White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

This is urban drama in its most conventional form – the monologue – and while Kostick’s script is rich in detail and pathos, Black Wednesday lacks the urgency of the best single-voiced one-person shows. It is a good story, well-told, yes. But why tell it, why perform it, now? Sara Keating

Until September 21st

Tonight Everything’s Going to Change

Filmbase Basement **

The bowels of the Filmbase building provide an appropriate venue for Adam O’Keefe’s Tonight Everything’s Going to Change. The opening is as cryptic as a Pinter play, with each new arrival dropping oblique clues as they too try to figure out why Trish has invited them to celebrate their last day at work. Or, as they repeatedly toast it, freedom.

Seven characters are squeezed into the 90-minute performance, reducing personage to personality, as laboured backstories are stuck on to lightly-sketched relationships. Knowing nods to the play’s soap-operatic elements only compound the confusion, leaving us unsure whether the play is designed to be silly or serious: is this a heist fantasy or a parable of contemporary events? Reacting to the melodramatic bombshell that Trish eventually drops, Katie remarks: “but this is coming out of a void. It doesn’t seem real.” And that is exactly the problem. Sara Keating

Until September 20th

Bewley’s Café Theatre ***

On the face of it, this is a comic two-hander about the invisibility of middle-aged women. In the hands of writer-performers Marion O’Dwyer and Maria McDermottroe, appealing, experienced performers with great comic timing, it becomes something more than that, a well-paced exploration of revenge that is of our time.

Being invisible gives two friends, in different worlds, the opportunity to wreak a sweet and satisfying revenge in Ireland’s post-boom society. This Show in a Bag production, directed by Iseult Golden (with Fringe, Irish Theatre Institute and Fishamble involvement, and dramaturg Gavin Kostick) meets the two women in a warehouse, mysteriously preparing for a trip and on the cusp of payback. The plot neatly encapsulates micro and macro injustices; the notion of fairness, in personal life and business, is central. Neatly structured and with lots of funny lines, it’s an amusing,

righteously angry hour. If only it were true; in real life, the perpetrators of injustice are still at large. Deirdre Falvey

Until September 20th