Ghosts review: Obscenity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder in this act of onstage intimacy | Tiger Dublin Fringe

Ghosts
Project Arts Centre
***

It starts with an innocent enquiry: if one graphically sexual moment in this performance will break the law. After Ruairí­ Donovan has scrolled through a solicitor's email – so elaborate it takes a moment to realise his partner, Asaf Aharonson, has stripped naked and begun to arrange the set – they seem to be in a precarious position.

Yes, after an ignoble history of censorship, Irish obscenity laws still stand, and this stage, a forest of freestanding wooden beams, looks similarly ready to topple down on them. What are these two – dancers and lovers – willing to risk?

There is more than one form of self-exposure at play, however. By putting their relationship onstage – gently, comically, quite honestly – the performers present emotional intimacy as something potentially edifying or corrupting: the public expression of private feeling. We see them in Edenic isolation, spooked by a bear (or our intrusion), retreating into a tent (and our imagination), using text and audiotape to tease out what counts as “unnatural” desire and answering (or avoiding) probing questions about their own romantic nature.

Ghosts still feels like a work in progress, as does any relationship. But during a rather conservative Fringe, Donovan and Aharonson are admirably and engagingly asking the right questions. Run finished