Tangy taste of festival with a twist

And they’re off. Our team of critics assess the first shows in Dublin’s Absolut Fringe festival, which began at the weekend

Angry School

West Arran St, Smithfield

Held at an abandoned office in Smithfield last Saturday, Angry School was a one-off participatory art event that was closer to art therapy than theatre. The experience was structured as a series of classes, aimed at focusing participants’ anger on taking action to redress whatever injustice is bothering them.

Classes included: induction, where the school’s theme of injustice was introduced; the entrance exam, a long list of seemingly pointless questions; a one on one discussion with an expert; a group discussion; art therapy class; and final graduation, where participants wrote and delivered a speech about their anger.

An atmosphere of anger is prevalent in the country – it's a good idea to explore it and focus it. However, like the anger it was investigating, Angry School largely failed to find that focus, hampered by some of the facilitators being inadequately briefed. Ended Sat. IAN KILROY

Anatomy of a Seagull

Absolut Fringe Factory

Placing art, formal experimentation and the act of creation itself centre stage, Chekhov’s sardonically autobiographical work offers rich pickings to any company prone to self-analysis. Loose Canon thus stage an austere, fitfully updated, “mumblecore” version of the play by director Jason Byrne, where the flaring passions of lovelorn Russians bleed into the frustrations of an Irish theatre company still searching for a style it believes in.

Although sometimes distractingly similar to Krétakör's recent staging – with a plainclothes cast sitting among the audience, harshly functional lighting and a dead seagull in a shopping bag – when Byrne's production strays beyond self-mocking references and lets its actors commit to his lucid version, it grips with subtle intensity. Jonathan Byrne's perfectly self-involved artist and Dee Roycroft's be-hoodied miserabilist benefit most from a muted, achingly self-conscious tone, while Catríona Ní­ Mhurchú and Damien Hasson's vigorously dysfunctional mother-son relationship suggests The Seagull is made captivating not with dry dissection, but when flesh is put on its bones. Until Sun Sep 12 PETER CRAWLEY

The Cirque de Légume

Filmbase

It’s billed as “the greatest vegetable circus on earth”, and who can dispute Cirque de Légume’s claim? Clowns Jaimie Carswell and Nancy Trotter storm the stage, armed only with a cratefull of vegetables. A cabbage becomes a rabid animal. A radish hypnotises a woman. An onion performs a striptease. Again and again the audience are asked “how about that?” – an invitation to gape in wonder at the incredible feats (not!) of numerous foodstuffs.

The absurdity of the performance is entirely the point. This is classic red-nosed clowning; a gentle art that is well served by the two performers and director Pablo Ibarluzea.

However, the show took a while to establish itself and win the audience over. Indeed, one wonders if it should be pitched at an audience that includes children. It might work better. That said, after a slow start, work it did. Until Sat. IAN KILROY

Emigrants

George’s Dock

The 37-year-old camper van we squeeze into for Teatr Wiczy’s ultra-intimate show has seen better days. So have its inhabitants, two well-named Polish emigrants XX and AA (Radoslaw Smuzny and Krystian Wieczynski); the former a large-sized manual labourer, the second a stifled intellectual, now both alcoholic and anonymous. Based on the political absurdist Slawomir Mrozek’s 1970s play, the performance is also beginning to show its age. Where Mrozek, a Pole in Paris, hoped to contrast political exile and economic migration, this post-EU version can sound only one note.

As the play rambles through the pair's fraught relationship one new year's eve, they bicker over cigarettes and tea, consider eating dog food then relent, mercifully, and settle for cat food, while drunkenly divulging their fears and hopes. Any resemblance to two familiar figures waiting endlessly for Godot may be intentional, but these exiles are simply waiting to go home. Much like their van, however, they are going nowhere fast. Until Sat.  PETER CRAWLEY

Point Blank

Project Upstairs

The atomised society is surgically dissected in Point Blank, an engrossing work from Edit Kaldor that interrogates the vital question of how best to live.

The conceit is that 19-year-old Nada wants to know what to do with her life. So, she sets out on a journey, photographing people’s lives to consider their choices as potentials for her own life. To live alone or in a couple? To trust people or not? What kind of work to do? These questions are explored as Nada projects her pictures and talks us through the options.

The performance looks like reality, but is a scripted performance nonetheless, interesting in its reappraisal of the aesthetics of performance: it removes the suspension of disbelief.

Although overly Cartesian, this piece nevertheless forces us to reconsider our own lives and choices. It reminds us what we have forgotten: that life is a vitally serious matter after all. Ends today IAN KILROY

Holiday

Project Cube

This is an Australian two –hander and it is like nothing I have ever seen in the theatre before. Two men prowl around a space that may be a resort swimming pool. There’s a plastic paddling pool on the stage, two stools and a chaise longue. There are traffic sounds, birds and animal sounds. And from time to time the men break into classical songs with a baroque feel. They smile encouragingly at each other and swap various bits of information about their lives. Do they know each other already? Or are they just getting there?

It's curiously relaxing; and despite a slight edge of the sinister, nothing happens. I enjoyed it. It is oddly like being on holiday. Performers Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt are both masters of timing and nuance, which they have to be. Direction is by Adriano Cortese. There is no programme. Until Wednesday  NOELEEN DOWLING

Red Lola

Mill Street Studios

The main device in Asylum Productions’ show is that it’s performed backwards. Acting from a kind of red framed puppet stage, the cast of two present their backs to the audience, wear their cloths the wrong way round and create their characters through the masks on the backs of their heads.

The story they tell is more inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita than Red Riding Hood, of which there are also traces.

A school girl seduces, or is seduced by, an older man, the sexual politics of the relationship generating numerous complex moral anxieties that are constantly in flux.

This is really well executed and very entertaining, with much comedy coming from the limitations that the actors are working under. The only residual concerns relate to the logic of this backwards world – was it theatrically necessary or is it a gimmick? Also, what was achieved by the unmasking at the end? Until Saturday IAN KILROY

T his is Not a Drill Absolut Fringe Factory

“This is not a drill,” a disembodied voice announces, this is the real thing: the apocalypse is coming. Amid the bare brick and concrete floor of Absolut Fringe Factory we might be gathered in an air-raid bunker, sheltering from the storm. But as this “public information performance” reminds us our death is inevitable either way. Using four chairs and various multi-media devices, the four-strong cast for this devised piece, directed by Patrick Michael Stewart, tread a thin line between sardonic amusement and detachment as they enumerate the coming threats to humanity. Listing litanies of disasters as pithy as tabloid headlines, the relationships between cultural hysteria and the media, and appetite and advertising, are wittily deconstructed; even the Fringe sponsors are gently nudged.

Tongue-in-cheek references to the process of making theatre are less amusing: theatre for theatre-folk, then, rather than the public. Until Friday SARA KEATING

12 Minute Dances Absolut Fringe Factory

Five dances by choreographer Liz Roche in one sitting is a rare treat.

All were created in the past year and are not just individually satisfying, but fit together perfectly as a collection. Although drawing on many influences, a quotation by Mark Rothko in the programme reveals how, above all, Roche wants the viewer to complete the moving picture in front of them. From solos to a quintet, each dance is individual but contains echoes from elsewhere, not just identifiable riffs like shoulder shrugs or brushing the back of your hand, but a deeper connection in mood and spirit. Throughout there are excellent performances from the five dancers and great music, particularly by Ed Rosenberg. This isn’t stereotypical in-your-face fringe fare, but elegantly crafted choreography that is confident in its understatement.

And like revisits to a gallery, the five 12-minute dances will undoubtedly reward repeated viewings. Until Sat MICHAEL SEAVER

A Useful Play

Project Arts Centre

If all art is quite useless, Argentinean theatre maker Gerardo Naumann here wrings it for all it’s worth. A theatre performance billed as the dry run for a film, itself based on an accidentally discovered book (a young girl’s diary), itself a catalogue of romantic non-events and South American soap opera episodes, the result is a media hall of mirrors – forever hinting at some significance in its execution, while keeping its subject, Karina, forever out of reach.

Aided by a team of non-professional "extras", recruited from Dublin, who gamely respond to instructions and potter around with a video camera, a serene Naumann coaches two "legit" performers through take after take from the diary pages. Some fantastically inventive moments are playfully compelling – Karina's darkening spirits charted by steadily more burnt pieces of toast; her poor Uruguayan town depicted on the extras' T-shirts – but as Naumann seems to lose interest, his sequences meander, splutter and trail off. Finally, shrugging off the project entirely, Naumann gives the impression that he has nothing to say – only countless ways of saying it. Until tomorrow PETER CRAWLEY

Who Is Fergus Kilpatrick?

Project Arts Cube

Is it a play? Or a documentary? Is it a lecture about a documentary within a play? Are the actors kidding us or not? Is it believable? Are they acting now or just being themselves? Who the hell is Fergus Kilpatrick anyway? Hero or villain?

Just some of the questions this delightfully witty and clever theatrical intervention by The Company tantalise and tease us with over the course of an inventive 60 minutes that sees Brian Bennett, Rob McDermott, Nyree Yergainharsian and Tanya Wilson playfully and dexterously flirt with what actually constitutes the truth inside and outside the theatre.

The great Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard are cited as inspirations for The Company's methodological self-critique but Jorge Luis Borges, that inimitable architect of artistic chimeras, and his story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero feature strongly. Using video to construct various mockumentaries and deepen the presented fabrications, Who Is Fergus Kilpatrick? is skilful, hilarious and hugely enjoyable. Pure Fringe. Until Sat PATRICK BRENNAN

Fringe talks Barry's Tea with ... at Metro Bosco Tent

Elbow : In conversation(Today 7pm)
How did Manchester band Elbow achieve their "overnight success"? Elbow lead singer Guy Garvey, left, and manager Phil Chadwick discuss the band's experiences, how they are finally reaping the rewards after 19 years of work and won a Mercury Music Prize and Brit award for their latest album, The Seldom-Seen Kid.

Recession: Opportunity Knocks(Tomorrow, 7pm)
A "town hall-style" evening with journalist Sinead Gleeson chairing a panel that includes Trevor O'Shea (Bodytonic/Airbound), BrenB (Offset / Always Read the Small Print), Dylan Haskins (Exchange / Hideaway House) and Kate Nolan (Re-Dress), to hear the ideas, experiences and ways in which a generation can address a recession as a fresh opportunity.

The Value of Art?(Thurs, 7pm)
Practitioners and critics including Mick Wilson (head of fine art DIT), Qasim Riza Shaheen (artist in residence with City Arts/Fire Station), Peter Sirr (poet), Michelle Browne (Mind the Gap/artist) and Will St Leger (artist/activist) discuss what is a work of art and what is its value.