No, please, not audience participation . . . Maggie Cronin's brilliant smile is fixed alarmingly on me and I'm about to be dragged into the performance. The moment passes and I realise that the only reason she's looking at me is that there is nobody else in the rows around me.
The Crypt Theatre in Dublin Castle has not been well favoured by audiences during this festival, but the handful of people who saw Belfast Theatre Company's A Most Notorious Woman on Wednesday did their best to compensate by the warmth of their reception.
Written and performed by Maggie Cronin and directed by Paddy Scully, this one-woman show (ending tonight) re-creates the life and stirring times of the 16th-century Connacht heroine, Grace O'Malley, otherwise known as Grainne Umhaill or Granuaile. Born into a sea-faring family who roamed around the islands of the west coast, and described by Sir Philip Sidney as "a most famous feminine sea-captain", Grace led her clan in resistance to Elizabeth I's forces.
Documentary evidence about her is scant, but her story survives in song and legend, and from these shadowy sources Cronin has fashioned a play that is delicate, funny and richly textured. Constantly shifting in time and between characters, the language and visual style are deliberately anachronistic, with Grace clad in a black leather jacket adorned with a skull and crossbones, and later a baseball cap and shades.
With a few simple props - a battered suitcase, a white silk sheet which doubles as a tablecloth, a wedding dress and a billowing ship's sail - Grace's free spirit is evoked. The symbolism of feminine rites of passage is emphasised, as Grace tries to reconcile the life of a sailor/pirate with the pull of love and motherhood.
Behind the reconstruction of her historical circumstances lies a wealth of allusions to the allegorical tradition in which Grace O'Malley can be associated with the spirit of Ireland, with the speirbhean figures of 18th-century Gaelic poetry and the Revivalists' icon, Caitlin Ni hOulihan.
Towards the end of the play a wise, black-shawled, Hag of Beire muses on the long line of women who have travelled from Ireland, but the final references to coffin ships and journeys for abortions seem unnecessarily didactic. This memorable play has already shown that "we're all the daughters of Granuaile if we but knew it"; we don't need to be told.
The reclamation of women's history continues in Shibboleth Theatre Company's devised show, The Turnout (City Arts Centre, ending tonight), which takes a gently humorous approach to the 1798 Rebellion.
Recently graduated from the renowned Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre in Paris, these young Belfast-based performers have impressive physical versatility and an adventurous spirit. In their enthusiasm for mime, movement and inventive imagery, however, they have neglected the script, which is very thin indeed and doesn't give the work the skeleton it needs. The result is lacking in focus.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office will have a knowing chuckle at Brimstone Theatre Company's Duck Rabbit Duck (Andrew's Lane Studio, ending tonight), as the bewildered, institutionalised Anton (John Ryan) and Sharp (Tim Casey) are trapped in a monochrome hell and mysteriously find themselves promoted from Section B7 to C28.
A corporate version of Waiting For Godot, with an echo of Kafka's The Trial, this is an ironic satire on bureaucracy. It's hardly a challenging target, but the American author, Jeremy Karaken, has given his script a gruesome twist which compensates for the obviousness and repetitiveness of some of the humour. Of course, repetition is the point, effectively made, as audience members begin to feel that we, too, will never escape from Section C28 . . .
The Fringe Information Office is in Arthouse, Curved Street, Temple Bar. The Fringe phone number is: (01) 605-6833 and information is available on these websites: www.fringefest.com and www.dkm.ie/events