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Fringe 2007 Reviews (60)
Is This About Sex?
By Christian O'Reilly
Rough Magic
Traverse Drill Hall
****
After last year's hugely entertaining and very quirky Improbable
Frequency, Dublin theatre company Rough Magic returns to the Traverse
with a very different, more conventional kind of play.
When the play opens, Daniel is tentatively trying get shop assistant
Cathy to help him to choose some women's clothes—for himself. He
has decided that the problems with his marriage to Kay must be due to
him really being a woman in a man's body, so he is trying on the clothes
to start with. Cathy thinks that her problems with boyfriend Paul are
because they read in bed every night until they are too tired to have
sex, but then Paul becomes obsessed with trying to satisfy Cathy—and
then Kay when he starts an affair with her—orally in the shortest
possible time.
Darragh Kelly plays Daniel as very laid-back and thoughtful, if a little
wrong-headed about women and about himself. Rory Nolan has some superb
facial expressions that let the audience read exactly what he is thinking
when he is letting some information sink in or is considering his next
move. Hilary O'Shaughnessy as Cathy tolerates Paul with deliberate shows
of patience, while Ali White as Kay doesn't know what she wants at all.
Ruth Hegarty completes the cast as Angela, Kay's pushy friend. Lynne
Parker's direction is perfectly paced, and there is some nice linking
music from Denis Clohessy.
This play explores sex and modern relationships in a way that is often
extremely funny but also touches on serious aspects of these issues.
There is plenty in here that most people will recognise from relationships
of their own, occasionally perhaps with a little embarrassment. This
is a great production with some very good performances and is well worth
seeing, except perhaps by those who are offended by frank and explicit
discussions about sex as, to answer the question in the title, this
is a large part of what the play is about.
David Chadderton
Howard Read: Light, Shade
Lemonade
Just the Tonic
C soco
***(*)
You have to feel sorry for Howard Read (although he is not the only
one in this situation). As he explains at the beginning of his show,
the original venue he was booked for never actually happened, and so
at the last minute his show was rehoused by C; in his words, he was
expecting to perform in a cave and ended up in a tent. The tent is on
top of the remains of the former Gilded Balloon, and as the tent city
taps into the old venue's electrics, the first week was plagued by power
cuts. None of this is a happy story, but he makes it quite funny when
he tells it.
Howard Read is known as Big Howard when he is performing with his animated
creation Little Howard—currently running at the Assembly Rooms—but
he also performs a solo stand up show. A large part of this show features
a routine, including a song, about premature ejaculation, although there
are other subjects as well. Interspersed between the jokes are a few
songs sung either a cappella or while accompanying himself on
the ukulele, including one about wanting to sell his son Samson after
spending months without sleep and the most terrifying lullaby about
bed bugs you could sing to a child. Every so often, he shows us some
bizarre cartoon creations with strange captions on a flip chart pad,
which are very funny.
Read does not hide his annoyance about performing in a tent, sometimes
without power, sometimes drowned out by the noise of the rain on the
roof, but he ploughs on with confidence through some good material well
delivered, despite on this particular occasion having a small audience
that was reluctant to join in with any audience participation. His songs
are very good and his drawings are superb, and everything is delivered
with the same amiable, child-like glee that he shows in his performances
with Little Howard.
David Chadderton
Meow Meow in Beyond Glamour:
The Absinthe Tour
Meow Meow Revolution
Spiegel Garden
****
When it comes to breaking the ice with an audience, Meow Meow is an
exceedingly naughty lady. Within moments of emerging on stage, she has
snuck into the intimate crowd at the Bosco Theater and is requesting
that they relieve her of her clothes, item by item. It's clear from
her breathy but firm tone and the fact that she manages to maintain
a song whilst being clumsily stripped by the drunken spiegel masses
that this is no ordinary cabaret star.
In so many c-rate fringe burlesque shows, the art of comedy seems to
be forgotten in favour of topless women and sequins, and this is where
Meow Meow scores a triumph in her one-woman show. With bundles of audience
participation, every song is stamped with her powerful singing voice
and flighty blah-blahing through the boring bits, alongside a feisty
appetite for the comic bizarre, and for the most part, all fully clothed.
Unfortunately for Meow Meow, the audience were not quite on her comedy
wavelength for the full show, and after several successful numbers,
including a variety rendition of Ne Me Quitte Pas with audience
members providing a human chair and hugging her knees, the fear of being
the next victim seemed to cast a slight frost over the crowd, with the
front row attempting to thwart the singer's valiant crowd-surfing. It
was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between what was staged
and what was impro, and this created an unsettling tension, especially
when some moments after moodily asking the lighting man how many minutes
she had to continue for, she kicked over a stool.
Like a badly behaved Edith Piaf with attention deficit disorder, Meow
Meow's breezy unpredictability combined with a vicious determination
to involve her audience could be both her trump card and her Achilles
heel, depending most probably, on which night you go, and how drunk
you are.
Lucy Ribchester
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