This gang are a real scream

Semper Fi had people fainting at their previous show, but Adrenalin should keep the blood flowing, its writers tell Belinda McKeon.

'Are people pointing and staring?" I ask Karl Shiels and Paul Burke, as we drive a circuitous route through the streets of an unknown part of Dublin. Unknown to me, that is, and only at this precise point in time. Why? Because, perched warily on the edge of Shiels's passenger seat, my knuckles clamped white around the safety belt, I am completely blindfolded, a tightly-knit scarf tied twice over my eyes.

At one o'clock on a Friday afternoon, the city, for me, is pitch black - but not for the people we're passing. Surely some of them, I laugh nervously, must be looking concerned for the plight of this sightless stranger? Surely some of them must be stopping to look again, to note the car registration, to whip out their mobile phones?

"Not at all," snorts Shiels, as he executes another sharp right-hand turn. "This part of the city . . . it happens every day."

"Yeah," interjects his companion from the back seat. "The way that guard waved us on there . . . we'll have a police escort next."

They're joking. At least, I hope they're joking. Shiels and Burke are driving me to the secret location of their epic new production, Adrenalin, and the blindfold and the banter about my doomed fate are all part of the fun. They want to give me an idea of what Adrenalin's audience will experience when, during the show's run as part of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival, they are bussed to the venue in coaches with blacked-out windows, led into it through doors surrounded by partitions so high that they will block out even the merest chink of a skyline, and seated in the thick of a high-voltage scenario in which the panic and violence of an armed gang fresh from a massive heist are shot through with the spectacle and glamour of a full band and a brace of psychedelic dancers.

There'll be gunfire, there'll be fury, there'll be ruthless brutality, as the gang's inner tensions explode around the cavernous warehouse space in which Shiels and his company, Semper Fi, will stage the show; but there'll be, all the while, musical chutzpah and high camp in the corner, as singer Tamela and her troupe shimmy their way through the tongue-in-cheek soundtrack composed by Vincent Doherty and Ivan Birthistle.

With serious visual impact, serious stunt action, and not forgetting serious weapons, Adrenalin is going to be a hell of a show. The sweet smell of danger will hang heavy in the air. But only for the characters of the fast-paced plot devised by Shiels and Paul Walker, written by the latter and directed and designed by the former; nobody, either in the sprawling cast and crew or in the audience, will actually be treated with anything less than respect. "Even those pigeons are on an Equity minimum wage," quips Shiels, as another of the winged frequenters of the warehouse sweeps and dives high above our heads.

The destination of the warehouse - in which Shiels, Walker and Burke have been spending enormous amounts of time piecing Adrenalin together since the start of this year - must remain a mystery, if I'm to avoid less friendly encounters with that blindfold in future. But this much can be revealed: it's the perfect space for the sort of bewildering, bedazzling theatrical creation that the company has in mind for this show.

It's huge enough, and intricate enough, to conjure up a whole world - in this case, the world of an unnamed city in the 1970s - in almost painterly detail. The darkness beyond two sets of great, noisy shutters on the building's rear wall will be enough to suggest an exterior reality to seamlessly replace that from which the audience will have been separated from the moment they stepped on their blacked-out coaches.

The contents of the warehouse itself, meanwhile - the vast walls, the grit floor, the stacks of pallets and cardboard boxes, the dumped carpets and discarded boards, the transparent panels in the high roof, the darting pigeons and the creaking hinges - become, once bathed in light, noise, and the pumping brain chemicals of the vicious gang members and their hostages, the terrifying interior of a nightmare in which the audience has no option but to join.

"What we do," explains Shiels, as he bombs around the warehouse, clearly on a permanent high of adrenalin himself, "is try to incorporate the site as part of the character of the show. We're going to have three banks of seating, 75 seats each, and they'll be in the round, right in on top of what's happening."

Burke's work as stunt director is based on the same principle, says Shiels. "It's very much that you use the environment, because the audience will feel that. And the music really drives it as well, and then when you get the gunfire, you get that drive, so it's about the entire experience. You get it, you feel it . . . in the way it's going to be lit, it's going to be like a dream sort of thing in here."

Though it will be far from naturalistic drama - think, rather, the films of John Woo crossed with the graphic novel tradition, crossed with the daring and artistry of the sport known as parkour - still Adrenalin contains, at its core, meaty characterisation and a human drama.

The shock meeting which sends the show's energy spiralling to dizzy heights occurs between the five members of the bank-raiding gang who burst into the warehouse in their Bedford van, and the two innocent individuals who happen to be standing in the warehouse at that very moment: young Irish estate agent Colette and the business shark with whom she's negotiating a sale, the rich Englishman Quelly.

The gang - comprising two Irish brothers, Leo and Mikey, Mambo the Jamaican, Omar the Eastern European, and their callous Spanish sidekick Patsy the Flea (so-named "because she bed-hops from gangster to gangster") - surge from the elation of their raid to the chaos, confusion and recrimination of this new situation, complete with hostages and a roof-swarming team of Swat agents, and their predicament grows worse with every passing minute.

Semper Fi describe the show as strictly not for the faint-hearted, and, this time, they're not joking; they have exact figures for what they call "fainters" at each run of their previous hit show, Ladies and Gentlemen, and they're well prepared for the possibility of similar reactions at Adrenalin, though they believe the much less claustrophobic venue (Ladies and Gentlemen had darkened public toilets for its setting) will reduce the casualties.

But it's going to be a rollercoaster ride. Shots will ring out; blood will flow; screams will echo around the walls, as the gang and their hostages get to grips with the mess in which they've found themselves - all to the slightly surreal soundtrack of Tamela and her band. Equity minimum or not, you've got to feel for the pigeons.

Shiels and his colleagues have no worries about audience safety; though it will look like a frenzied burst of energy and violence, every single element of the show will actually be planned and timed down to the last millisecond. The bullets are numbered, the moves are plotted, the fight scenes are tightly choreographed; even the layers of cardboard in the piles of boxes lying around the space, says Burke, are carefully counted and layered so that the falls, dives and scuffles will happen exactly as they have been devised and rehearsed.

Not that the audience will realise any of this; it's going to look like a maelstrom in there. Shiels and Walker laugh like schoolboys as they admit that the most significant changes they've made to the original script have been to render the deaths of certain characters even more gruesome than was originally intended.

"We were surprised at just how sick we could be," grins Walker.

"Yeah," agrees Shiels, 'the detail has grown, and it's grown day by day."

And, they hope, the growth will continue when the actors - some of whom have no idea as to their characters' fates - join the rehearsal process next week. How will Shiels, Walker and Burke get them into the right frame of mind? Blindfolds? Horror flicks? Thrillers?

"Well," says Shiels, trying to restrain another burst of laughter, "actually, we start the morning with a yoga session. The fight club comes later. And it's what the actors then give us that will excite us again, it's what they bring to the table. And rehearsal will be difficult. There'll be no hangovers here at nine o'clock in the morning." That doesn't, of course, apply to the audience. In fact, a stiff drink might be a good idea . . .

The Dublin Fringe Festival runs Sept 12-Oct 2. See www.fringefest.com; 1850-FRINGE (1850-374643) Adrenalin runs at a mystery location, Sept 19-Oct 1, meeting at the Customs House