Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: 21 shows to catch, from comedy to cabaret, clubbing and wrestling

Help! With 79 wildly contrasting events coming up around Dublin over 16 days, how to choose? This year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, which begins on Saturday, September 9th, and runs until Sunday, September 24th, has 562 performances in 32 venues, including 45 world and 18 Irish premieres. Here’s a selection to consider, ranging from comedy, theatre, music, dance, circus and physical performance to after-dark cabaret, clubbing and wrestling, audio adventures, immersive experiences and live art installations, as well as events for children and younger people.

Only an Octave Apart

Gate Theatre, September 5th-10th

The cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond and the American countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo team up for Only an Octave Apart, a musical fantasia presented by Gate Theatre and Fringe, expressing queer identities and mixing classical and pop for a new pathway between opera and politically subversive cabaret.

Who Wants to Write an Email

Lir Academy, September 9th-12th

Billed as (probably) the world’s first interactive quizshow about artificial-intelligence-generated text, Who Wants to Write an Email turns audience members into contestants trying to distinguish human from machine. Developed by the performer Laura Allcorn and the Science Foundation Ireland researcher Jennifer Edmond in sessions across Ireland, the show promises to make you think, laugh and question what you know about being a human in an automated world.

Blue Thunder

Meeting at 10-13 Thomas Street, September 9th-23rd

Blue Thunder is an immersive play by Padraic Walsh that’s staged in a 12-seater taxi. It’s 3am, and Brian isn’t taking any more fares – until his drunk sons show up. One of them has a plan for something horrendous, and the audience is coming with him.

Project Arts Centre, September 9th-15th

Hothouse was originally commissioned by Thisispopbaby for its Where We Live festival in 2020. Scuppered by Covid, this climate-change comedy makes it to the stage three years later, staged by Malaprop. Told through songs, it addresses how our grandchildren can possibly remember us fondly after what we’ve done to the world.

Nowhere Better Than This Place

Dublin Castle Chapel Royal, September 9th-13th

For Nowhere Better Than This Place, Andy Ingamells and Seán Clancy promise solemn and seductive music for multiple synthesisers, live and recorded concrete sounds, physical theatre and projected concrete poetry about people needing a safe place to call home.

DublinLand

Lir Academy, September 10th-16th

Satire with a great premise, from Cian Jordan and Matthew Tallon, DublinLand is about what the city is becoming. In the near future, a time of crisis, the taoiseach announces they’ve sold Dublin to corporate investors to turn it into a theme park offering an experience “more Irish than Ireland itself”. A launch press conference presents the dystopian plan as an advancement for industry, tourism and culture. Take a rollercoaster to work instead of the Luas, get paid just to be Irish, live your whole life as a Truman Show-style performance for leprechaun-hunting tourists.

Ruvheneko

Smock Alley Theatre, September 10th-12th

Ruvheneko is billed as a multidisciplinary experience debuting Kayssie K’s poetry collection exploring self-identity, women’s rights and creative expression, and celebrating the strength and resilience of minority women.

Texture Like Sun

Samuel Beckett Theatre, September 11th-14th

Texture Like Sun is combines contemporary dance and theatre to depict three people spiralling through cycles of dependency, addiction, trauma and drug use – but also promises flashes of absurd humour and dark comedy. From the choreographer Diarmuid Mayock Armstrong and Crooked Thinking, with an ambient original score by his mother, Dee Armstrong (Kila), and brother, Lughaidh Armstrong (Sky Atlas). Created in their geodesic-dome studio and performing-arts residency space in Co Leitrim.

Drainage Scheme

Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, September 11th-16th

Focusing on an 18th-century family living on the edge, struggling to survive, Drainage Scheme, a rural drama written and directed by Richard Walsh (Noke Theatre), mixes experimental music and performance techniques. Copresented by the Abbey and Fringe, it’s the result of five years of research into a time of radical change, when Cork city ballooned in size and rural Munster contracted into a cow-based monoeconomy.

Paddy Lama: The Shed Talks

Smock Alley Theatre, September 11th-20th

Paddy Lama: The Shed Talks, the comedian Jason Byrne’s first play, is about his father, the subject of yarns in his standup for years, and who died a couple of years ago. “If you don’t continue to talk about someone when they die, they die twice,” Paddy Byrne said, and this solo piece, directed by Brokentalkers’ Feidlim Cannon, aims to bring him back to life, channelled through his son.

Mosh

Project Arts Centre, September 13th-17th

Is it violence or dancing? What are the rules? What do bacteria and moshers have in common? Why would anyone do it? Questions about moshing subculture may be answered by Mosh, which features live music, real interviews, humour and lots of headbanging from five performers, choreographed by Rachel Ní Bhraonáin.

The Garden of Shadows

National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, September 14th-24th

After last year’s sell-out Remnant Ecologies at the Botanic Gardens, Jony Easterby returns with The Garden of Shadows, another large-scale outdoor installation there, a sensory journey through the mysteries of the night. Art and nature converge in immersive sound and light installations celebrating the natural world’s beauty and interconnectedness.

You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating)

Meet at Pembroke Cottages, September 14th-22nd

You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating) is an intimate performance for one audience member at a time, in a cottage, from the collaborative artists Tasteinyourmouth. Carrie is “done with the world” and lives in her bathroom on slim noodles, chopped-parsley baths and snail-mucus-whale-placenta face masks. She’s visited by a series of volunteers helping her reintegrate into society; this week, it’s your turn.

Clash at the Quays!

The Complex, September 16th

Clash at the Quays! is a big night out where live music meets professional wrestling, as Ahmed, With Love joins other musicians (KhakiKid, Efé, Negro Impacto, Curtisy and Julia Louise Knifefist) for an all-out musical brawl inside the squared circle of the wrestling ring.

Egg: The Proclamation of the Irish Republegg

National Stadium Ringside Bar, September 16th

The Dublin queer collective Egg plan one night of song, dance, comedy and drag. The Proclamation of the Irish Republegg – part dazzling DIY cabaret, part musical political rally for a new Egg-shaped Irish Republic – is led by the nonbinary Aoife O’Connor and the transgender performer Pea Dineen.

Feet Pics Aren’t Free!

Smock Alley Theatre: Boys School, September 19th-23rd

Feet Pics Aren’t Free! is based on the theatre-maker Gráinne Holmes Blumenthal’s experience of finding a photograph of her own feet online at Wikifeet, posted without her consent for foot fetishists. She takes back control of the narrative via song, dance, DMs and fast moneymaking schemes.

Persona Metropolitana

Smock Alley Theatre, September 19th-23rd

Persona Metropolitana is an interdisciplinary theatre-dance by Annachiara Vispi and Giulia Macrì that’s set on an imaginary city train or subway. It’s predicted that by 2050 two-thirds of the planet will live in a city – Macrì wonders if we’ll all fit.

Songs of Theys

Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, September 19th-24th

Song of Theys – cabaret, music and comedy from Marianmarythe6th – asks if extravagant robes dripped in gold, sacramental wine and putting other people’s bodies in your mouth is Mass or a gay bar. Described as a queer Mass with choral singing at the centre.

The Crow’s Way

Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, September 21st-23rd

Galway’s Moonfish Theatre Co make their Dublin Fringe Festival debut with The Crow’s Nest, for ages eight-plus, their families and anyone else who loves adventure. The show follows Gerda as she braves the dark and unpredictable forest to save her best friend, Cuán.

The Dan Daw Show

Project Arts Centre, September 22nd-23rd. All performances are captioned; audio-description on September 23rd

The Dan Daw Show is an intimate evening of kink and power play, bodies, power and submission. Dan Daw and Christopher Owen provide “a peep into the shiny and sweaty push-pull of living with shame while bursting with pride”. Nominated for several dance awards, it also comes with a long list of content warnings: kink experiences, suffocation, humiliation, dominant behaviour, sexually explicit depictions and language, descriptions of feeling othered, loud noises, flashing lights and sexy disabled people. That’s telling ya.

When the Moon Spun Round

Draíocht, Blanchardstown, September 23rd

Fidget Feet’s aerial dance meets Ceol Connected’s traditional arts in When the Moon Spun Round, a show for ages six-plus, inspired by WB Yeats’s poetry and stories. The performance, commissioned by Babaró children’s arts festival, is touring this autumn.