Maris Piper is having a party, and all her fruity friends are invited. There are the bickering Cherry twins, the opera-singing Madame Aubergine, Mr and Mrs Pear, who met at a conference, and their son William. There is poor little Peach, who keeps falling over and bruises easily. There are some veggies in attendance too: entertainment comes courtesy of a Spanish onion strumming his guitar, and the guest of honour is Potato. Potato is a slippery (and dirty) kind of guy. He loves parties, but hates having to get ready, and as Ms Piper prepares his bath he disappears.

This charming show from Shona Reppe invests ordinary objects with a sense of wacky fun. Conceived and designed by Reppe, the combination of set and subject work organically, as an ordinary kitchen becomes a site of invention and surprise. Doors are on the floor, teapots are lampshades, and a whisk has many adventurous uses. Cupboard drawers become the bedrooms for cruciferous characters – baby carrots and bananas who are sleeping in their skins – and bubbles are literally whipped up in an improvised tub to entice the reluctant Potato.

Potato Needs a Bath is performed by Reppe too, in a colourful ensemble of acid green and a pineapple hat for the special occasion. She is an enchanting presence on the Ark’s small stage, though her ad-libbed responses to the audience seemed more sarcastic than sympathetic. At 35 minutes long the pace is perfect for short attention spans, and there is much to excite the imagination of three- to five-year-olds (not least some very clever toilet humour) as well as adults familiar with the diversity of vegetable species. When the party finally starts, everyone jumps up eagerly, to sing and show-off their dance moves, inspired by Reppe’s animation of everyday food-stuffs. Lunchboxes will never be the same again.

Run concluded
Sara Keating

In 1990, the young Oberzan goofily spoofed Kickboxer (among other B-Movies) at home in Maine with his elder brother, Gator, with support from their kid sister. Nearly 20 years later they remake their remake, frame by frame, and what seemed like a lark becomes fraught with alarming change. Gator, toned and confident in 1990, is now paunchy and restless; the quiet and intense Zachary has become obsessional. And while we watch the three versions roughly spliced together on-screen, we consider the effects of time, both eroding and hardening. And whatever happened to Jean Claude Van Damme?

For a while, Oberzan’s performance seems like an extended, wicked joke at the expense of the faded “Muscles from Brussels” persona. Sitting before us beneath a film screen, Oberzan announces an absurd theory about acting and addiction, aping Van Damme’s accent and flexing his bicep – a muscular and Brusscular parody. When we hear those words again, though, from their original speaker, the meaning is devastating.

Life doesn’t imitate art, Woody Allen once clarified, it imitates bad television. Oberzan’s project eventually rations out enough sobering evidence to take the maxim seriously. Just as Kickboxer’s brothers follow separate trajectories, one debilitated by disaster, the other stirred by it, so the Oberzan siblings pursue diverging paths following their parents’ divorce: Zachary towards performance, and Gator towards drug addiction and prison sentences. The show is not glibly fatalistic, though (if they had spoofed When Harry Met Sally, their lives may not have been substantially altered).

What it suggests, more artfully, is a slow loss of innocence guided by memories that can’t fade. The violent films they devoured in 1990 (including the gruesome exploitation flick Faces of Death) are so utterly unselfconscious they now seem hopelessly endearing, and the bright camaraderie of the Oberzan brothers makes their struggle to recreate the past more moving.

With the screen bearing so much of the work, though, the show’s inclusion in the Dublin Theatre Festival may seem almost suspect. (It has been screened elsewhere without Oberzan’s live participation.) Thematically, though, it develops and refines other ideas in the programme – the slavish recreations of the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, here with emotional consequence, or the harsh and affectionate home truths of Brokentalkers’ Have I No Mouth – and any quibbles over the medium won’t dilute its message. However hard we try or wish, we can’t go back. All remakes are impossible.

Ends Saturday
- Peter Crawley

THE COMING Storm begins with a lecture about storytelling. A good story should have a strong beginning, we are told, and a charismatic central character, elements of mystery, and silences that gets broken. Of course, Forced Entertainment will flout every one of these conventions in this devised, impressionistic performance, which offers fragments of stories frustrated in their telling in a deliberately anti-linear approach that never comes together as a coherent whole.

House lights remain up as the ensemble cast of six emerge from the wings in their casuals, smiling wryly at the audience as if to say: “Well here we are, what are you going to do to entertain us?” Between the offered dictums of narrative technique, they take turns to tell us their stories, which range from the absurd to the mundane, sometimes within the one tale. Sharing a single microphone, they interrupt each other and undermine each other, all the while training their attention on the audience with an unsettling dead-eyed stare.

The stage is flanked by a pair of clothes rails hung with glittering costumes and a variety of musical instruments, which offer the audience a promise of something more theatrical, and as the stories become more fantastical so, too, do the company’s modes of distraction. The women get undressed and dance provocatively, the piano keys are tinkled and bashed, and a series of surreal images grab the focus of our gaze: a writhing crocodile, an embodied tree, a whirling ghost, a bare-chested devil. The imagery does not echo the contents of the stories in any literal way, but their phantasmagorical unpredictability mirrors the uncertain landscape of the worlds – true and unreal – that the performers share with us.

If there is a theme to The Coming Storm, you might identify it as fairytale in the Grimm sense of the word: the stories are full of missing children, deceptive forests, fatal misunderstandings, and a sharp awareness of mortality and ageing. However, this is Forced Entertainment, which has delighted in denying audiences the catharsis of concrete interpretation for the near-40 years of its existence. For those coming to the work for the first time, it might be reassuring to know that The Coming Storm, with its cabaret-ish feel, is actually more palatable than most of the company’s previous work, if no less confounding.
Ends Saturday
– Sara Keating

What is the best production you have been in? Tricky one. I’ve been fortunate to be in some great shows, so it would be either the original production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme or The Price by Arthur Miller at the Gate.

And the worst? Easy. A very depressing play, appropriately called Atonement at the Lyric in Hammersmith, many years ago. To this day, I still couldn’t say what it was about. I had a very embarrassing nude scene, one of the other actors – there were two of them – suffered a nervous breakdown, and on Guy Fawkes Night there were more people on stage than in the audience.

What is the best production you have been to? Another tricky one, but I was lucky enough to catch Derek Jacobi playing King Lear recently. Amazing.

Who has been your greatest influence? My parents.

What one show, other than your own, of course, were you really looking forward to in the Dublin Theatre Festival? Hamlet – the Wooster Group have great pedigree.

Opening night – terrific or torture? Slightly torturous. Obviously there’s no way round them, but even if it has been hugely well received, there’s the downer that you have to do it all again tomorrow just as competently and you may well be hungover.

And critics – terrific or torture? Neither, God love them.

Where were you when inspiration struck for your latest role? That question assumes that it has.

What is your pre-show routine? Stand on stage for a bit – reacquaint – shower. Sing. No food!

And post-show? Complain. Bitch, set the world to rights – usual stuff.

What one thing would you say to an aspiring actor at the start of their career?
Do your homework. Be on time. And remember, it’s not fair.

The lead has called in sick, the director is drunk, and the ticket sales are poor – must the show go on?No. Of course not. What good will that do?

No one should ever go to the theatre on an empty stomach: what’s the best meal/drink to have before seeing The Talk of the Town? A cocktail.

The best thing about your job is … The variety.

What are you looking forward to when your run is finished? I’ll begin rehearsing the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Dead.

Finally, the pitch: Why should someone come and see your show at the DTF? Maeve Brennan is relatively unknown in her home country but, as Roddy Doyle (whose mother was a cousin of Maeve) points out, when it comes to short-story writing, she is up there with the best of them, and her life story is fascinating. This production ticks all the boxes: award-winning author, Emma Donoghue; great director, Annabelle Comyn; great cast, with the terrific Catherine Walker as Maeve. But don’t take my word for it, ask the people who already have tickets – it’s nearly sold out.

With more shades of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde than Grey, and filmmaker PT Anderson’s criss-crossing city narratives, Duggan uses sex as a metaphor, mapping out cosmopolitan Dublin through a succession of apparently random collisions. A black English film star hits on a Romanian bookstore employee; a Dublin entertainment journalist buys Valentine’s Day flowers for his girlfriend from a widowed Japanese florist; a woman recovering from her husband’s suicide and gradually returns to social life while her sister explodes in reckless behaviour.

Without skimping on character detail, Duggan turns those lives into the warp and weft of his drama, prompting further reflections from director Tom Creed’s production on the new fabric of contemporary cities. Frank Conway’s set, saturated in red and literally turning the traditional kitchen upside down, recognises deeper roots beneath urban facades and flashy professions, while Eimear Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh’s costumes, in Benetton-bright hues, turn a full 360 degrees through the colour wheel as the play itself comes full circle.

There is a tragicomedy in such relationships in casual racism or unexpected confidences – most amusingly when Ian Lloyd Anderson’s hack pours out his heart to Michael Yare’s film star during an interview – while families and lovers become sealed off and separate. “I restrain you,” Alicja Ayres’ beautifully played Ioana tells Lloyd Anderson, without labouring the theme, “I have you tied up in knots.”
Duggan isn’t always so subtle. Constrained by the brisk episodic form, he sometimes struggles to keep exposition light (bringing up suicide or venereal disease in casual conversation can be a challenge) and his weakness for a well-crafted exit line can teeter towards melodrama.

Dennis Clohessy’s ambient electronic music is a pleasure, but it covers a number of pace-sapping scene transitions that could still be more sharply executed.

One late exchange, which Creed handles seriously and delicately, seems to hint at another consequence of Duggan’s own artful approach, when Ioana claims she is the opposite of claustrophobic. “Claustrophilic?” offers Orion Lee’s excellent, sympathetic Hideo. That encapsulates the play, which is engaging, detailed and fiendishly clever but finally ties up everything too neatly. Shibari enthusiasts will disagree, but it can be rewarding to leave some loose ends.

Until November 3rd
– Peter Crawley

The tightly-worked form of Halcyon Days is the old-fashioned naturalistic one-act, which David Horan’s subtle direction and Maree Kearn’s cold conservatory set does little to disturb. This is no metaphorical purgatory, despite the early suggestions of Kevin Smith’s inviting doorways, where the nurses hover off-stage, except in the sense that all acts of waiting might be described as a limbo. The tone, meanwhile, is unavoidably sentimental, as the logic of the characters’ fore-shortened lives works itself out.

What distinguishes Kinahan’s play – what gives it its pulse – is its finely-drawn characters. Sean has the sharp intelligence of a man who knows he has been beaten, but Patricia shows him that there are new roles he can play, even from his wheelchair. Patricia, meanwhile, brings giddy effervescence to her self-denial. Calisthenics, fish-oil, walnuts: she will fight her fate until she is forced to embrace it, and Sean, with his merciful acceptance of his new reality, frees her to do just that.

Kinahan could ask for no better actors than Stephen Brennan and Anita Reeves to bring her characters to life. With his eyes magnified behind large glasses, Brennan veers between frail shadow and robust romantics in a performance of physical vulnerability that is animated by flashes of an actorly bearing. Reeves is jauntily defiant in her encouragement of Sean, but moments of stillness – an outdoor scene where she sits alone in the sun, say – reveal her helplessness: it is written all over her face.
The constraints of naturalism mean there is only one way for Halcyon Days to end: with a predictable melodramatic flourish. However, Brennan and Reeves look like they are having such a good time on the journey there, that you would easily forgive the schmaltzy final scenes.
Until Saturday
– Sara Keating

This is what Polarbear has been doing since he was 10 years old, when his father left and he was recruited to the Super League of Storytellers, which actually pays very well. Or that’s what he tells us anyway, although we are never quite sure if we can trust him.

Mouth Open, Story Jump Out is an interactive piece of storytelling for audiences of nine years old and up, who are encouraged to provide key details in the tale of origins that Polarbear narrates. The elements a story needs to be believable, he says, are the particulars of time and place, and the added frisson of whoever else is there.

With hands raised or using paper and pen, we are encouraged to put flesh on the characters in Polarbear’s story: dance-loving Dominic, bully-turned-best-friend Danny, karate-chopping Donna, the bearish Mr Bukowski, and, crucially, Polarbear’s missing dad. What does he look like? Where did he go? And, most importantly, does he ever come back?

We leave our suggestions on the messy living-room set, which he begins to pack-up as the performance draws to a conclusion, our scribblings, literally, becoming part of the fabric of the play.

At an early afternoon showing for schools, the audience were thoroughly invested in Polarbear’s tale, fighting over small details and full of questions at the end. One cheeky listener even asked if he could help get them out of homework, but Polarbear suggests a compromise: maybe their homework can have a storytelling theme. If his own adventures haven’t convinced them that it is worthwhile, nothing will.
Run concluded
– Sara Keating

TThere are many ways we could describe the tumbling and twisting imagery of Miet Warlop’s riotous spectacle for the Belgian company Campo, but none that don’t sound like dispatches from the middle of an acid trip. On a bare stage that resembles a gallery space, a preposterously rotund invigilator sits by a white wall, observed only by a figure whose head is the size of a planet, the texture of a mop, and precisely the same shade of pink as fairground candy floss.

Some minutes and several eruptions later, the stage has become a psychedelic playground, a surreal landscape billowing with various inflatables and plumes of coloured smoke, where fascinating figures confront one another, shift their shapes and conduct merrily messy chemistry experiments. Warlop’s agenda, which is equal parts delightful and perplexing, is to stimulate almost every sense while making absolutely none.

Mystery Magnet: Mad, bad and dangerous to know

A Belgian visual artist who gravitated towards the theatre, Warlop shares a fascination with fellow artist-directors Romeo Castellucci and Robert Wilson for hallucinatory imagery and startling transformations. Her mise en scene may initially seem more playful, where balloon animals and miniature cars suggest childlike abandon, but she makes the act of creation seem steadily more cruel. See how a man’s legs strain in a pair of black stilettos as he becomes the back end of a horse, bearing a rider on his back; or listen to the unsettling thuds of a hail of darts, lobbed indiscriminately over the wall; or observe other mop-headed creatures attacking each other with staple guns and chainsaws as paint in primary colours spews and spurts. Just because they bleed in rainbows, doesn’t make it any less violent.

That combination of fantasy and horror may suggest the logic of a dream, where symbols warp and loosen their meanings. But Warlop’s succession of images seems more consciously determined. The distended figures and vicious surrealism recall Dali and Bunuel; the canvas wall, splattered and dripping, couldn’t be more Pollock; and before anyone can say “Damien Hirst” we find ourselves in the presence of another (gentler) floating shark.

Through it all, the seven performers – including Warlop herself – are subordinated to the images they create, concealed behind fat suits and wigs, just units in a composition. That increases the suspicion that Warlop sees the theatre as another venue for an artistic exhibition, a pedestal for her singular vision. It’s the images, then, that give the performance, created in front of us, signed in paint or foam or smoke, then dissipating instantly. It is a sensual and subjective experience, giddying, irresponsible and mystifying, whose mysteries would prefer to remain unsolved.

Ends tonight
– Peter Crawley

Hamlet is a play tormented by ghosts. “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” asks one of Elsinore’s watchmen, safe in the knowledge that the spirit of Hamlet’s father will appear every night, or at least for as long as the production is running, commanding his son to avenge his foul murder. Each production is similarly haunted, laden with ghosts of performances past; with generations of supposedly unmatchable princes from Simon Russell Beale to Laurence Olivier to David Garrick. We’ll never know for sure, because theatre leaves little trace. You had to be there.

In the first Dublin appearance by the Wooster Group, however, the prominent New York ensemble tries to match Richard Burton’s Hamlet word for word and gesture for gesture, re-creating his 1964 performance from a recorded “Theatrofilm”. Brought to us as an experiment in what the performer Scott Shepherd describes, po faced, as “reverse Theatrofilm”, Elizabeth LeCompte’s production replaces “our spirit with the spirit of another”.

Burton’s performance, in other words, becomes the ghost in their machine. As a glitchily edited black-and-white recording of Burton flickers and dematerialises on plasma screens, the Wooster Group’s performance becomes a frantic act of mimicry through technology, using monitors to mirror Burton’s movements, copying 48-year-old intonations through earpieces, shifting their stage positions unnaturally or scrubbing the set into a new position each time the film judders.

Initially fascinating and impressive to watch, this method nonetheless contains madness. LeCompte makes her points with cool, sardonic intelligence: here the production itself has been cast as Hamlet, witty, giddy and chaotic as it follows the ghost’s impossible demands.

But while Hamlet himself accepts there’s a divinity that shapes our will, the play’s energy lies in his resistance. Naive as Burton’s production now seems (memories are forgiving, recordings are not), he made his own choices. Shepherd’s performance forfeits such agency – ironically, his Hamlet involves the precise execution of a difficult task. (He’d probably kill Claudius as soon as LeCompte told him to.) This makes for an aloof production, one that’s easy to admire but quite difficult to love.

Kate Valk, who plays both Gertrude and Ophelia, comes closest to eliciting an emotional response in the closet scene, but the production, coldly self-aware, doesn’t expect us to invest. It is more fluent in arch gags invoking the baggage of previous incarnations; if a scene from the Burton film goes missing (“unrendered”, the screens flash), a cringe-inducing excerpt from an Ethan Hawke or Kenneth Branagh film adaptation is duly sourced, and you’re reminded just how quickly fresh interpretations can curdle.

But what has the Wooster Group put on the line? However considered and dazzling, the act of piecing Burton together from fragments doesn’t risk failure but expect it, and so this “experiment” is never anything more than a feint. The Wooster Group knows what it will discover; it has nothing to prove.

Run concluded
– Peter Crawley

Good clowns never go out of fashion, even half-petrified dust-coated ones, and the chalky Belgian duo in Ha Ha Ha need nothing more than an old ball, a few empty boxes and a swinging door frame to win the hearts (and humours) of their audience of over-fours.

Performed by Xavier Bouvier and Benoit Devos, Ha Ha Ha is an hour of artful simplicity. Short scenes focus in on familiar circus feats – tumbles, juggling, slapstick – but each set-piece is made new by being stripped back to basics; a joyful paradox of accessible physical wonder in this over-stimulated, over-simulated age.

The reconfiguration of a cardboard tower blends comedy and acrobatic skill, and the children watching are as invested as they would be at the pantomime, crying out ‘he’s behind you!’ as the tower reaches impossible heights and one clown tries to thwart to the other.

Wearing oversized shoes and baggy flour-sack overalls, Bouvier and Devos’ bodies are sites of comedy too. In their large hands, something as basic as a raised eyebrow or a grimace provokes much hilarity, which is enhanced by their white-face half-masks and jumbo puppy-dogs noses. The duo’s nonsense mumbles, meanwhile, carry a litany of giggle-worthy complaint. They may be speaking a different language – they may not be speaking any real language at all – but there is no misunderstanding the shifting hierarchy of competition and mutual dependency that defines their relationship.

At a little more than 60 minutes, the energy in Ha Ha Ha flags toward the end, and the finale is a muted, if beautiful affair, as a circus tent descends from above spilling light and confetti from the sky. After such a raucous hour, the audience seem somewhat unsatisfied and they invade the stage, greedy for more, something that even the natural improvisers behind Ha Ha Ha seem thoroughly unprepared for.

Run finished
– Sara Keating