With week one of the Dublin Fringe Festival up and running, our reviewers assess the highs and lows of what's on offer so far.
Baglady****
Ss Michael and John Church
No flies on IMP Productions, as their presentation of Baglady points to some considered, canny choices: the piece is the work of a recognisable, successful playwright (Frank McGuinness); it calls only for one actor and few props (a lady and a bag); and it requires (and receives) a simple, focused staging, that demands the audience to imaginatively engage with the text.
Her head wrapped in a dull gray cloth, our nameless narrator is a filthy Madonna, an itinerant Lady of Sorrows who poetically and elliptically relates to us her sad history of abuse and loss. Imelda McDonagh is vocally rich and physically precise, and delivers a performance that embodies the story as much as verbally relates it. Teetering between past and present, incoherent horror and coherent anger, McDonagh is riveting, and Pat Burke's direction is incisive and creative, fully exploiting the character's violent swings of mood from rage to remorse, without losing the plot.
Susan Conley
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Forgive Me Father**
Teacher's Club
Could an "It Girl" embrace Islam? Would a rape victim blame her clothes and not her assailant? Wouldn't a true friend understand her? In Jill Campbell's first play, e-popping, man-eating, London-based fashionistas inhabit a world somewhere between Sex and the City and Absolutely Fabulous, before Irish girl Cathy is raped by an Islamic cab-driver. Through Campbell's moral morass, Cathy finds the Koran, donates her Prada to Oxfam, never returns her father's calls and drifts piously from her flatmate Tory, a creamy-toned caricature whose social life is unsettled by such events for a good five minutes. In Sheila Ryder and Charlotte Purton's competing audience addresses and listless ideological exchanges, Campbell's views of Islam, consumerism and friendship seem neither judgemental nor profound. Indeed, the clincher in Cathy's conversion comes when a Muslim confidant reveals a Dolce & Gabbana dress beneath her shroud.
Here fashion, lifestyles and insights all come off the peg.
Peter Crawley
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Ladies and Gents***
St Stephen's Green Public Toilets
Don't let the claustrophobic, squalid atmosphere of these dank public toilets fool you. This is only going to get darker. Semper Fi's site-specific production of Paul Walker's macabre twin plays (staged simultaneously in each convenience) is immediately grim and grimy. In Gents, an educated pimp and an unblinkingly sinister client conduct business by the urinals. In Ladies, the prostitute and a young male accomplice plot a blackmail scam, having already disgraced a politician into suicide. While Pinteresque dialogues of unspecified menace notch up the tension, the drama's real-life inspiration (the Pike Theatre's 1957 condom controversy) is remarkably tenuous, while some period details are flawed (£40 for a toilet tryst in the 1950s?). With a finely tuned atmosphere, chillingly enhanced by Sinead McKenna's unsettling lights and Ivan Birthistle's attentive soundscape, it is an engagingly performed, tautly directed experience, although patchy plot twists and house-of-horror shock-tactics leave the site better explored than the specifics.
Peter Crawley
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Accidental Death of an Anarchist****
International Bar
The choice of Dario Fo's revered socialist chestnut hardly seemed an exciting one for a festival; but then I noted the subtitle "Hypothetical Death of an Activist", and all became clear. This highly entertaining romp is an irreverent mining of Fo's original for ammunition to embarrass forces of the state who repress freedom of speech and protest today.
The play begins with a video of the violence of the Gardaí towards the Reclaim the Streets group in Dublin last May. Then we are back to a topical satire in which a crazy man, posing as an investigating judge, is driving his police captors out of their limited wits. Lunacy, directed by Oonagh McLoughlin, triumphs.
Tom O'Leary is delightfully anarchic as the wacky one, backed up by an excellent cast including Anthony Fox. Lots of laughter, and just what the festival ordered.
Gerry Colgan
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Missing Football***
Rubicon Gallery
Teenage footballer Stevie reckons he has it all: he's been having talks with Notts Forest; their scout is impressed with his skills and has entered into discussions about contracts. Stevie has the same smile he has seen many times on the face of his hero, Roy Keane: a smile that says life has never been so good. Yet, through a short sequence of events, that range from bright blue humour to pitch black bitterness, Stephen's life spirals out of control - events initiated by a visit to local loan shark/gangster Ray Fox and regulated by his working class environment, as well as youthful stupidity and romantic fantasies. Stevie, actor Stephen Kelly, portrays every nuance from wide-eyed innocence to crumbling downfall assertively and with courage.
A pure and simple piece of theatre - one actor, white lights, black backdrop - its theme of idealism corrupted, as written by Peter McKenna, is salty and invigorating.
Tony Clayton-Lea
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Hullabaloo****
GUBU
Rebecca Walter , winner of the Fringe's "Sexiest Show Award" last year, set her previous show in a laundromat. This year the audience congregate in a pub as she and her six-woman troupe - with Jennifer Fleenor, Lisa McLoughlin, Emma O'Kane, Katherine O'Malley and Rebecca Reilly - use the geometric set-up of the GUBU bar in Capel Street to redefine its space. In six dance vignettes to different kinds of pub music - jazz, country, French café chansons - the group gained momentum over the hour-long performance, with highlights toward the middle and end, such as a county-and-western-influenced piece down the back of the bar. The most remarkable pieces involved dancers performing within window spaces, standing on the low sills and twisting and spinning in these rectangular cocoons, limbs alight as they made a mockery of enclosed space - with the occasional backdrop of surprised passers-by gaping in. The candy-striped tape to section off areas for dances detracted from the experience, though - could they come up with a better solution?
Christine Madden
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On Our Way to Lisbon (or The Italian Job)***
Andrew's Lane Studio
Gerry has passed away and old friends Denny and Tony have come together to see him off. So starts On Our Way to Lisbon, a physical two-hander from Isosceles Productions, which brings us to territory we have been in more convincingly before: in Mercier's Studs and Breen's Alone it Stands, for example. For Gerry's funeral is just an excuse to re-enact the glory days when Glasgow Celtic went through teams like Zurich and Inter Milan to win the 1967 European Cup. Written by Patrick Prior, directed by Jim Dunk, and acted by Pat Abernethy and Dave Marsden, the strong point here is the spirited performances. It is the repetitive, laddish script which jars; at times bordering on the xenophobic - because of his nationality, an Austrian referee is compared to a Nazi, for example. Cheap jokes abound; 1960s nostalgia has a field day, and quickly we're in the mire of the sentimental. All credit to Abernethy and Marsden, but enough football-theatre already.
Ian Kilroy
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Two Magpies**
International Bar
Abbie Spallen's 30-minute playlet is really just a prolonged bout of whimsy, with the author and Eithne McGuinness dressed in black and white as the eponymous birds. They begin with a recap of Hitchcock's The Birds, a film they revel in as a triumph for their species. After that, they turn their attention mostly to humans.
A handful of vignettes follow in a manifest effort to be alternately funny and serious. Bathetic specimens of men and women are sardonically described in vignettes, ending finally and improbably, in a throat-cutting murder, all observed by the magpies.
The idea was hardly inspirational to begin with, and soon sinks under the weight of its own frenetic invention. Jokey dialogue about Noah favouring doves or monogamy in birds does not generate laughter, despite the energetic attack of the actors. Comedy needs a lot more than this to work.
Gerry Colgan
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Ride*****
Project Cube
It would be a mistake to reduce the thrust of this play to its titillating title, as Australian company The Other Tongue have created a text that is as cerebral as it is sexual, a memory play that is more about what we don't remember than what we do, and the essential loneliness that an anonymous encounter and a rainy day can inspire.
Kicking off with a fantastically cringeworthy moment- a woman and man wake up together, naked, unsure as to how they met and whether they've had sex. Actors Fiona MacLeod and Todd MacDonald never put a foot wrong as they try to piece together the events that led up to their arrival in bed. Jane Bodie's direction is superb - even the scene changes are elegant - and the colloquial script is both funny and stunningly lyrical (without being pretentious). Honest, human and true, it's a gem of a piece that demonstrates both body and soul.
Susan Conley
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Sonnets for an Old Century****
Project Cube
Jose Rivera's vivid piece brings a refreshing sense of the human condition to the Cube. A linked series of short monologues from the "souls of the last century" presents a startling portrait of raw, physical joy and pain in language that is taut and vigourous.
The text evokes a Latin world, in an American setting, a limbo where, directed by two sylphs (Angels of Life and Death?) the characters speak one after another, in eclectic sequence: the dreamy schoolgirl, the fork-lift trucker, the fecund Hispanic mother of 16, a latter-day Icarus. The fascination lies in the variety, the charged experiences, the fresh idioms, the opening up of an unfamiliar world.
The cast of 11 (directed for x-bel-air by two of their number, Rosin McBrinn with Sarah Brennan) is uniformly excellent, intensely concentrated, sensitive to the underlying rhythms. This is an economically and gracefully physical piece, set against a background of jagged abstract projections (by Sarah Blackman). Here a young generation of talents cut their teeth on arresting material.
Derek West
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Spoonface Steinberg/The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband***
New Theatre
Bad puns abound in Debbie Isitt's The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband. With wonderful filmic sequences and hilarious simulated sex, the greatest moments are when Dunia Hutchinson is on stage as the ex-wife brandishing her very sinister meat-grinder. Before he becomes spaghetti bolognaise, Bryan Harten is a good foil as the husband, while the mistress (Corina Kenna) has to make do with weaker lines. It might end on a weak pun ("What's for dinner?" "A surprise") but this play is good fun.
However, Spoonface Steinberg is disconcertingly unmoving. Seven-year old Spoonface is autistic. She has cancer. She listens to Maria Callas as she describes the butterflies that children drew on the gas chambers. In pink pyjamas and white bobbled hat, Rachel Rath is a convincing seven-year-old. It's the script that fails to convince. Despite some wonderfully vivid language, there is only so much emotional manipulation one can take. A curious double-bill.
Fíona Ní Chinnéide
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Twelfth Night***
The Crypt
'Enjoy" is director Donnacadh O' Briain's bidding in the programme note to this production of Shakespeare's festive comedy, and, confronted in the caverous Crypt by his spirited cast and the colourful, confused community they render, the audience cannot fail to obey. Twelfth Night is a celebration of social misrule, of the madness wrought by love and the theatricality of life; but the line between playful disguise and wicked deception is fudged by grief for lost brothers and the melancholy edges of the Fool's songs.
Sam Jackson's delicate score taps those shadows; overall, though, this version shirks them - Myles Breen's camp Sir Andrew is a well-judged riot, a mockery of masculinity, but he brings too much of that foppishness to his additional role as the selfish Malvolio.
Yet this is scarcely at the expense of a vivacious and unpretentious imagining of the unreal world of Illyria, buoyed up by Chisato Yoshimi's bright costumery and unintrusive stage design.
Belinda McKeon
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Candide****
Ss Michael and John Church
'Why do you think the world was formed", asks Candide plaintively. "To plague us to death", comes the reply he has resisted all along.
The picaresque tale of how Candide's faith in the optimistic philosophy of his teacher Pangloss is tested is a marvellously enduring satire on hypocrisy and inequity among monarchy, clergy and government. It has been adapted by Jo Mangan and Tom Swift and staged by The Performance Corporation with the energy and irreverence demanded by Voltaire's original novel.
Played in the round at the Fringe's new venue in Temple Bar, this production is slick and polished, making use of video projection to give us a cartoon commentary on the action. Led by Stephen Swift in the title role, the actors, powdered and bewigged, wink knowingly at the audience, accompanied intermittently by the Cantoiri choir.
Jo Mangan's direction celebrates the grotesque and endorses Candide's final choice of risk over boredom.
Helen Meany
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One Night Stand***
Cobalt Café
One Night Stand is posited as a modern cabaret, and in many ways it is: the many exemplary original songs (most of which are written by its director, Gavin Kostick; others are by arranger/producer Feargal Murray and Jack L), the theme of finding oneself amidst the detritus of modern life, the search for meaning in an increasingly superficial world, the transient nature of relationships and the expression of these through the voice of Camille O'Sullivan. The drama unfolds over one evening through a low-budget multi-media conceit: a television screen where actor Tony Flynn takes on the guises of several men in cabaret singer Sarah's confusing life.
While Sarah/Camille whips up a high wind through the songs, the piece comes to an end when she finally confronts her vulnerabilities.
It's engaging enough, but overall it fails to convince. The setting (theatrically insubstantial) and the venue (uncomfortable) don't help.
Tony Clayton-Lea
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Sucker****
Bewley's Café Theatre
Laurence Leung claims to be a former con artist who learned the trade of grifting while travelling eastern Australia in the mid-1990s with "The Professor", an old-style card shark and scam merchant, and his beautiful daughter. With a background screen showing close-ups, the witty and charming Leung demonstrates some eye-boggling sleight-of-hand, accompanied by a spiel that would benefit from being a bit looser and less obviously rehearsed. Cheekily engaging with the audience, he reveals the "secrets" of three-card trickery, explains how to guarantee aces at poker and constantly reinforces that most disillusioning of truisms: you can't cheat an honest person - and completely honest people barely exist. Maybe all that stuff about the Professor is genuine, or maybe Leung is really just a clever young man with extraordinarily nimble fingers who has dreamed the whole thing up.
If it's the latter, then we've been suitably suckered by this unpretentious and diverting show.
Stephen Dixon
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Numb***
Ss Michael & John Church
These two short plays are written and directed by Peter Hussey. Three Figures At A Well has two women and a man tell their individual stories, which then merge in an overly-dramatic climax - not a fault of which Beckett, who is said to have inspired the work, would have been guilty.
There is still much originality in the writer's approach to his theme, and to his characters, well played by Yvonne O'Hara, Hazel Coyle and Keith Burke.
Bending Spoons is a more successful safari, this time into Pinter terrain. Two men meet in an office, apparently a psychiatrist and his patient. They engage in a kind of duel in which now one, now the other, gets the upper hand. Then the doctor lets his guard down, seeking a real relationship - and it is all over.
Nick Devlin and Darren Donohue are quite gripping as the duo.
Gerry Colgan
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Surface Tension***
Civic Theatre
The opening show of the Fringe has some useful tips for the aspiring poseur at festival events over the next three weeks. An Abbey opening night provides an appropriate backdrop to the social progress of three twentysomethings in search of celebrity and happiness - in that order.
Crammed with references to MTV and designer labels, it's a lighthearted Dublin version of Shopping and Fucking, which could be improved by some tightening of pace and judicious pruning of the slightly repetitive text.
Susie Lamb, Barry Flanagan and Grace-Anne Kelly gracefully rise to the demands of Shane Carr's satirical script. Directed by Sighle Tóibín, they successfully negotiate the shifts from monologue to brief dialogue as the three young things flit from café to gym to nightclub. Simultaneously cocky and insecure, they each give different versions of the same events, but agree on one thing: that it's all, like, "so disco baby".
