Absolut Fringe Reviews

I’m Not A.D.H.D., I’m B.O.L.D.

The New Theatre ****

When a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder turns up in primary teacher Dana’s class, he unleashes behavioural traits she long thought she’d conquered. After one too many inappropriate responses to the child’s jibes, Dana (an excellent Jacinta Sheerin, who wrote the play with Georgina McKevitt) is ordered to see a kind but incompetent therapist (a hilarious Clare Barrett). Dana had ADHD as a child, and in a therapy session the two reveal themselves, through songs, flashbacks and puppet play, to be suffering from a gamut of mental-health problems.

For a play dealing with the complexities surrounding mental-health diagnoses and treatments, the ending is a little too neat, but these two exceptionally talented performers make each moment a treat. Flitting easily from the quietly poignant to the sublimely comic, they examine how we can push each other towards doubt and fear and madness, simply by pressing the right buttons. Until Saturday – Lynn Enright

Singlehood

Projects Arts Centre ****

Chances are you have already heard about Singlehood, Una McKevitt’s work on being single, a play that describes itself, confusingly, as not a play. And that’s not the only confusing thing about it. On stage, eight characters tell us about their lives as singletons, moving in and out of different characters with each move into and out of their chairs.

The narrative may be difficult to follow, but the sentiment is not, and where Singlehood really shines is in its sheer honesty. Each scenario is met by slightly embarrassed laughter from the audience: we’ve all been there.

Things are helped along by a series of songs, some hilarious, all bittersweet, and 60 minutes feels like 15. Watching Singlehood is like eavesdropping on a group of friends telling each other their most ridiculous, heartbreaking, hilarious and mundane stories about trying to find love – and who doesn’t love to eavesdrop?

Until Saturday – Rosemary Mac Cabe

The Wave

The Black Loft ***

In an effort to discipline an unruly class into preparing for an honours history paper, the exasperated Mr Quinn resorts to tactics used in Nazi youth camps. First terrorising his class about their parents – “Poor, poor, poor, and staying that way” – he then points them towards the possible solution: “Strength through community, strength through discipline.” Accompanied by a salute and a marked improvement in learning, this soon becomes the group’s motto.

From classroom banter to nervous tics, fixations and obsessions, the group of young people are utterly convincing and entertaining, every detail making their sinister descent more believable. When called to take stock of their actions, only the rather weak book of "school rules" shames them. Mr Quinn's methods seemed to be effective, leaving this audience member worried that, with the end of The Wave, so came the end of their prospects for honours history. Until Saturday – Róisín Agnew

Clowns

Smock Alley ****

Better known as a musical comedy group, Dead Cat Bounce take the chestnut of the crying clown and mine the concept to produce an invigoratingly hilarious show. Backstage after a particularly disastrous show, a trio of children's jesters – world-weary Bobo (Shane O'Brien), pretentious Bozo (James Walmsley) and overeager Binky (Damien Fox) – decide to call time on their unsuccessful partnership, having tired of performing to four-year-olds. (Bozo notes he got into the business to play to six- to eight-year-olds.) As they analyse their shortcomings and assess their fading prospects – "A lot can happen in two years," Bozo tells Bobo. "Two years ago you had a wife and a son" – a few telling points about the addictive pull of the stage are made, not least in the finale. But the show, zippily directed by Megan Riordan, mostly has enough quick-fire gags and belly laughs to make the best clown cry with envy. Until Saturday – Mick Heaney

Jimmy Stewart, an Anthropologist from Mars, Analyses Love and Happiness in Humans (and Rabbits) and 30 Cecil Street

Samuel Beckett Theatre ****

In the first part of a beguiling double bill, Tassos Stevens presents the story of a Martian, named after the film star, trying to unravel the heart’s mysteries. Assisted by a “synesthetic sound system” (a surreally suggestive flip chart) he derives a bizarre emotional metric from love songs, hears anecdotes of absorbingly dreamy detail, and canvasses the audience. It is as imaginative as magic realism, and Stevens revels in involving ambiguities.

Dan Canham's remarkable solo performance, developed from his short film on Limerick's defunct Theatre Royal, is a poetic documentary: a dance about architecture. Using a reel-to-reel player to evoke crumbling atmospherics and spoken memories, he maps out the space in masking tape, then dances it back to life. It is part celebration, part lament. Canham conveys its social disintegration through juddering movements, implies romantic history with an elegant sweep of footsteps, then conjures the ephemerality of performance with just a hypnotic rolling of his hands. Canham isn't restoring a specific space but describing the transience of all performance within a fragile monument. Run ended. – Peter Crawley

The Revolution Will Be Televised, Retweeted & Available on 4OD

Smock Alley ***

Despite the multimedia interactivity implicit in the title, Abie Philbin Bowman’s comedy is quaintly traditional in execution, but none the worse for that. Aside from a garish entrance, which sees him in a pastel balaclava and crushed-velvet jacket, Philbin Bowman’s performance rests on the sharpness of his wit and the appeal of his persona, as he unleashes a stream of vividly imagined and just plain funny scenarios loosely structured around resistance tactics against global capitalism and religious intolerance.

His outrage at the injustice of the economic collapse is entertainingly rendered, with easy German credit compared to a cheap vodka party. And if some of the more outre metaphors are a bit strained, such as recasting Mitt Romney's management consultancy as a predator on vulnerable schoolgirls, Philbin Bowman's impassioned affability and rebellious spirit ensure proceedings never fall flat. Until Saturday – Mick Heaney

DISCOnnected

The Kitchen ***

Music pumps from the Kitchen as we wait to go deeper and down to DISCOnnected. Queuing for a nightclub before darks feels distinctly teenage disco, but sadly the club night we are about to witness is an adult one.

Performers Stephen O’Rourke and Sarah Baxter jostle at the bar, drink shots, stalk each other around the room, get sick, get together. So far, so Friday night. We meet the all-seeing bouncer and the man who works in the toilets, but the narrative is stale.

The dance sequences offer some insight. The animalistic bodies in motion on the bar, across the dance floor and into the toilet cubicle better express the deeper desires of the characters, whether oblivion, happiness or love. A “quick feel”, a lustful tumble or a casual end-of-the-night arrangement are success stories under the glitter ball. Thankfully, no one will remember in the morning.

A depressing view of how we socialise. Until Saturday – Meadhbh McHugh

BRB (Be Right Back)

Black Box at Smock Alley **

The legendary Oisín, entranced by Niamh’s promise of eternal youth, journeys to Tír na nÓg and loses 300 years there. We turn to the internet and emerge aeons later from a wilderness of status updates and viral videos. Where does the time go?

Galway's Waterdonkey tries to fuse these versions of suspended animation, but its dramaturgy is similarly unhurried and distracted. Assembling a hypertext of links and allusions without deciding on a clear performance path, director Meadhbh Haicéid leads her cast through a YouTube make-up tutorial, a torch song, a recently unearthed John Steinbeck letter and a video of 1970s Dublin – all delivered at wearying length – loosely interwoven with an amusingly mumblecore version of the Tír na nÓg legend. It might have worked slightly better as an installation, for which we could make our own connections, but as theatre, it doesn't require a fascination with eternal youth as much as limitless patience. Until Saturday – Peter Crawley