Dublin Fringe Festival reviews.
And They Used to Star in Movies
Bewley's Café Theatre
An aggressive and drink-sodden Mickey Mouse, his weary ex-wife Minnie and old co-star Donald Duck, their glory days far behind them, sit in a Hollywood bar shooting the breeze and dreaming of the great comeback (Mickey's waiting for a call from Visconti in Rome). Originally staged 30 years ago, Campbell Black's darkly witty little oddity contains some solid laughs and proves well worth reviving, though the action remains in the 1970s because for it to work the trio have to be middle-aged, not old. And, of course, it's unthinkable that Disney would really ignore such iconic money-spinners. This poignantly-funny nonsense is directed with great confidence by Alan King and ebulliently performed by Alan Howley (Mickey), Amelia Crowley (a defeated Minnie), Feidlim Cannon (the solicitous barman) and Neil Watkins as a very camp Donald. At just 45 minutes, it's a quick lunchtime treat. (Until Sept 24)
STEPHEN DIXON
Cross Purposes & The Same Jane
Project Space Upstairs
Choosing a bare black stage and half of the bank of seats as her canvas, Liz Roche asks us to consider choreographic form above emotional narrative. She has been picking away at theatrical conventions for a while now and Cross Purposes has evolved from a warmish exploration of energies in flux to a more austere and, on one viewing, elusive work. Doubling the cast to eight dancers she spreads our focus throughout the space, with the straining heads of the audience creating a dance of their own. Although reminiscent of the 1999 Interrupted Light, the duet Same Like Jane shows a similar evolution. Exploring sisterhood and danced magnetically by Jenny Roche and Katherine O'Malley, it has a slight detached edge, not found previously. Drawing on shared work with the performers, a perfect ending illustrates how despite jettisoning theatrical frills, Roche maintains complete control of her form. (Until Sat)
MICHAEL SEAVER
Dragon
Project Cube
Using only house lights and a boom-box onstage, Katarina Mojzisova signals a preference for concept rather than theatrical niceties, but in spite of this narrow focus Dragon still can't illustrate the choreographer's sprawling ideas. A 15-minute movement sequence to a sound collage repeats itself, with slight variations offering different outcomes to decisions made. In the first series she hesitates in front of an imaginary door lifting her hand as if to knock, but in the next repetition she explains that hesitancy. Metaphoric overload, including "Flying Pills", nightmarish dragons and the hanging black bodies in Nina Simone's Strange Fruit, prevent clarity emerging. Although this looping structure is meant to stare us down until we blink - by a member of the audience turning off the music - Mojzisova had to ask an individual to do so. The failure of this ill-chosen theatrical gesture to rescue the overall concept was indicative of the entire work. (Until Sun)
MICHAEL SEAVER
Dr Dillon And Ms Georgia
T36
Dr Michael Dillon is the very model of a wartime English gentleman: polite, erudite and vaguely chauvinistic. The difference is that he used to be Laura, the first recipient of a female-to-male sex change operation, and the principal narrator of Phil Kingston's captivating one-person performance. How the stoic life of Dillon connects with that of Georgia, a pre-op transsexual in present-day Manchester, is the imaginative journey of Hungry Ghost Theatre's production. Less steeped in gender politics than in realising fully fleshed roles, Kingston doesn't so much portray his characters as channel them. Dillon's personality and circumstances are wonderfully evoked, while Georgia makes a believably bruised, conflicted soul. Binding them through the hypnotic, flailing dance of Joy Division's troubled frontman (whom Georgia impersonates), Kingston's added portrayal of Ian Curtis is unerringly real and deftly symbolic: a person unaccountable for his body's ambitions. Humorous, challenging and moving, the play melds its medium and message: in this flux of identity Kingston's performance is an inspiring act of transformation. (Until Sat)
PETER CRAWLEY
Five In The Morning
Project Cube
Stranded between the swimming pool and dressing room, shivering in swimsuits, dazed by white light and sleep deprivation, three characters attempt to follow instructions. Well, not characters, exactly, but performers, waiting to hear from their invisible masters what their next move should be. "Wear your towel in a different way" or "build a human tower." Which they do. Repeatedly. The audience waits too: there's a sense of colluding in a psychological game, with hints of something worse, the possibility of humiliation, or even torture. Using unrehearsed guest performers, the British company Rotozaza characteristically veers between improvisation and scripted theatre, keeping us guessing. The formal innovation continues to impress, but the sense of its limitations increases with each repeat visit. With less humour than last year's RomCom to carry us through 80 minutes, there's a danger that Rotozaza might now be prisoners of their chosen form. Time to smash the tannoy system perhaps? (Until Sat)
HELEN MEANY
Gaumenkino
Players Theatre
A little absurdity goes a long way in Gaumenkino, a lysergic experience of avant-garde performance and music from German company leitundlause. Five female performers, resplendent in retina-scorching rainbow ensembles and black bobs, slink through a minefield of bleeping plastic toys, low-hanging lampshades and the ingredients of a decent egg salad while squawking, chattering and gargling through the vocal compositions of Georges Aperghis, Emanuele Casale and Meredith Monk. Allowing us ample opportunity to be baffled in several languages, director Matthias Rebstock tries to strip the performance of literal sense without robbing it entirely of contemporary meaning: sure, narrative coherence may have dissolved, but we find a vaguely familiar world where language has curdled into the indigestible pabulum of infomercials. With sudden lurches in mad, sometimes inspired directions, together with long torpid stretches, the show is as amusing as it is frustrating. Fans of non-semantic doo-wop, plasticy synthesizers, post-structuralist theory and all things kitsch need look no further though. (Until Sat)
PETER CRAWLEY
I'm Sorry & I'm Sorry
Samuel Beckett Theatre
If Theatre of the Absurd is one side of a coin, Absurd Theatre is surely the other, and this 70-minute show by two young Americans, who call themselves The Candidatos, belongs unmistakably to the latter. One plays a ham actor with a knife stuck in his back, and the other his sailor buddy who put it there. Once this situation has been established, the rest is physical and vocal slapstick. Each exploits the other in various ways, and the audience is occasionally involved. There is no resonance in the proceedings. The objective is solely to stimulate laughter, and the duo's clowning achieves it only sporadically. An overall impression is left of two talented performers lacking a script to showcase their abilities. If this show were cut by, say, 40 minutes, it might serve as a lengthy comedy sketch - but even that is not certain. (Until Sat)
GERRY COLGAN
Man with a Movie Camera, live soundtrack by 3epkano
Spiegeltent
Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera is an extraordinary, experimental silent film from 1929, using myriad technical tricks to cover a day in Soviet Russia. With its depiction of modern urban living, it is very much a stylistic and thematic precursor to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, scored by Philip Glass. In recent years it has enjoyed a number of specially written scores, including one by Michael Nyman. Now Dublin ensemble 3epkano, having already written scores for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Faust, have composed their own soundscape for Vertov's film. The beautiful score is full of urgent percussion and sweeping strings, and owes a great deal to pioneering Montreal post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Performed live from behind the screen, the music doesn't always dovetail perfectly with the startling images, and the music occasionally feels too contemporary for Vertov's film, but the overall effect is mesmerising.
DAVIN O'DWYER
Metsanskayia Street No. 3
Liberty Hall Theatre
A physical comedy, according to the blurb, with a smattering of Russian realism, silent film and American musicals, performed in Greek with English subtitles - this production from Athens-based company Chrysotheres is carrying a large world on its flimsy shoulders. Terrific venue notwithstanding, the play, with its irritatingly jaunty narrator and less than magnetic leads, tells a bland and predictable story (set in Moscow in 1926) of a couple who invite a third party to share their cramped apartment during a housing crisis. The laborious melodrama, interspersed with tedious songs about trams and vapid rumpy-pumpy under the eiderdown, made it difficult for the scant handful of people in the opening-night audience to match the cast's obvious enthusiasm. Like or loathe it, however, one couldn't help wishing that the festival could somehow have been hospitable enough to at least drum up an audience for the company's first appearance abroad. (Until Sun)
HILARY FANNIN
On This One Night
Spiegeltent
From the start, this piece, though inventive, is let down by false advertising. Billed as an interactive trip through a city "you thought you knew", this is more an interrupted tour of a vacant building. Starting from the Spiegeltent, you are invited to follow Brokentalkers devisers and directors Gary Keegan and Feidlim Cannon to the Old Docklands Offices. I was expecting a more literal walk through the seedy backstreets. A set of monologues is presented which include the loosely connected stories of a stigmatic former prostitute, a transsexual and a swimming-trunks-clad afro-ed dreamer. Patrick Bridgeman imbues this dreamer's monologue with warmth and charm and I would certainly pay to see his fully fleshed-out story. With a creative use of space, the individual set pieces are entertaining in themselves. Linked by themes of identity and isolation as a whole On This One Night doesn't quite gel. (Until Sat)
ELIZABETH O'NEILL
Poet No 7
Smock Alley
It's war-time in modern Australia and society is disintegrating. Four people clutch their damaged identities and try to make sense of their lives. A librarian (Helena Easton) craves love. A psychiatric patient (Damien Warren-Smith) seeks sanity. A council worker (Miriam Lucia) pays tributes to forgotten bodies. A businessman (Patrick Ross) focuses on making deals. Sounds confusing? It is. Four monologues that interweave at random do not add up to a coherent piece of theatre. The self-consciousness of the writing, particularly for Warren-Smith's cliched tortured character, lets down Ben Ellis' over-ambitious, unfocused piece of work. Only the performances rescue this play: Lucia is a fine, tough-hearted but vulnerable council worker, struggling to maintain her own and others' dignity; and Easton's determinedly naïve librarian provides some much-needed black comedy. (Until Sun)
ROSITA BOLAND
Rockaby Project
Andrews Lane Studio
Beckett purists would probably be horrified by WinterMute's Rockaby Project, a reinterpretation of Rockaby by Greek director Rena Fourtouni. Instead of his "prematurely old" woman, the main character is a young Japanese woman played with intensity by
Shinako Wakatsuki. Likewise, Beckett's stage directions are disregarded: rather than sitting in a rocking chair on a darkened set, Wakatsuki wanders around a claustrophobic room, repeatedly acting out a series of movements such as lying on a table, combing her hair and sitting down. At first, Wakatsuki acts with apparent calm, but she progressively descends into an ever-more desperate state, powerfully conveying the agony of a person locked in neurosis. While she does speak lines from Rockaby, they are evidently secondary to this pattern of compulsive movements. Rockaby Project thus bears little relation to Rockaby as Beckett conceived it, and while it may be a brave reinvention, Beckett's version remains far more radical. (Until Fri)
EIMEAR McKEITH
Side Effects
Bewley's Café Theatre
This tale of a brother and sister reunion, lubricated by pints and shots, intermittently disrupted by bad (is there any other kind?) karaoke and delivered with high-octane Glaswegian bonhomie, thinks it has cunningly cloaked its potential conflict - but how surprised can even the most uninformed audience member be if brother Hamish is back from army duty in Iraq, sister Kathleen is sporting a large anti-war badge, and friend Ilsa is obviously of non-Caucasian extraction? All that raucous laughter was sure to degenerate into meaningful monologues fraught with pain, and so it does - as well as veer down several unexplored narrative alleyways, and then not so much close as stop. There's any number of ways the conflict in the Middle East might be used as a metaphor, but as revenge for a long-dead goldfish, dosed with Dettol by a younger brother? Not convinced. (Until Sat)
SUSAN CONLEY
The Happy Suicides
Mill Theatre, Dundrum
The tears of a clown dichotomy provides the basic stuff of John Staunton's fourth play, The Happy Suicides, a drama that snapshots the sad and sorry private angst of two immortals of British comedy, Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams. In a simple set that references one of Hancock's most famous sketches, The Blood Donor, Paul O'Flaherty plays the alcoholic, wife-beating Hancock, plagued by the desire to be seen as a serious artist, as he runs through "the lad's" career up to his suicide. Offstage, in recorded form, Shane Larkin delivers an unsure approximation of Kenneth Williams' inimitable larynx voicing similar disappointments. The absence of any authentic archive examples of Hancock's and Williams' comic genius, which would have enriched the stumbling, interwoven monologues, proves a serious lacuna. There is no sense of the magic these two tortured individuals once created. Sadly, The Happy Suicides somewhat dies a death of its own making. (Until Sat)
PATRICK BRENNAN
The Unfortunate Machine-Gunning of Anwar Sadat
Players Theatre, Trinity College
Although it's not a perfect production, Conall Quinn's new play for Coalface holds the interest and provides some guffaws. Taking an absurdist view of nationalism, colonialism, ecology, and other large questions, its first half is set in the past where off-the-wall idealistic nationalists Sean and Sarah try to persuade Francis, newly returned from horrific war, to become their leader in the coming struggle against the "Brits". It all ends badly, as does the futuristic second half, where eco-warriors Eugene and Chamomile find their campaign to swap the Atlantic for the Pacific ending in violence. A strong cast - Stephen Swift, Patrick O'Donnell, Jennifer Laverty and the excellent Shadaan Felfeli - works hard, but is not always audible. Director David Horan's pacing could be more precise, too. (Until Sun)
NOELEEN DOWLING
Why Men Cheat
Andrew's Lane Studio
Women were advised to bring notebooks for Mórwax's light-hearted look at infidelity, but a surprisingly high number of men also turned up to discover why they cheat. (Women cheat too, we are told, they're just more subtle about it.) The five actors take us ably through various hilarious scenarios - the college professor tempted by a student, the husband having a fling with the au pair, the fiance and his bride-to-be's sister. There's also a poignant scene through the eyes of a betrayed wife. Though the script lacks pace in spots, writer/director Peader de Burca gives his cast ample opportunity to showcase their versatility. We are offered several reasons for a wandering eye - lack of reassurance at home, the abundance of single ladies throwing themselves at men's feet - but it seems the blame lies with women. Men can't help it, poor lambs, it's only natural. You're left with a smile on your face - and maybe a few second thoughts about hiring an au pair. (Until Sun)
CLARE McCARTHY
Xspired
Project Cube
Having won the Spirit of the Fringe award last year, youth theatre group Performance Lab returns with a new commission. Just as the Spire marks the centre of Dublin, so does Xspired take this landmark as its focal point. But the Dublin of Xspired is not a vision of cosmopolitanism; it is a world of drug-dealing, violence and alienation, in which the lives of a group of Dubliners become intertwined with tragic results. The production is an inventive visual and aural onslaught: shaky footage of scenes around the city are projected onto a backdrop with a blaring soundtrack. At times there is an imbalance between stage action and footage, while a lack of development in some sequences causes the pace to falter. That said, the young actors display passion and conviction, helped by the sharp, lively dialogue - they prove the spirit of the Fringe shows little sign of expiring. (Until Sun)
EIMEAR McKEITH
Empress of India
Town Hall, Galway
Stuart Carolan's new play for Druid focuses on men who pretend to be what they are not. Séamus Lambe (Seán McGinley) was once a famous actor, but now stumbles around his sickroom in a bad imitation of King Lear on the heath, using performance to disguise his moral bankruptcy.
His eldest son Martin (Aaron Monaghan) is a journalist, who is supposed to have a talent for words and an understanding of the world around him - yet he's painfully inarticulate and confused. And Martin's brother Matty (Tadhg Murphy) is simply a mess, parroting self-help magazines to convince himself he's "special" when he is in fact just odd.
This may sound like a traditional Irish drama of familial strife, but Carolan is attempting to produce something less common: an exploration of the difficulty of believing in God in a chaotic, unjust world. If his characters seem confused, it's because they repeatedly find themselves in an absurd situation: they curse God for not existing - then curse God again for not objecting to their blasphemy.
As writers from Dostoevsky to Graham Greene have shown, fictions about this clash between faith and doubt need to be engaging before they can be enlightening. Carolan therefore roots his characters' outbursts of religious angst within a robustly plotted narrative about Séamus's missing daughter, Kate (Sarah Greene).
This dual approach is aided by Francis O'Connor's design, which places a large mirror centre-stage, angled to present distorted images of the characters, which contrast with their representation onstage. Director Garry Hynes has used this technique before, but never with such intensity: the mirror reveals events as if they are being viewed from above, giving us a "God's eye" perspective that deepens our appreciation of Carolan's themes.
The combination of religious inquiry with strong plotting doesn't fully cohere, however. Everything we know about Kate is revealed by her brothers and father, who see women only in terms of reductive stereotypes: the nurse and virgin, the harridan and whore. Because Kate never speaks for herself, it's difficult to care about her, and since the plot hinges on the revelation of Kate's fate, Carolan's conclusion is sensational and sentimental, neatly tying up the narrative instead of resolving the characters' dilemmas.
This attempt at closure overshadows the preceding scenes' emphasis on the value of accepting uncertainty.
The play's treatment of contemporary relationships is considerably more successful. McGinley fully convinces us that his character loves his sons, even as he torments them. And Martin's relationship with his fiancée Maria (Sarah-Jane Drummey) is a superbly acted portrait of a couple who look desperately to each other for a certainty that will never materialise.
The hopelessness of these characters' situations gives The Empress of India a disconcerting credibility, which leaves a lingering impression.
At the Town Hall Theatre until September 23rd; at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival from October 4th-14th
Patrick Lonergan
Marc Copland and Bill Carrothers
NCH, Dublin
If the attendance at the NCH was disappointing, the music was anything but. Pianists Marc Copland and Bill Carrothers treated the audience to duetting of rare depth, sensitivity and accomplishment. It was a continuous sonic adventure couched in terms of great beauty, owing as much to classical influences as to jazz.
Both are formidably equipped for the task. Harmonically they can go anywhere their imagination takes them, each has a wonderfully expressive touch and their mutual responsiveness was a constant delight.
Although much of the repertoire was drawn from their new CD, there was no sense that this was done for the comfort of the familiar. As Copland explained, they had come out with a set list, but that was forgotten as they simply went wherever the spirit took them.
The music had already made this abundantly clear. They had edged delicately into Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman and reassessed You And The Night And The Music in terms of line and radically redressed it harmonically, before it morphed into Neil Young's The Needle And The Damage Done - with O'Donnell Abu thrown in as an occasional motif.
Carrothers then turned Take The 'A' Train briefly into a mock-pompous march before they took the piece through several changes of tempo and mood in an exhilarating romp. They drew on other sources for nourishment, including the Jet Song from West Side Story, and Thelonious Monk's Rhythm-A-Ning and Blue Monk.
If there was one single performance from this night of outstanding music to cherish in particular, it was Blue In Green, Miles Davis's (but really Bill Evans's) melancholy reflection. It was set up by a lengthy, ruminative, back-and-forth, freely explored improvisation before the theme became anything like explicit, and then became a vehicle for a series of variations spellbinding in their inventiveness and compelling in their sheer poetry of sound.
There was still time for Stephen Foster's Oh, Susannah and the traditional Barbara Allen, and an encore that was a lesson in how to turn a tired tune like Danny Boy into pure gold. It was a privilege to be there.
Ray Comiskey
Arms and the Man
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
The irony begins with the title, taken from the opening line of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic glorification of war. George Bernard Shaw's devastating riposte dashes all such idealistic, romantic notions, replacing them with the harsh reality of experience, as described by the Swiss mercenary Bluntschli, who knows all too well that, in the heat of battle, chocolate is more use than cartridges.
While warning of the onset of the first World War, little could Shaw have anticipated that a century later, the play's setting, in an obscure conflict in the Balkans, would be echoed by unimaginable horrors, massacres and ethnic cleansing in the same part of the world. And in this, the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth, society again should need no reminding of the true nature of war.
Richard Croxford's bright and breezy revival initially makes a better fist of dealing with the irony of the bigger picture than with deconstructing the fluffily unrealistic concepts of love and marriage, harboured by Karen Hassan's shrill, over-dramatic Raina Petkoff and her socially obsessed mother Catherine, played with fine comic timing by Libby Smith. After the rather forced early scenes, which sees the fleeing Bluntschli taking refuge in Raina's bedroom, it is as though a switch is thrown with the arrival of Glen Wallace's ludicrously posturing cardboard hero Major Sergius Saranoff and Frankie McCafferty's armchair general Major Paul Petkoff. Their combined bluster allows the weary wisdom of Matt McArdle's Bluntschli to escape the production's stilted beginnings and stamp his uncompromising moral upon proceedings.
On another level, Saranoff's arrogance forces a spirited defence of the downtrodden servant class from Niki Doherty's arch Louka and Richard Orr's pragmatic Nicola. Stuart Marshall's intricate fretwork set makes no attempt at reality, providing the right dash of theatricality for this well-integrated cast to throw caution to the winds in getting to grips with Shaw's bitter, wounding comedy. Runs until October 7th
Jane Coyle
