Cars, cakes and blue boys are all part of the Dublin Fringe Festival this week. It's happening all over the city in corners, shop-windows, squares and theatre spaces. In the Cube at the Project, Michael West's play, Foley (no relation), opens to a full house. It is directed by his wife, Annie Ryan, who is expecting their first child in the new year. They welcome friends, including retired professor of genetics at TCD, Prof George Dawson, and West's uncle Richard Hilliard, a retired businessman from Killarney.
Singer and actor Maria Doyle, arrives in, as does Catherine Punch, who can currently be seen in the film, Flick. She plays the girlfriend who gives the dashing anti-hero the heave-ho. Proper order, too!
Afterwards, friends and guests go around the corner to Belgo restaurant to have a party and eat Bewley's fruit cake washed down with Tiger beer. It's a wrap. For those who miss Foley tonight at the Cube in the Project (at 7.30 p.m.), the play re-opens on Monday 16th for one more week.
Meanwhile, over at SFX Theatre, Limerick comes to Dublin in the shape of Island Theatre Company's Pigtown, a moving and funny evocation of life in the big smoke on the Shannon. Playwright Mike Finn, who's from Thomondgate in the city, has flown over from Iowa for the Dublin opening of the play, which has been seen by more than 13,000 people to date. His mother, Breda Finn, is delighted - "I missed the opening in Limerick, so I wanted to be here tonight - even if I had to cycle up! But I didn't have to cycle."
Barbara Scarlett, counsellor for public affairs at the US embassy, who arranged Finn's writing scholarship in the University of Iowa, is here for the celebrations and the show, with her husband Earl Scarlett, deputy US ambassador. Other visitors from Limerick include TD Jan O'Sullivan, Willie Fagan of Chorus, the city's new cable and phone company, and Mayor John Ryan, who comes from a line of 14 generations in the city. And all the time Terry Devlin, Pigtown director, watches from the wings.
And for theatre goers who are looking for some quiet time, try the Temple Bar Gallery where photographs of Angola, taken by Eleanor Curtis over a long period, went on show this Thursday. Picture Angola 2000 runs until Friday, 20th.