Stage Struck

There's life in the old city yet, writes PETER CRAWLEY

FOR THE second time in its 16-year history, our capital’s fringe festival missed a crucial component from its title: Dublin. That certainly hasn’t been true of the actual programme for this year’s Absolut Fringe (née Dublin Fringe Festival), which this weekend concludes a vintage year marked by artists with a rapturous understanding of the city. The Fringe’s fascination with a place and its people, its history and development, the swirl of motion and cacophony of voices that animates it, has given theatre a new energy.

The sprawl of city narratives often seems more at home in other artforms, where roaming prose or a sweeping camera can take in its expanse, letting us see one place through countless eyes, capturing its geography and its time.

One famous and still daunting example turned a day in Dublin into a literary odyssey, where a city may be as hard to define as a nation: "the same people living in the same place". The Company's brilliant As You Are Now So Once Were We, took its title from a graveside musing in the Hades episode of Ulysses: "All these here once walked around Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we."

The show could not have been more full of life, taking the competing perspectives and diverging memories of its four performers to recreate the dailiest of days, while moving countless cardboard boxes – those icons of homelessness – with masterly choreography to build a city in front of our eyes.

The aim of Playgroup's affecting Berlin Love Tour, on the other hand, is to make one city disappear into another. As its guide points out sights and memorials, we superimpose them on familiar surrounds.

The city turns performer: Temple Bar plays Kreuzberg, the Liffey does its best Spree. When the tour becomes its own memorial to a broken relationship, though, it shows how cities are defined and possessed by people, alternatively adored or taken for granted. “My Berlin is crumbling,” Hilary says as her heart breaks, and after its reunification Dublin looks strangely new.

Both THEATREclub's Heroin and Anu's extraordinary World's End Lanemade an older Dublin vividly present.

Grace Dyas’s innovative, enervating exploration of addiction measured out its decades in music and rhyme. Louise Lowe’s eye-opening and unnerving performance installation about the once-notorious red-light district of Monto made us see Foley Street as a double exposure, a dizzying mesh between then and now.

Fergal McCarthy's LiffeyTowninstallation slows every bridge crossing. Its floating Monopoly hotels and houses bob in satirical tribute to the city's recent history, but its tranquil glow gives a gentle reassurance of the power of art to create and rebuild.

Like so much of what has been great in this year's Fringe, LiffeyTownshows you that a city can be reflected as well as transformed.