Below The Belt ...
Bewley's Cafe Theatre
From the American playwright Richard Dresser, this is the story of three factory officials working against a deadline in a tiny compound in the desert, pressured to produce vast quantities of unspecified "units", caught in a cycle of power-tripping and paranoia that is played for laughs yet is also disturbing. SΘamus Allen is suitably deranged as Merkin, the supervisor who has supervised one unit too many, with Declan Mills and Gavin McCaffrey as the subordinates who have sacrificed everything for the job, sleeping in their suits on the hard rungs of the career ladder. Mills is impressive as the resentful Hanrahan, hypersensitive and fiercely possessive of his petty space, but McCaffrey falters as Dobbitt, the idealistic newcomer who gains Hanrahan's trust only to be cornered into betrayal by the gleefully malicious Merkin. Signing on the dotted line, he brings what is essentially a fable of corporate soul-selling to an unsettling, if predictable, conclusion.
Belinda McKeon
Manhattan Whispers ...
Crypt, Dublin Castle
Gary Duggan's Manhattan Whispers is loosely based on his experiences in New York during the summer of 1999. He and some friends had bad times and good, and came back with a plethora of stories. With something presumably real to write about, it is a mystery why the author chose to fashion a mixum-gatherum of pretentious internal monologues delivered by six actors. The programme describes them as three young couples classified as runaways, students and professionals, but nothing in the writing identifies them clearly as such. They all seem very much the same. The writing is mostly an off-putting, overblown melange of sentimentality or pseudo-toughness - the same thing, really. The youths don't talk directly to each other, except in occasional counterpoint. There is drinking, sex and heavy thinking to go with the heavy breathing. So many words; so little substance.
Gerry Colgan
BONDage ...
Cobalt Cafe
Imagine a drag cabaret of the Weimar Republic: smoky clubs with bars serving Martinis, shaken not stirred. Add a dash of humour and irony and you've got Alan Kinsella and James Barry's highly entertaining and well-sung musical journey through 1960s London and various 007 scenarios. Here, the sensuous and flirtatious Ladies Blue drag double act are back for at least the third time in the Fringe Festival, but on this occasion as sisters Petrah and Steelah. One of them falls unrequitedly in love with the homosexual John Bend, and is sent to Russia to spy on James Bondage, the dastardly villain who wants to rid the world of fabric, leaving only leather. But in the end the plot, while fun, is only an excuse to introduce the 22 well-rendered songs that grace this camp fantasia, a regal display that restores your faith in drag queens.
Ian Kilroy
Epic ...
City Arts Centre
'This is a catastrophe," they are saying, but we know it isn't. One of the problems Declan Gorman has in Epic, his new play for Upstate, is that the foot-and-mouth crisis on the Cooley Peninsula, on which it is based, has been upstaged by true catastrophe. You might call that an unfair criticism, but the style of the work is a take on commedia dell'arte, the Italian improvised theatre; the impression is deepened by Paul O'Mahony's fabulous skull masks, and the show needed to be reworked over the past couple of weeks. It turns the foot-and-mouth slaughter into the catastrophe visited on the men of Ulster by Macha in the Tβin B≤ Cuailgne. So Gorman sees the stricken Cooley as a symptom of the greed of intensive farming and illegal smuggling. It's a good conceit, but neither the writing nor the acting can push the virus to the scale of mythic catastrophe. The often engaging individual stories fall away from the mythic intent, so that even the cast didn't seem fully persuaded, on the opening night, that it was staging an epic.
Victoria White
