Our reviewers round up the good, the bad and the middling as the first week of the Dublin Fringe Festival gets into its stride.
Acro-matic ***
Samuel Beckett Centre
Michael Seaver
These three drama-laden solos on the earth and in the air by Wired Aerial Theatre and Fidget Feet shouted rather than whispered. Stuffed featured Wendy Hesketh and her best friend, The Toilet, recounting episodes in the life of a bulimic, but in spite of the sincerity of the performance it quickly lost its opening wit. Humour kept things going in Solaris as Jim Daly rambled on seeking enlightenment, and I Can't Handle Me traced an unravelling personality from childhood. Hidden in the over-prescribed drama were some sotto voce images of real beauty and magic, such as a white hoop that rises as a white feather falls down from the ceiling or a simple skirting run floating over the ground. Thrills and spills are at a premium in all the works, but the constant metaphor of struggling against gravity as a struggle against life gave some moments of raw excitement before the overwrought drama brought us back to reality.
Runs until September 26th
The Bird Trap **
Project Cube
Susan Conley
Talk about a tough first day at the office: Max (Neil Connolly) shakes up the delicately insane balance that defines his new workaday life by refusing to waltz with one of his new colleagues. Low man on the totem pole, he is a mysterious threat to co-workers Mr Rivendale (Nick Devlin) and Mr Bell (Joseph O'Malley), an unwilling target for the friendly overtures of Mr Crème (Paul Winter), and an unwelcome defender of Sophie (stand-out Jillian Bradley). The fact that the company deals in dubious organ brokerage is beside the point, which is, by and large, the problem with Darren Donohue's text, which sacrifices focus for an uneasy mix of trite existentialism that sits uncomfortably with absurdist tendencies. Director Peter Hussey has assembled an able cast, and despite the cheekiness of the play's closing moments, this ground has been marked and conquered by Ricky Gervais, and anything else is a meagre substitute.
Runs until September 26th
Bleeding the System ****
SFX Theatre
Gerry Colgan
Spacecraft's new comedy, written and directed by Fearghal Leddy, is very funny, although not satirical in the manner of previous work. This one is strictly for laughs and, thanks to the splendidly manic performance of Simon Toal, gets them in ample measure.
He plays Bean, a white-smiling chancer with a neglected wife and a mountain of debt. Along comes Jim (Tom O'Leary), an international conman who promises to make Bean rich, but does a neat and final skinning job on him. With his wife almost ready to deliver a baby (not his) after a pregnancy of a few hours (don't ask), and her money also gone, Bean is literally flushed down the toilet.
The play is slow to get going, and the ending is unnecessarily prolonged.
It also introduces three musicians, with occasional songs to no obvious profit. But Simon Toal alone is worth travelling to see - a comic gem.
Runs until September 26th
Days of Cleanliness **
Players Theatre
Rosita Boland
The Greek company, Locomotive Theatre, presents George L. Bakolas's play, which Bakolas also directs. It's Steve (Nikos Katis) and Faye's (Dora Stylianesi) wedding anniversary, the stage is strewn with roses, and the couple intend to celebrate by buying taxi-driver Steve his own cab. The stylised, promising start collapses as a group of junkies steal the couple's savings, and Steve drags one of them, injured Lina (Nathalie Paboridou and Sophia Marathaki) back to their flat, with the intention of making her grass on her associates. For some reason, two actresses play one role, but fail to do anything more with this device than limping on alternate legs. Days of Cleanliness never decides whether it wants to be realism or surrealism and commutes unconvincingly between the two genres to a clumsy, predictable ending. The Greek actors struggle at times with the English script, which doesn't help at all. There's a nicely moody set by Konstandinos Zamanis and good lighting by Sakis Birbilis.
Runs until September 25th
Gryfhead ****
SS Michael and John Downstairs
Anna Carey
At first, this "urban gothic" adaptation of Keats's by a Welsh theatre company does not seem promising. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where mobile phones co-exist with cannibalism, it's the story of Ella, whose violent brother Wolfskin kills her lover, Enzo. But Ella won't let him go. While the pacing of the first half seems slack, the play improves as it goes along, and all four performers do fine work with a sometimes wobbly script. The costumes look like the cast-offs from a futuristic 1980s children's TV programme, but the multi-level scaffolding-based set is ingenious and well used, the music is excellent, and there are a few wonderful touches such as the wooden box grave in which Enzo is buried, and the pedal-powered computer on which Ella's poet neighbour writes.
Runs until September 26th
Ignition: Programme 1 **
SFX
Michael Seaver
Separating her choreography and film-making, Jocelyne Danchick creates inner and outer landscapes for her solo performance in Breath Cycle. Presented independently, the film and dance highlight each other's weaknesses: the film's graded and shaded textural nuances win out against the psychological flatness of the dance, yet it is choreographic sensibilities that triumph on the screen. Emotionally repressed by a burnt forest and physically restricted in an oversize corset, Danchick's body takes a journey from leaning forward with twisting arms to short little runs with arms floating out to the side.
Becky Reilly's Fragments resists any such shape and is what it says - fragments. A video on the back wall and the choreographer's own dance with paint and canvas compete with two dancers. Short and understated, the piece is also unfulfilling and more could have been eked out of the material.
Ends tonight
Lovefuries ****
SS Michael & John Downstairs
Susan Conley
Welsh company Lurking Truth/Gwir sy'n Llechu Theatre Company offer two stylish, and stylistically challenging, works written and directed by David Ian Rabey. In both, two people undergo struggles with inner voices, one from an archetypal, chthonic past, and one from the more recent past. In the first, The Contracting Sea, Antoinette Walsh struggles with an ancient urge to throw off her humanity for a goddess-like power. Walsh is a compelling presence, and her performance is underlined by a throbbing double-bass score by Paula Gardiner.
In The Hanging Judge, Roger Owen wrestles with the internalised voice of his childhood abuser in a riveting and explosively physical performance. Rick Gough's setting is striking, a labyrinth of scaffolding that stands in for the protagonist's bared psyche, but it interferes slightly with Owen's ability to let loose; however, Gough's lighting design is impressive, adding an extra layer of shine to a polished production.
Runs until September 25th
The Marowitz Hamlet **
Focus Theatre
Giles Newington
"I despise Hamlet . . . You may think he's a sensitive, well-spoke fellow, but, frankly, he gives me a pain in the ass," wrote Charles Marowitz of his 1960s collage version of Shakespeare's play. A few decades on, however, his earnest attempt at anti-heroic deconstruction itself seems a little dated, and, in this enthusiastic production by Spellbound, flawed by the same over-theatricality he must have intended to parody. The production opens promisingly enough, with a 30-second enactment of the play's events culminating in a stack of corpses, the victims of Hamlet's intellectual paralysis and vacillation. Unfortunately the extended version of the same conceit which follows is not as effective, with everything from Marowitz's cut-ups of Shakepeare's poetry to his parodies of 1960s staging tending to emphasise his own work's lack of current resonance. While it is novel to see Hamlet treated as a figure of fun, the in-joke (much enjoyed by most of the audience, it must be said) quickly palls.
Runs until September 26th
Master Harold . . . and the Boys *****
The Helix, DCU
Fintan O'Toole
This wonderful autobiographical play by the great South African dramatist, Athol Fugard, deals with an emotion greatly neglected by art: shame. Written in the early 1980s, when the fall of apartheid seemed a long way off, and set in 1950, when its legal structures were being created, the play builds a capacious reflection on the social and personal psychology of oppression on top of a deceptively simple structure. There are three characters: white teenager Hally and two middle-aged black men, Sam and Willie, who work in his parents' café. The action unfolds in real time and entirely within the café that is evoked so vividly by designer Carol Betera. Yet spinning out of it is a brilliant and terrible parable of the way subjugation is both driven by and feeds back into a sense of self-contempt.
For much of its length, Bairbre Ní Chaoimh's production for Calypso seems too placid. Conrad Kemp's Hally feels a little too innocently goofy; George Seremba's Sam too much the gentle giant; the obsession of Joe Vera's Willie with ballroom dancing too softly sentimental. The key moments when the arrogance of Hally's assumption of superiority flash out through his ambivalent love for his surrogate father Sam are underplayed. Yet this is all part of a brave and finely executed strategy to make the climactic moments, when Hally's self-hatred turns outwards and Sam's dignity emerges, all the more potent. Kemp handles this transition with great conviction and Seremba's shifts in tone are as masterly as they are moving. This thoughtful production of a richly humane play becomes both intellectually challenging and emotionally engrossing.
Runs until October 2nd
My Foot, My Tutor **
Project
Anna Carey
Billed as a meeting of Brecht and Beckett, Peter Handke's My Foot, My Tutor is a play influenced superficially by both writers. But it lacks the former's ideological fire and the latter's black humour. Performed without dialogue and with the use of some rather Brechtian placards showing stage directions, the play focuses on two figures in what could be a farmhouse who may represent tragedy and comedy.
Handke's work is often concerned with the power of language on a theatrical audience, which tends to mean that his plays are interesting concepts on paper but painful theatrical experiences in practice, and My Foot, My Tutor is no exception. While both actors perform their roles with enthusiasm, or as much enthusiasm as one can muster while hacking up vegetables or spending 10 minutes taking off one's socks on stage, this play is both intensely irritating and almost unbearably boring.
Runs until September 26th
The Poe Project *
T36
Rosita Boland
The name of the author of The Poe Project is not on the programme for this Office Supplies Theatre Company production. This is wise. It was not the anonymous author's finest hour. What is a Poe, by the way? Search me. This production rambles from one impenetrable, turgid scene to the next, with unaccountably long delays between each, with the audience left sitting in silence and darkness, staring at the stage. For the record, there seems to be some pastiche of gothic going on (a woman in black emerges at intervals to screech at us for no reason). There is also some kind of Dungeons and Dragons thing happening (a male narrator speaks in dire rhyming verse about castles and lords and ladies and birds rapping and tapping at casement windows). All the other scenes consist of mumbled voiceover to an empty stage with red lighting. A confused waste of energy.
Runs until September 25th
Problem Solvers Anonymous/It Won't Be Great When I'm Not Here ***
International Bar
Gerry Colgan
These two short plays by Christian O'Reilly are clever and witty, but undeniably lightweight. The first is about the eponymous firm whose business is the assassination of men as commissioned by women. One of its hit-girls has botched an important job by falling for the target male. She comes, with her mother in tow, to plead her case, and it all ends in a hail of bullets.
In the next play, a woman attending a play protests at its meaningless repetition, and finds herself in a surreal scenario. She is actually the author of the play, but never got beyond the first line. Now she is compelled to account for her creative paralysis, prompted forcibly by her colleagues. All of this then becomes the play she could not write. Aideen O'Donnell shines as the lead in both plays, which are interesting but too superficial to make a strong impression.
Runs until September 25th
The Robb'd That Smiles ****
Focus Theatre
Giles Newington
The actors have obviously got time on their hands on the Fair City lot, with Claudia Carroll's debut novel now followed by this subtle psychological drama from Gemma Doorly. A three-hander, performed with authority and humour by Sonja Byrne, Bren McElroy and Doorly herself, it concerns the events played out in the mind of Martha as she tries to come to terms with past trauma. The women involved, all immaculately dressed in white as if to emphasise the fragility of their identities, tell and retell incidents from their lives, changing roles to try and get closer to a resolution of their conflicts.
While the tension is maintained throughout, and the dialogue is crisp, the events leading to Martha's psychological collapse are somewhat obscure. What remains is a strong sense of her anxiety, and a connection with the jealousy and revenge theme in Othello, the source of the quote "the robb'd that smiles steals something from the thief".
Runs until September 26th
In Fine Form ***
Players Theatre, TCD
Donald Clarke
Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez, two talented comic actors who, as Sabotage, received a Perrier Best Newcomer nomination at Edinburgh this year, play a dangerous game throughout In Fine Form. By constantly reminding us how silly and unreal their school of Dadaist vaudeville is, they run the risk of having us agree with them a little more heartily than might be desirable. Happily, the American clowns are so inventive that they just about get away with their outbursts of sly self-deprecation. Dressed only in pyjamas, with two chairs as their sole props, Allen and Chavez take us through a surreal, barely coherent tale that has something to do with a haunted hotel, a talking horse, a crazy king and a mysterious death. The piece is really a loosely connected series of sketches, but, animated by the benevolent spirits of the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope, it is never less than diverting.
Runs until September 25th
Searching for the Enemy ***
Project
Christine Madden
What happens if George Bush's "Big Mother is Washing You" politics settle in as the norm in Western society? You get Searching for the Enemy, a collaborative production among three companies: Boomerang Theatre Company, Ireland; Shade Interactive, the Netherlands; and Theater der Jugend, Austria.
James Connors (Richard McFerran), newly promoted, becomes horrified by the official voyeurism that erases individuality in order to "protect" society - "society is the enemy", says Fritz (Simon Jaritz), purportedly an underground activist.
Staged sparsely, but with cameras transmitting images of actors and audience to a background screen, this theatrical cubism achieves a sinister feeling of dimensions that cannot be plumbed, of constant surveillance. Yet this ambitious and timely project lacks something - control? Focus? Despite a well-constructed plot, in which James descends from gold-card employee to potential informer to captive, complete with Jerry Springer-like interrogation, the piece falls short of its promise. Colin Stewart, however, excels as the menacing boss, Miller.
Runs until September 26th
Seven Deadly Teens *
SS Michael & John
Peter Crawley
There comes a point, somewhere in the unadvertised second hour of this energetic but shapeless exercise, when the cast launch into an acidulous and overblown lampoon of drama schools; all animal impersonations and abstract improvs. The tone of the show iseerily unaltered.
Honourably, writer/director Orla Dunne wants to invigorate youth theatre; less honourably, each stride forward is matched by a careless slip into patronising cliché - adolescent fatalism, second-hand existentialism and, of course, extended parent-bashing. In a cavernous performance space, her seven deadly schoolkids rush through quasi-Joycean speeches, lovingly sprinkled with moist sound effects and salty jokes but rendered as distinct as a football chant in a cathedral. This is the kind of play where every character dies onstage - and there's still an hour to go. Finding themselves where many a group improvisation has strayed before - in an afterlife waiting room - they then face an eternity of suffering.
Are we there yet?
Runs until September 26th
Tick My Box! ****
Bewley's Café Theatre
Donald Clarke
What extraordinary things Carmel Stephens and Iseult Golden do with the dynamics of posture and the politics of personal space in this rollicking crowd-pleaser from Inis Theatre Company. Playing the two organisers and all the guests, male and female, at a speed-dating evening, the actors, who devised the show alongside director David Horan, convey surprising depths of personality through just the inclination of a shoulder, the tilt of a chin or the restlessness of a lascivious eye. At one stage, shifting between characters for the hundredth time, Golden slumps so dramatically in her seat that she appears to morph from Julianne Moore into someone who looks like he might smell strongly of congealed fat. Tick My Box! is (understandably considering the brief) a tad disjointed. But it is rare that one gets to see so many moving and funny stories - the suppressed passion between the organisers is particularly poignantly played - crammed together into such a neat package.
Runs until October 9th
The Dublin Fringe Festival runs until October 10th. Tel: 1850-374643 for bookings, or book online at www.fringefest.com
