Festival clubs are a necessary evil. It's important that there be a place to which people can repair at that late post-theatre time to conduct post-mortems in comfort. Their corners seem to hide fulltime festival liggers, however, who must surely sleep by day and spend their nights going from festival to festival - the clubs, not the shows - to drink, and bore people as much as they can.
In fairness, I have been accosted by no such person to date during this festival. The main Festival Club is in the Coach House in Dublin Castle (10.30 p.m. until late, pay £2 a night, or £12 for membership), the Fringe Club in the City Arts Centre (11 p.m. to 2 a.m.; pay £2 a night, or £5 for membership) and the most astonishing difference between them seems to be the age of the patrons (the ravages of the festival are much more apparent on the faces at Dublin Castle).
The main festival club has a menu of music which tonight features the Beatnik Record Club, "a rapidly rising Dublin-based French and Northern mix of young and fresh cutting edge jazz and funk", which is surely cunning wording on the press release, because you have to see them live to work it out.
This year there is an innovation: a supper club at Baton Rouge on Stephen's Green (orders taken between 10.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m.), which gives hungry punters an alternative to a batter burger and chips on the way home. My partner and I supped on a starter of (toothsome) oysters, wine and one dessert and we paid over £16; and that kind of pricing sent the average age of the diners spinning into late middle age on the night I was there. It's a good idea, but a cheap and cheerful option would be better.
Festival file
Opening Today:
Main festival:
A Touch Of Light, The Ark.
Fringe Festival
Stone And Ashes at the Temple Bar Music Centre, 8 p.m.
Let It Flow at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn, 8 p.m.
Snakeskin at The Crypt, 8 p.m.
The Hanging Tree at The Furnace, 7 p.m.
Chitra at the Irish Writer's Centre, 1 p.m.
Festival Tip:
Those of you who read here last week that you had forever lost the opportunity to see the film actor Dominic West (Richard III, Surviving Picasso, True Blue and Diana And Me, the canned film on the Princess of Wales and a paparazzo) performing in a Fringe show will be relieved to hear that he has returned from London, where he was playing Chekhov at the Old Vic, to bring Michael West's A Play On Two Chairs back (by public demand) to Andrews Lane Studio. He plays with Amanda Hogan today and tomorrow at 1 p.m., and the second cast (Michael West and Annie Ryan) takes over for the rest of the week.
This original and beguiling piece of movement theatre has been on the go for some years - it has just played in New York's international Fringe Festival.
