4.48 Psychosis, Master Shuttlefate, Remember This, Sans, The Hospital, The Sunshine Play in today's reviews from the fringe.
4.48 Psychosis
Project Cube
English playwright Sarah Kane committed suicide in 1999 at the age of only 28. She had already written five major plays. The last of these was 4.48 Psychosis, finished shortly before she died and first staged posthumously at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2000.
As part of its Seeds 2 Showcase, Rough Magic has revived the play with Tom Creed as director. Siobhan McSweeney, Paul Mulcahy and Hilary O'Shaughnessy play a variety of roles but predominantly they represent, through a form of theatrical triplicity, the interiority and exteriority of the mental disintegration of the central character. Kane hated the reduction of her plays to mere autobiography, and 4.48 Psychosis is metaphorically layered with philosophical depths that go further than any literal analysis. Although this is an impassioned production with fine performances, more care is needed in the direction to bring out all the subtlety, resonance and theatricality of Kane's text. Essential viewing, nonetheless. Until Sun (matinee on Sat)
Patrick Brennan
Master Shuttlefate
Players Theatre
In Master Shuttlefate, the Angel Exit company has made a valiant attempt to devise a play that distils the essence of the refugee experience. A professor of linguistics, Jan Shuttlefate, flees his own country to seek asylum in Faraway, and is trapped in a Kafkaesque situation. He is lodged in a detention camp where the authorities are openly derisory about their captives. Every move to resolve Shuttlefate's situation is thwarted; application forms are out of stock, communications are blocked.
In the second half, specific narrative shapes are imposed on the plot, going against the play's apparent thrust. We see the death of Shuttlefate's sister, and a prisoner dies for lack of medical care. Finally, through a near-coincidence, Shuttlefate gains entry to the promised land of Faraway. All this creates the overriding impression of a literal but incoherent drama.
The acting is good, directed by David Randolph Irving.
Until Oct 2
Gerry Colgan
Remember This
Project Cube
In terms of an audience's shared experience, you can't count on much beyond breathing, eating, drinking and sleeping. Apart from that, only falling in love you can assume everyone's done before. This is what resonates throughout Rachael Lincoln and Mark Stuver's piece: the ability to recreate physically those overpowering feelings of elation, despair, removing all barriers, senseless annoyance, rage, anxiety, loss and being reunited.
It's rare to find dancing partners who work together so organically - their movement together is astonishingly close and aligned, they're almost like symbiotic plants, their tendrils on time-lapse film. Lincoln is particularly agile and adept at communication through her body, at times as limp as a rag doll, at others taut and strong as a drawn bow, with all its potential energy.
Some spoken elements take the piece into an area that is mundane and sentimental - and they are superfluous, because these dancers, and their work, are most eloquent left to bodily devices.
Until Sun
Christine Madden
Sans
Project Upstairs
Threats in programme-speak to focus on stuff like "modes of transition" and to base Sans merely on the dancers' presence, might be a worrying sign of undiluted self-importance. Thankfully French choreographer Martine Pisani achieves both with far less solemn tactics: after one long stare at the bare stage, three guys just act the maggot for 50 minutes.
The playfulness isn't quite loose enough for the audience to suspect improvisation, but it still has a sense of discovery and illogicality. The dancers blow each other around the stage, look at us with changing moods and faces, and translate stories inaccurately but hilariously. As with clowning, there is always something serious being said and you can read your way into the piece at all sorts of levels, but with the constant safety net of humour. And in case you missed a bit, it ends with a fast-forwarded rerun of the entire dance.
Run concluded
Michael Seaver
The Hospital
Project Upstairs
The concept could have been conjured up by a patient coming round from an anaesthetic: a green-tinged nightmare in which three nurses are stranded in a deserted hospital, playing not doctors and nurses but patients and nurses. In the absence of anyone to minister to, they injure each other, at times playfully, but with sadistic overtones, as one of them tyrannises the others until they turn the tables on her.
Performed in Norwegian by the Joe Stromgren Kompani, no translation is needed, as the scenarios are writ large through the committed physical versatility and comic exaggeration of the performers. A pill-popping binge, a frenetic chase behind screens and a darker strand featuring an abusive sexual fantasy punctuate what is essentially a series of sketches. Polished set, sound and lighting design make the production stand out, but after a while, like its three characters, it has nowhere to go.
Until Sat
Helen Meany
The Sunshine Play
Project Cube
Three thirtysomethings' lives intersect on a Bucharest rooftop, and a "broken hearts' magical mystery tour" to the seaside is planned.
To reveal more would be to deny other audience members the delight of discovery, and to disrupt the sophisticated calibration of writing, staging and performance (in English) on display here from the MONDAY Theatre at Green Hours, winner of last year's Fringe Project award. The overall impression is of effortless lightness - just a slice of life, filled with humour - but Peca Stefan's play also offers a fascinating window into Romanian life, which might startle Irish audiences with its familiarity: tribal politics, the pull of global capitalism, the isolation of the returned emigrant. The standout quality of Ana Margineanu's production is superb acting, though Isabela Neamtu and Cosmin Selesi's slightly exaggerated characterisation clashes occasionally with Daniel Popa's mesmerising naturalism - he is a film star in the making. This show's a welcome delight.
Until Sun
Karen Fricker