Fringe Festival Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of fringe festival events

Ann and Barry: What Kind Of Time Do You Call This?

NCAD

This promenade piece by Talking Shop Ensemble explores how the dreams and hopes of childhood are often shredded and crushed once we reach adulthood.

TSE divulge their theme by alternating between intimate, grown-up snapshots and Magic Roundabout playfulness as the audience is lead around the grounds and into the buildings of the National College of Art and Design.

We first meet Ann and Barry in, appropriately enough, a classroom. Members of the cast, as six-year-old children, interact with us. We feel again what it’s like to be a child. Then our teacher, Ms Fallon, takes us on our journey, one which leads us right into the rotten heart of corrupt, recession-ridden modern Ireland: adult Barry is a developer, Ann an artist.

Punctuated by aspirational and imaginatively garbled lines from the poetry of Yeats (à la Ms Fallon), Ann and Barry's disintegrating lives are ours, too. Original and fun, disturbing and pertinent. Until Sat Patrick Brennan

Johnny Meister and the Stitch

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre

Johnny Meister and the Stitch is a fast-paced journey through the dark heart of West Belfast. To say that the play owes a debt to Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie would be an understatement: from the grotesque criminal underbelly of urban youth to the two-act, two-actor structure, from the staccato colloquial rhythms to the violent sexual imagery, at times it seems less homage and more mere relocation. Writer Rosemary Jenkinson is also at pains to ensure the audience never loses sight of the similarities between the two rival characters, but the simplistic equation of fatherhood with redemption is overstated, and at times offensive.

Paul Kennedy directs the action like a veritable joyride, but the production moves too fast for even the actors, John Travers and Brian Markey, to keep up with. Both talk so fast that the play is difficult to follow – and sometimes to understand. However, Jenkinson's vitriolic humour finds its way to the surface on occasion, reminding us of some of her best short stories. Until Sat Sara Keating

Love, Death and Balloon Modelling

Bewley’s Café Theatre

For his next trick, actor and magician Simon Toal will conjure up the memory of his late father. Toal, a born entertainer, has both the material and the metaphor here for an unlikely meditation on death, but it proves difficult to transmit his personal grief into the structure of performance. Framed by a hellish children’s party in Coolock, in which he rattles through stock gags and tired tricks, hollow and hungover, his show is most successful when it appeals to our sympathies indirectly, using magic as a metaphor.

A deathbed conversation becomes more poignant in the mouth of a puppet. A balloon animal twists into shape during a Chekhov recitation. But meditations on unanswered questions smack, oddly, of an act, and are further bled of emotional effect by a bewildering sound effect of softly singing crickets.

There is much potential here for a show that slips bereavement into a universal routine and makes death the ultimate disappearing act: Now you see someone. Now you don't. Until Sat Peter Crawley

Rough

Player’s Theatre,

Even party girls get the blues in Grace Dyas’s lyrical evocation of meaningless drinking, meaningless clubbing and meaningless sex for new company THEATREclub. As far as meaningless experiences go, these ought to be pretty damn good, but not even a radiantly beautiful young cast or designer Doireann Coady’s pleasingly no-frills Wonderland will dispel a pang of disconnection, and a loveless society built on rough encounters.

Written loosely in the later style of Sarah Kane, whose 4.48 Psychosis is referenced routinely, the play’s characters are immaterial: there’s no reason why the tumbling words and mantras couldn’t be delivered by either Roxanna Nic Liam or Aoibhin Garrihy, and that indistinguishable angst is presented, unconvincingly, as a universal consciousness.

Crucially, though, Dyas recognises suicide chic and Kane idolatry as a pose itself, watching her performers through picture frames and a catwalk show of costume changes, enswirling them with music, and ultimately concluding with an optimism that sadly eluded Kane, nicely giving us the rough with the smooth. Until Sat Peter Crawley

Waterworn

Back Loft

The Old Man and the Seaand Moby Dickare the inspirations for this piece of shadow theatre, which uses a combination of human silhouettes and puppetry in a tiny corner of the cavernous Back Loft.

Ger Clancy directs a slow-moving, rather hypnotic series of images of a trance-like fisherman, a small rocking boat on roiling waves above, and assorted large fish and mammals below. It looks a little like an old-fashioned Eastern European cartoon. An atmospheric, but slight, half-hour show could have been condensed into half that time without losing anything. Chris McLoughlin provides the music. An additional extra is a backstage explanatory after-show tour of the home-made mechanics of how everything works. It's interesting, but unfortunately runs the risk of effectively dissipating the illusions the show worked so hard to create. Until Sat Rosita Boland

Where did it all go right?

Pantibar

A warning. Don't sit in the front row unless you want to be part of the action. Ass-in-face, hands-on-boobs, slow-dancing-with-the-cute-lead-male kind of action. Ponydance has taken the boy-meets-girl story, placed it close up in a club and injected a bit of tiresome reality. Simple seductions are never easy, particularly with jealous advances from the cloakroom girl and judgmental observation from the barman. Luckily, everything can be worked out by dancing and the Ponydance cast dutifully oblige with comical set-pieces that showcase their slinky skills and reflect everyone's pathetic dreams. The drama fizzles out a bit in the end and the denouement might have benefited with sharper direction, but anything can be forgiven with such joyous dancing and sharp wit. Until Sept 20 Michael Seaver