pop-up changing tent – from pink mini to an Adidas tracksuit, before the trio shimmies their way through a mixture of Stevie Wonder's Superstitiousand Benny Benassi's Satisfaction.

"It's our way of giving a gift to the Irish public," says Róise Goan, festival organiser. "We love Ponydance; we wanted people to be able to see them for free."

The audience loves it too. There is arm-waving, there is participation (two women join in, early on, one shouting "I'll show yiz some moves"), there are children and pensioners alike. Where theatre is often accused of being "elitist", this street spectacle is proof that there are no hard and fast rules – sometimes, it's just about being in the right place at the right time.

Absolut Fringe runs until September 26. See fringefest.com for details

CLARE FITZGERALD

"I saw this was on, on the Fringe website, so I came along. I'd seen Ponydance before in a small venue where you get the jokes a little bit more, because you can hear everything. They're great in a small environment. Street performance is great fun; everyone can take a look, and – look – everyone's happy."

EILEEN O'NEILL

"I think Ponydance are brilliant . . . I'm not sure I'd get up with them, I'd only go up if they dragged me up. We're going to see F*ck My Lifetonight in the Project, as part of Fringe."

ROSA MARTINEZ

"I saw on the programme that this was on – it's great to have street performances. I wish there were more of them; they're open to everybody, and great fun. I'm going to go and see as much as I can during the festival."

PAUL DUFF

"I was just passing by so I stopped to see what was going on. It was an interesting way to get people to pay attention; I heard rapping and stopped . . . it was really good, like the circus, very acrobatic."

PAJAMA MEN – LAST STAND TO REASON *****

Absolut Fringe Factory

Your guard is usually up at any Fringe festival. The overly-experimental, the mawkishly self-indulgent and just the plain daft are always lurking with intent. What a relief then that within five minutes of Pajama Men's show to be able to sit back and relax; fully secure in the knowledge that you are in the hands of a theatrical duo who are accomplished, performance-fit and ridiculously talented. Using heaps of physical comedy, startling vocal ability, stand-up and improv, the pair (bereft of all props save for their own bodies and voices) bring you on a magical mystery tour which takes in countless characters, a web-like story structure and so many rapidly-switched scene changes you feel in need of a Sky Plus-style pause and rewind button. And there are great lines: whether describing a goat as "how Satan would design a horse" or something so quiet "you could hear a pin whispering as it dropped". The Pajama Men have it all. Do yourself a favour.

Finished on Saturday, September 25.

– Brian Boyd

HEROIN ****

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin

This Theatre Club production follows three characters in thrall to heroin, but there are no easy readings to be had, and this production resists literal interpretations. At first, one character appears to be the addiction itself, the druggy conscience of another addict who roams listlessly around his ragged apartment. As the play develops, these actors become full-fledged characters with names, histories and motives. The play's strength lies in how effectively it conveys the reality of an addictive existence: the cyclical, almost inevitable futility that goes hand-in-hand with life in certain parts of Dublin.

Through these three characters, the play effectively charts the rise of heroin, and society's inability to deal with it, from the late 1970s to the present day, and the ghosts of addicts past haunts the script (who remembers Josie Dwyer, for example?). This production could perhaps have been shorter without losing any of its potency, but this is a tough play about hard times and a horrible existence that is handled with skill and ambition.

Until Friday

– Laurence Mackin

CLEANER ****

Tiesan Café, Filmbase, Dublin

Although there's one performer, Cleaner is in no way a one woman show. Puppeteer Medb Lambert (yes, she's one of those Lamberts) draws on a cast of brooms, mops and dusters to transform into characters from her past.

Arriving to clean up an empty café, she discovers a cassette marked "Play Me" full of love classics like The Man I Love and My Baby Just Cares For Me, which trigger memories, from ugly forced sex to romantic smooching to a final joyous romp behind the counter. It's a simple enough premise, but director Donal Gallagher finds subtleties in the action that reveal the sad realities of this marginal life.

Lambert is deft with the puppetry, but her own character felt over-projected at times so that the audience weren't always drawn, voyeur-like, into her world.

Until Saturday

– Michael Seaver

MEDEA ****

Samuel Beckett Theatre

For all its mythic proportions, the story of Medea is our every jealousy, betrayal and unrestrained rage writ large. Here, Siren Productions impressive staging of Robin Robertson's translation magnifies its passions while presenting the tragedy as a domestic drama with lyrical motion.

Director Selina Cartmell moves her excellent cast through Paul O'Mahony's strikingly exposed two-tiered house over Conor Linehan's discreet but constant score. Over-reliant on archetypes for emotional resonance, Cartmell focuses on a stylish, placeless aesthetic. Eileen Walsh's commanding Medea is dressed to kill when appealing to the women of Corinth, for instance, but conceals her bloodiest thoughts behind the apron of a domestic goddess. Such dark wit can make other characters seem trivial (Bryan Murray's Creon looks like he just stepped off a yacht) yet the drama doesn't lose voltage. "Beauty turned to horror," Ronan Leahy says in a masterful description of one vengeful scene. The compelling, unsettling power of this Medea is that it folds beauty and horror into the same moment.

Finished on Saturday, September 25

– Peter Crawley

MY LIFE IN DRESSES ***

Project Cube

Every woman has had a memorable frock in her life, and a surprising number of them are happy to speak to Sorcha Kennedy about them. For her project, Kennedy has collected stories – both her own and those of a number of Irish women ­ for this intimate piece. It could also be called "If These Frocks Could Talk", because they do – they even sing You Don't Own Me.

Regrettably, Kennedy seems a little too fond of the disparate elements she has ­ audio interviews, films and vintage photos as well as racks of dresses ­ to stitch them into a coherent whole, and the show rambles, feels incomplete and without conviction. A great pity, because there is really excellent material here. Good news is that the project is ongoing, so maybe she can tighten it up for a future run (or sequels: My Life in Hats, Shoes?). We all really love a good frock.

Until Saturday

– Christine Madden

AS YOU ARE NOW SO ONCE WERE WE ****

Project

Ever wonder what Cubist theatre would look like? This production by the very promising The Company uses no other props or set except for countless, seemingly indiscriminate cardboard packing boxes, and shifts them about with such skill, creative intelligence and effortless grace that you see their day-long odyssey in Dublin clearly before you.

Except effortless it isn't: much thought and rehearsal have gone into this production, which (like Cubism) snips apart the events and musings of four young actors and fits them back together into a seemingly fractured but eloquent, breathless and utterly charming whole. Company members Brian Bennett, Rob McDermott, Tanya Wilson, Nyree Yergainharsian and Jose Miguel Jiminez have crafted an inventive and inspirational piece for theatre professionals with enough wit and charm to appeal to any punter off the street. It drags only a bit at the end, otherwise it would get five stars. Don't miss it. You'll be sorry.

Until Wednesday

– Christine Madden

JERK **

Project Cube

The true story of Texas serial killer Dean Corll – who raped, tortured and murdered 27 boys in the 1970s with the help of two accomplices – is disturbing enough. Re-enacted here as a deliberately crude puppet show by one of the accomplices, David Brooks, Jerk is appropriately sickening but its effect carries no deeper meaning.

Played with unnerving jitteriness by Jonathan Capdevielle, Brooks uses children's toys, ventriloquy, a torrent of drool and seemingly limitless supply of squelching sounds to re-enact the degradations. The postmodern exercise of director Gisèle Vienne's production, based on Dennis Cooper's novella, is to turn her audience into fresh accomplices, inviting us to read graphic descriptions of coercion and torture in a "fanzine", re-staging murders in our minds, turning our imaginations into dungeons.

"This character projection shit is a real rush," says one killer, manipulating a victim, and Vienne makes hideous analogies with the puppet show. If Jerk wishes to show that artificial means can draw genuine revulsion the point is well proven. But without insight or ethical responsibility, to what end?

Until Tuesday

– Peter Crawley

NEUROPOLIS ***

Smock Alley

Questions questions questions. For Henry, the amnesiac anti-hero of Gary Duggan and Gavin Logue’s devised psychodrama, it is not clear whether remembering or forgetting is the more traumatic option. Waking, guilt-stricken, in a Phibsboro laneway after some unknown personal catastrophe, Henry is reintroduced to his changing city by the ghosts of his past. “Rip it up, Henry, rip it up,” they advise him when he tries to find answers, or to assemble an identity, by jotting his fragmentary impressions in a notebook. “Every day is a new beginning.”

Performed by a lively and confident ensemble, with the convincingly distressed Matthew Ralli at its centre, Henry’s quest works well in the evocative old-Dublin surrounds of Smock Alley, where a standing audience is arrayed interrogatively along walkways around and above the stage. Short, sharp and atmospheric, it is a theatrical hour to be enjoyed while passing through the city, like a thought-provoking incident observed on the street.

Until Friday

– Giles Newington

Worth catching

BERLIN LOVE TOUR ****

Meet at Absolut Fringe Factory, Liffey St

Early in this walking tour of Berlin – a role played gracefully, if sometimes inattentively, by the city of Dublin – our guide Hilary O’Shaugnessy stops to point out a building that isn’t there. Describing the demolished Palast der Republik as we gaze into a matching absence, her words nudge gently at the spellbinding conceit of Playgroup’s production. Between evocative descriptions of monuments to the Holocaust or the Berlin Wall, she soon begins to spill personal details of her broken relationship, first solemnly, then with mounting emotion, and gradually her performance about memorials becomes a memorial itself.

Tracing histories in buildings and emotions in scars, writer Lynda Radley and director Tom Creed distil complex ideas into moving motifs. The contradictory impulses to acknowledge and exorcise, to forgive and forget, mingle with the stealthy delivery of a break-up soundtrack and Berlin and love are beautifully, even painfully evoked. Although stretches between tour stops allow our attentions to wander, O’Shaugnessy’s tour-guide mantra is a gentle balm for history and heartache: “I think it’s time we move on.”

Until Sat

– Peter Crawley