Unfringed

Belltable, Limerick Ends Jan 30 10/5 061-319866 belltable.ie

Trends come and go, but love never quite goes out of fashion. As a loose theme for this year’s Unfringed Festival (playing between two spaces on O’Connell Street and Cecil Street) love may seem a bit catch-all. Here, though, it has prompted some idiosyncratic responses, many inspired by real testimony.

Bristol-based live art company Uninvited Guests has one of the more unusual offerings with Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, which is part wedding reception, part wake, part radio dedication show. Audience members can submit their own tales of passion with a requested song via info@uninvitedguests.net to join the smouldering stories of desires fulfilled and unrequited.

Across a compact five-day programme of theatre, dance, comedy and music, other notable contributions include Pontoon Theatre's Her Name Was Pamela Moody, compiled from interviews with 50 people of all ages about their childhood sweethearts; the LSA's comic book/narrative synthesis, Storybook; and touring shows from Sorcha Kenny's vintage-fashion-loving documentary, My Life in Dresses, and Carpet Theatre's scabrously funny shopping mall satire, The Blanch.

If all this talk of softer sentiments gets cloying, The Blanch makes the most gleeful antidote: a show that is not so much keen to tug on your heartstrings as slice merrily through them with a chainsaw.

Can't see that? Catch this

Mary MotorheadBewley's Café Theatre, Dublin