BAD SALAD, DISGUSTING LIARS AND A WAKE-OVER
With 586 shows and a whole lot of words – this year’s Fringe festival is raring to go
Dublin Fringe Festival
Various venues September 10–25
When you see an upcoming show called The Chorus Of Ghosts Living In My Skull Keep Telling Me To Take A S*** In The Fruit Salad, you can guess that the Dublin Fringe Festival is on its way. The publicity adds helpfully that Paul Currie’s show is ‘an hour-long existential genre-defying rollercoaster of rule-breaking’.
Whatever else you think about the Fringe (Sept 10–25) you can’t say it undersells itself. The programme invites you to ‘celebrate the glorious, the curious and the improbable from the top of the skyline’s tallest buildings to the peace of your bathtub’. And that’s almost literal, not metaphorical.
The 586 performances, in 27 venues with 430 performers, are going ‘to overrun the city’.
And the performers are not just artists, they’re ‘pied pipers, master poets, deep thinkers and maestros of mess’.
Performances are divided into eight sections with a certain amount of overlapping between traditional theatre, dance, comedy and other headings.
Lisa Fa’alafi and Busty Beatz are ‘locked, loaded and ready’ for a performance called Hive City Legacy: Dublin Chapter, exploring what it means to be a ‘Woman of Colour in Ireland’ – not just an ordinary performance, but ‘a gender-bending, heart-thumping and mind-expanding’ show that will ‘shift the paradigm and reclaim the narrative’.
Child actress turned-drag queen Candy Warhol stages a story about a queen who ventures through Ireland on a queer crusade, among other things, to save the masses from heteronormativity. If nothing else, the Fringe brings your vocabulary up to date.
The more expansive Thisispopbaby production Wake, running at the National Stadium (Sept 8–17), wins the contest for the most extensive use of superlatives in its publicity, so I’ll settle for its simplest description of itself as ‘a howling, raucous, soulstirring… celebration of nearly everything’. Which is surprising since it’s apparently all about ‘appropriating the traditions, rites and structure of the Irish wake’.
The Fringe occasionally has an unbeatable ability to describe an event so inscrutably that you have only the vaguest idea what it’s about. For instance, there’s Beyond Survival School Bus, a 90-minute coach trip departing from Bull Alley that, ‘will lead you through a journey of queer ecological and abolitionist coalitions which have paved pathways for thriving rather than just surviving’. That comes under the items labelled Escapades.
The Plays, Plays, Plays section devotes itself to 10 dramatic productions, including one from the urban Gaeltacht of West Belfast, Minimal Human Contact, by Naoise Cairealláin (aka rapper Moglaí Bap from Kneecap) that goes into the world of compulsive gambling.
Absent The Wrong, on the Peacock stage at The Abbey, is described as ‘a blistering production about adoptees in Ireland’.
And for those who don’t like too much gloom, Lie Low offers ‘a darkly funny new play serving up a theatrical exploration into the human brain via the genitals’.
The problems of a Nigerian immigrant settling in Ireland are traced in poetry and prose by Samuel Yakura in The Perfect Immigrant. Or If you have ‘a complicated relationship with your avatar’ Test 1 is a physically poetic dance exploration that will put you right. Tom Moran Is A Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar, not surprisingly, is about a man who struggles with the truth and wants to exorcise his ghosts.
For 8–12 year-olds, Whodunnit/ The Great Art Robbery, under The Young Radicals label, is an at-home murder-mystery style experience, an online multilingual mystery game about a stolen pigeon, with 12 suspects in the audience. You have to play a character, protect your secrets and use your skills.
The admirable Weft project is an 18-month talent development project for early career artists of colour in Ireland, from which four works will be presented.
■ To get specific information about the whole weird, wonderful and, deadly serious world of the Fringe, you need to check out the website – fringefest.com
‘If nothing else, the Fringe festival brings your vocabulary up to date’
‘About a man who struggles with the truth and wants to exorcise his ghosts’