Absolut Fringe

Various venues, Dublin fringefest.com

Despite its careful curation, the Absolut Fringe can seem both capacious and capricious. But by the second week patterns begin to emerge. One defining strand this year is its reflection of just how diverse and polyphonous our nation has become.

In Brian Fleming’s personal and musical history, Gis A Shot of Your Bongos Mister, directed by Barabbas’s Raymond Keane, we find a Dubliner lost in Dakar and later bringing his Senegalese teachers to Fatima Mansions in the 1990s, throwing first world problems into sharp relief.

Polish Theatre Ireland, meanwhile, introduce us (almost phonetically) to the poet, anti-fascist and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, taking him as the inspiration for Chesslaugh Mewash, negotiating a world mediatised by social

networks. Argentinian collaborators Noelia Ruiz and Angel Luis Gonzalez are making an older pilgrimage in Better Loved From Afar, reversing the journey their grandfather made 200 years ago, from Dublin to La

Pampa, while asking what it means to be part of the Irish Diaspora.

Finally, Manchán Magan, a previous Fringe victor with Broken Croi/Heart Briste, returns to take the weakening pulse of his mother language with Bás Tongue (above). Despite very different origins, they may all be speaking the same language.