Soup in your knickers? The show must go on

Making life-changing choices, hearing her own critique out of the mouths of teens, dancing the night away – Christine Maddenhad an eventful few days at the Cork Midsummer Festival

IN BESTLAND on Wednesday evening, I am Barta. Given the first of many choices offered by the godlike presenters of the show Best Before, I decide to have a girl avatar. I choose to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana, but I won't take heroin, although I support its legalisation.

I nearly have sex at 15, but chicken out at the last minute, thus avoiding a teenage pregnancy and a possible abortion.

Of the ones that do have sex, “50 per cent will get pregnant”, announces an indifferent techie, whisking away half the underage sexually active avatars. “Thank God,” breathes someone in the audience, and everybody laughs. The others have to opt for an abortion, and get a scar, or have the baby and trail a little blob about with them.

This ingenious production by Rimini Protokoll came to life in Vancouver, with the support of the Goethe Institut. The creators – Helgard Haug and Stefan Kaegi, two of Rimini’s three artistic directors – spent months in the Canadian city to gather collaborators and brainstorm this piece, which enables each audience member to take part anonymously by controlling their own avatar.

At the age of 45 or thereabouts, some of the BestLand avatars go on a shooting spree. One of the presenters spins a wheel to see who dies, and all the names beginning with B get it. Out I pop, as random as it gets.

That’s life.

Later at the Pavilion, I tell one of Best Before'stechie gods, Arjan Dhupia, that he was responsible for my premature demise. "Oh, no," he groans. "I always end up talking to the people I killed afterwards."

DAISEY CUTTING

Even later, after bopping around to Brian Deady's throaty funk gig upstairs, I am talking to Mike Daisey, who tells me none of his 16 shows is written down, he performs them all ex tempore. And he's working on a new show, already called The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs. For this, he interviewed people at the Chinese plant that works for Apple – the one Jobs has been quoted as saying: "You go in this place and it's a factory but, my gosh, they've got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it's pretty nice."

Daisey can’t understand why journalists aren’t swarming all over it. Of the labourers there, he declares, “none of them work less than 16 hours a day”. Soon after, I ruefully pull out my iPhone to check the time. Somebody is suffering for my virtual life and, unfairly, it’s not me.

CHILD’S PLAY

When the audience is ushered into the dark performance space of The Two-Dimensional Life of Herthe next day, a child's thin voice breathes, "Wow", into the gloom. There is a person standing on a chair in the middle of a chaos of ripped paper. Except . . . she isn't a person at all, but a barely moving film projection on a life-size paper cut-out. She – the projection – moves in and out of and across the rest of her house: film projections on papered surfaces, complete with sound effects. It's hard to know where reality begins or ends.

This category-defying show by Australian Fleur Elise Noble feels like a mini stage reimagining of Fellini's Juliet of the Spiritsby Terry Gilliam and David Lynch – for kids. And in this world, puppets and plasticine figurines live, move and have agendas. They become increasingly threatening and menacing, take over the building, and the house goes up in virtual flames. "It's amazing," our young critic comments. Then a real turban-headed woman berates the puppet population: "I've asked you guys so many times not to burn the set down." She tells them she thinks everyone would like a happy ending, so the set morphs into a wavy sea, and the figurines sail away.

ATOM BOMB

The next show, Invisible Atomby 2b Theatre Company from Nova Scotia, is somewhat more disappointing. A skilfully delivered monologue history of Atom, distant progeny to Adam Smith and, before him, Isaac Newton, he descends from wealthy, successful stockbroker to penniless and painfully politically correct fatherhood as he feverishly seeks his own father.

Lots of wit and excellent acting failed to discount its heavy earnestness, maybe even a whiff of sanctimoniousness. It could have shared its name with the next show, FML (F*ck my Life), although it, on the contrary, moved from joy to despair deftly with actors that possessed the stage with more presence than you would expect from such young, inexperienced performers.

Gravitating back to the Pavilion – as you do – a group of students from Austin, Texas doing a summer study tour of Ireland aren’t as impressed as I am by the show. Their verdict: underdeveloped. No real narrative thread. So many possibilities not explored. Damn it, they sound like me, and I hate having to hear this adult critic’s jargon bandied back at me by the young – erm, the younger – to describe the show.

Actually, I enjoyed the show, thought it was profound in its juxtaposition of the highs and lows of youth. Maybe, I muse as I listen to them, it’s a show about youth, but for adults. What would they have done differently? Only an old person would ask that. Anyone over 30.

DUCK THE SOUP

Also at the Pavilion, Caoilfhionn Dunne, who plays Maksim in Corcadorca's production of Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine, tells me how, as the character gets more desperate, people step further and further away from her as she moves through the crowd. The audience of Corcadorca's Plasticineliterally went on a journey through the dark places of the Savoy, which in its other life is a nightclub and has the trademark sticky carpeted floors to prove it.

In one scene, in which Dunne is supposed to vomit on another actor who’s looking for oral gratification of a specific kind, that character has to detonate a bag of cold vegetable soup concealed in her underwear, and unfortunately Dunne sometimes ends up getting a mouthful of it. Eeuurgh.

But at least Dunne can wipe it off and spit it out. The actress providing the prop “has to spend the rest of the show with cold soup in her knickers”, Dunne confides. Artists do suffer for their art.