The Living Room

Pearse Centre, Pearse St, Dublin Aug 15-21 8pm (Thurs/Sat/Sun mat 2pm) €15/€12 087-3621687 outlandishtheatre.com

What do Eve, Lot’s wife and Pandora all have in common? That’s right – curiosity got the better of each. Orpheus may screw up forgetfully, the boy who cried wolf deliberately, but the transgressive women of legends and foundation myths just can’t help themselves.

The moral and the gender bias may be pretty risible, but the sway of dark fantasy can still be seductive. So, when Bluebeard, the ferocious serial monogamist of Charles Perrault’s 17th-century tale, gives his seventh wife a key to a room she is forbidden from entering, the question is not what she’ll do, but why we tell ourselves such stories. To liberate desires or keep them in check?

That also seems to be the urge behind outlandishtheatre, a new company whose writer -performers (Bernie O’Reilly and Maud Hendricks, pictured) here draw out the subtext of sexual awakening and thread it into their framing performance.

A mother tells the Bluebeard fable to her daughter in a nightly effort to frighten desire out of her and suspend her in childhood.

If that seems mistily familiar, as though Bluebeard had run into Black Swan, Sarah Jane Scaife's production ought to find the tingle of fairytale in everyday lives.

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