This year’s fantastic Fringe offerings are a cut above
DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL PREVIEW
Various venues
The 30th Dublin Fringe Festival begins on Saturday and runs until September 22. It will feature more than 500 performances by more than 500 artists from various art forms who will perform in 29 venues.
According to the festival organisers, this year’s theme celebrates (in particular) love expanded: the make-up of family, precarity of romance, and the urgency of pleasure.
It’s a hell of a bucket, stirred with huge enthusiasm, terrific energy, and an overall commitment to breaking boundaries – sometimes for the sake of it, at others breaking them with real artistic purpose.
And, of course, in the mix will be a large number of theatrical ventures dedicated to experiment, and others dedicated to being recognisably part of the current dramatic form.
Let’s start with the latter.
The list is headed by actor/ author Janet Moran and Once Off Productions who present Moran’s latest play Afterwards at the Peacock.
It was developed in Fishamble’s New Play Clinic (a recommendation in itself) and features three women, one English and two Irish, in a UK abortion clinic in the aftermath of their procedures. It’s described as their “self-imposed purgatory”.
Lianne O’Hara’s Baby looks at another aspect of female sexuality. At the New Theatre, it’s a one-woman play featuring a 36-year-old woman yearning to have a baby, and surrounded by reminders of others’ fertility at every turn.
At the Civic in Tallaght will be Shane Casey with The Man Who Talks to Statues, a Verdant production.
Again, a one-man show, it features a radio engineer who braves the outside world from his attic in a “magic realist” road trip around Ireland, encountering certain iconic statues such as those of Richard Harris and Molly Malone.
Bewley’s will host Síomha McQuinn’s Secret Secrets Shh!, a foray into a single night in the working life of a cloakroom attendant, who susses out her customers by the simple means of going through their pockets.
Louis Lovett’s Theatre Lovett can always be depended upon to offer a combination of stimulation and elegance. This time it’s Carmel Winters’s The Maestro and the Mosquita, and features an eminent conductor tormented nightly by the visitations of a blood-hungry mosquito. With a musical score by Stephen Warbeck, it’s a somewhat surreal examination of the need for love in life, inevitably leading to downfall for an artist. It will be at the Project.
The same venue will host Dead Centre’s Illness as Metaphor, an adaptation of Susan Sontag’s book of the same title. The company has a well-deserved reputation for ground-breaking technically complex work. But it has to be admitted that their most recent offering, a co-operation with essayist/novelist Emily Pine called Good Sex, left me entirely cold. As a thought-provoking comedy of unrehearsed sexual manners, I found it humourless, pointless and boring.
Sontag, though, is never humorous, and her book examines the ”metaphors surrounding sickness that can... quite literally, kill”. Dead Centre has worked with six people living with longterm illness to ask how theatre can deal with reality, and if it can be a place where we live, and die without metaphor.
A lot less serious will be Aoife Sweeney O’Connor’s An Evening with Wee Daniel. Who? The one and only Daniel O’Donnell, of course.
It will be at Bewley’s, and is advertised as NOT a piss-take, but a rapturous love-letter to the rural queer, non-binary experience, to mammies, and to our Daniel. A celebration of “quare identity” apparently.
Sorry You Felt That Way isa three-hander by Harry Butler at Project, an offbeat love story of what happens when a woman moves in with her boyfriend, only to be confronted by his ex.
Suckin Diesel by Holly Furey and Ursula McGinn will be at the Patrick Sutton Studio in Smock Alley, featuring a “good gurl” (sic) confined in Tallaght Hospital against her will. It’s billed as an ode to self-preservation and resilience for women.
Rose+Bud will feature at the New Theatre, offering a closeted “t-girl” in a night club smoking area in Derry, as she comes to terms with who she is and what she wants to be. It’s produced by Commedia of Errors in co-operation with the Lyric in Belfast.
That’s just a selection of what’s on offer across the drama board at the Fringe. Full details can be found at fringefest.com.