FRINGE REVIEWS: It is usually the dancing that elicits a visceral response, but Julie Lockett's Tank puts the audience in an environment where Robert Furey's lights and Eoin O'Brien's soundscape first affect the audience. We are led into a partitioned section of the stage where two dancers have already begun a slow duet.
Tank
Project Cube
Standing inches from the performers you notice details like the soft padding feet on the concrete floor or arms that seem to float out from the torso yet still direct energy through the fingers.
There are rare moments of interaction. Sometimes one dancer's hand rests on the other's head or a head sinks on to the other's back, and these moments give a sudden surge of humanity to the ongoing movements. The piece is short, but the choreographer sustains the slowly evolving dialect with the aid of admirably concentrated performances from Katherine O'Malley and Emma O'Kane. (Runs until tomorrow)
Michael Seaver
Within 24 Hours of Dance
Project
The triumphant "we did it" proclaimed by Semper Fi after its latest 24-hour event summed up the importance the company places on the drama of the deadline. Since most dancers are fluid improvisers and since John Cage and Merce Cunningham proved that music and dance don't need to correspond, you might wonder at the point of commissioning new music and dance works in 24 hours, short of creating a theatrical "Ready Steady Choreograph". Choreographing to (as opposed to with) the music, John Scott's text and loose canons, Mary Nunan's internal body dialect, Rebecca Walter's straining groups and Caimin Collin's theatrical setpieces all showed different approaches to the task of "wrong directions". Unfortunately, the strong individual scores of Ivan Birthistle, Vincent Doherty, Simon O'Connor and Trevor Knight ended up as sonic wallpaper, and it was the dancers who stole the show, creating engaging performances out of some very obvious choreographic exercises.
Michael Seaver
Triple Espresso
Andrew's Lane Theatre
This is some pretty slick schtick, in the best sense of the word, calling to mind old-school entertainment styles ranging from cabaret-style piano bar crooning, magic tricks, and shadow puppetry. Shadow puppetry?! These guys will do (almost) anything to make us laugh, and they succeed, because they are gooooood.
It's Hugh Butternut's 25th anniversary as headliner at Triple Espresso, a local coffee bar. Butternut (Michael Pearce Donley) is joined in the celebration by an ebullient Bobby Bean (Bob Stromberg) and a taciturn Buzz Maxwell (Bill Arnold). Formerly a musical-comedic trio, their reunion will not only allow the fellas to let go of past resentments, but also dazzle us punters with their own individual talents. The nostalgic frame allows the three to exploit their somewhat old-fashioned routines in a current context, and they are executed so masterfully and exuberantly that it's impossible not to get swept up in the event. You'll be singing along in spite of yourself. (Runs until October 12th)
Susan Conley
Acquainted with the Night
Andrew's Lane Studio
What would happen to the two-woman cast of Female Parts's Acquainted With the Night if they stopped spinning their lurid fantasies? Throughout their partnered narratives, they express anxiety that they "might stop existing" if they're silent - "Nothing's real unless we say so". Originally from the country, lap dancer Gina (Caroline Mullarkey) and secretary Avril (Bairbre Scully) stumble their way through the dangers of Dublin, both unable to break the destructive, parasitic cord that binds them together - reminiscent of Genet's The Maids. Whether they are figments of their own imagination, something like Pirandello's five characters, or hapless girls trying to attach excitement and import to their lives is never resolved; and because of this, Paul Kennedy's dark yet entertaining script - despite its clever construction and sparkling, witty dialogue - feels like a fragment. First-night jitters notwithstanding, the actors made their characters come alive - Scully in particular shone as the tough yet immature secretary. Well worth the acquaintance. (Runs until Saturday)
Christine Madden
Besamé el Cactus
Project
Sol Pico gives out some tomatoes at the beginning of her performance and encourages the audience to fire them at her at a moment we feel is appropriate. Considering what follows, this is a brave move. Although armed with the outside eyes of a theatre director, choreographic assistant and dramaturge, Besamé el Cactus is still sloppily conceived and lacking any of the drama or imagination promised in the pre-show publicity. Whether being a blindfold swan in the miniature cactus garden, or vulnerably asking for an audience member to burn themselves with her (although the flaming torch was replaced by a knife for this performance), or slamming against a movable mirror while wearing a wig, she drip-feeds metaphor and allusion without purpose or flair. And the chess-playing actor and technician, Joan Manrique, is underused as a possible foil for her action.
Michael Seaver
Fringe Tonite
The Sugar Club
Perhps Derek O'Connor has not studied Alan Partridge or Mrs Merton closely enough. Ironic chat shows either succeed through mortifying incompetence in a fictitious situation, or devastatingly quick wit that subjects real guests to cushioned torture. But O'Connor's truculent, toupé-wearing compère, Hal Cock-Roach, demonstrates neither the material nor the intelligence to make this unscripted, unrehearsed comic wasteland anything other than an opportunity for some festival acts to plug their own wares.
In the hush that descends between Hal & Co's bumbling half-witticisms, lazy theatre- bashing, contemptible gay jokes and refund gags (which tellingly draw no laughs), you wonder how its Fringe affiliation was allowed. Then special guest and Festival director Vallejo Gantner gamely comes on to answer questions about whether he is qualified for his job. It's never a pleasure to see something die onstage, worse still when it involves collateral damage.
One star, and very lucky to get it. (Friday evenings, this week and next)
Peter Crawley
Blownup
Project Cube
When the performers of UK-based company Metro-Boulot-Dodo take to the stage, a lot goes on. A screen flickers with images and quoted (illegible) text, while a soundtrack delivers us a photographer's voice divorced from his images. On stage, one photographer (Paul Long) tinkers in the red light of the darkroom, while another (Michael Pinchbeck), acts out the beginning and end of a relationship with his muse (Esther Simpson). The conceit is this; from focus to final blow-up, the act of photography is like falling in and out of love. The disembodied photographer's voice provides the narrative and Antonioni's 1996 film Blowup provides the inspiration.
Yet for all the frantic, if assured, movement, and its tangled mesh of symbol and allusion, directors Paul Long and David Parkin offer us a curiously static show. Like a photograph, nothing moves, and thus, as theatre, it fails to move us. (Runs until tomorrow)
Louise East
The Ballad of Badger Bickle's Youngfella
SS Michael and John
Black box, bare space, story to be told - the resources of BYOB are four actors with such elasticity of faculties, vocal and physical, that they weave their narrative with recourse to no more props than would fit in the suitcase of the eponymous Badger Bickle's Youngfella.
How he came by his strange name, his parentage and his sudden sad orphan-dom, his passage to Americay and the emigrant's return, his love of the cakes and his luck with the bookies, his carnal pleasures and his sweaty labours, his lifelong dream of the "Luvly Dancing Gurl" and the reasonable sensual compromise, his crime of passion and atonement, his sudden unexpected demise and translation into heaven, forms the matter of 90 minutes' dynamic traffic on the floor of SS Michael and John.
Brian Desmond (director, author, actor), David Nelligan (our hero), Sandra Morrissey and Denise Murphy are bursting with quirky, versatile energy. They share 100 characters and the sound effects in an onrush of ironic paddywackery (Craggy Island meets Under Milk Wood). This is delightful, original, refreshing theatre. (Runs until Saturday)
Derek West
Cauldron of Brontës
Theatre Space
Cauldron of Brontës' is a story from the past played out on a modern stage. Black drapes, scattered pages and low lighting draw us immediately into the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of the vicarage at Haworth. Here we discover how this "house of God" could spawn such genius - and, ultimately, disintegration. As the Brontë sisters move towards literary success, their triumphs are eclipsed by the moral and physical deterioration of their adored brother, Branwell. The grave-digging figure of John Brown is not as convincing, while the shadowy presence of Papa Brontë remains off-stage to guard his altar-wine.
The cast give strong performances, in particular Natalie Childs as the ambitious and frustrated Charlotte. "It is difficult to separate the writing from the writer," she states within the gloomy interior of Haworth. Cauldron of Brontës sets out to find the writers in the writing and achieves exactly that. (Runs until Saturday)
Fíona Ní Chinnéide
All About Love
Cobalt Café
"Love lost and found, bought and sold, forgotten and everlasting", it says on the flyer and, crikey, it actually tells the truth. Add in the associated emotions of love - celebration, pain, bewilderment - and you have a veritable muesli of melancholia and mirth. Musician, singer and actress Maria Tecce takes on the guises of the bruised, the brash and the brittle in almost two hours of song. Thematically sound and elegantly executed, Tecce essays profound loss and joy through the likes of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Nature Boy. With visual tics that range from flirty and shirty to downright dirty, from a smile to a smirk, Maria imperiously translates the songs into her own theatrical language. The reference points might be Ute Lemper, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald and Barbara Streisand, but the end result is totally Tecce. (Runs until Saturday)
Tony Clayton-Lea
Do Not Adjust Your Self
International Bar
Mainstream television now being such a parody of itself, you wouldn't think there was much fun to be had sending it up. But while Kate Perry's hour-long sketch show has obvious targets - sad old people obsessed with Coronation Street, chat-show hosts and their book-brandishing guests, life as docu-drama - genuine laughs are frequent and self-indulgence rare as the cast (familiar through Dublin stage work and RTÉ) bounce off each other with great verve. An early sketch - the crazy TV repairman with a plate in his head that picks up satellite programmes - sets the tone as he describes how the job leaves little opportunity for romance: "You can be in Meath one day and Westmeath the next. What woman would put up with that?" Then there are the five TG4 newsreaders who run out of time after they have all pronounced their own names. Affectionate and very likeable comedy. (Runs until Saturday)
Stephen Dixon
A Road in Winter /N.E.S. in a Noose
The Crypt
In Penny Dreadful's A Road in Winter, by Darren Murphy, two English prisoners play a word association game between rounds of torture in order to keep a grip on their sanity. They list familiar places to themselves as a survival strategy. They employ language as a means to hang on to their identities. This is a Beckett nowhere we've been before, a Pinter scenario done less convincingly. Too slight and insubstantial beyond its basic dramatic situation, there was very little here to remember.
Bound and gagged, too, were Nic, Rose and Sal, three feisty but heartbroken lesbians, who recount their respective stories with humour, in writer Veronica Dyas's hour-long piece, N.E.S. in a Noose, presented by Macalla Theatre. Again, the reason for their incarceration in a Gimp-like (Pulp Fiction) cell is not apparent. What does become apparent, however - after certain incredulous stories, some good and bad jokes and meandering anecdotes - is that they will not escape their captor.
While better than the first piece in this double-bill, N.E.S. in a Noose was more like pretty well-staged student drama than a professional theatre production. The talents of all those involved suggest they could do better.
Ian Kilroy
Flowers for Fru Fagervik
Bewley's Café Theatre
This hour-long play by Isa Schöier had its première in Sweden last year, and comes to Dublin via the Dionysos Theatre Company. It is an introspective monologue spoken by the girl, Kim, in the apartment of an elderly teacher who is ill, apparently as a result of an insulting remark the girl made to her. It seems that Kim sees her own persona and future as mimicking the lonely life of the teacher, ugly and unrewarding. While talking, she sets up an improbable tableau of dolls to represent the duo, and manipulates them to no particular purpose or profit; a comment that might equally be levied against the play as a whole.
Helena Lewin's performance relies on a limited range of expressions and a soporific voice that cushions its hearer against whatever meaning may attach to the bones of the story. Leading edge this is not. (Runs until Saturday)
Gerry Colgan
