Theatre: Falling into the Fringe trap

After the first week of Dublin's Fringe Festival Colin Murphy hungers for some good,
old-fashioned drama

'You will break the law and get away with it, visit a stranger's house and drink his wine... laugh as a man suffocates in front of you." Hmm. Predicting the unpredictable is a hazard of fringe festivals. Too much talk of subversion and surprise leaves audiences jaded and hungering for some simple, old-fashioned drama.

Young Dublin company Brokentalkers put themselves at a disadvantage from the off with their "recommended" On This One Night. Supposedly a promenade show through the streets of Dublin, in fact it all took place in a couple of rooms in the Docklands Authority's offices. There was wine and popcorn, which was nice, and polite ushers. In a room decked out in seedy disco style, a person with bandages wrapped around their head talked through a microphone about his/her sex-change. A woman in a sleek dress climbed a ladder to pout into a video camera, and her face stared out at us from a TV in the corner. A goofy chap in Speedos told a story about innocently abducting a young girl. In another room, a gentle fellow sat on a bed and followed video instructions on how to kill himself. The acting was uneven and the script strained, but the set design very effective and the ideas occasionally interesting.

Dreamers also left me longing for some narrative, anything to give the Lombard brothers' extraordinary dancing some sort of dramatic structure.

The brothers are 20-something identical twins from Argentina who taught themselves to tapdance and breakdance and went in search of stardom in the US. It didn't quite work out, but they've made a show out of their story so far. The dancing is stunning, but with its limp narration and messy documentary footage, the story is clumsily told. The show is poorly served by its venue, the O'Reilly Theatre, a cavernous space that simply swallows many shows. Dreamers could pack a punch in a smaller, more intimate venue, where the brothers' engaging enthusiasm and furious dancing could warm up a tired audience, but the venue bled the show of its passion. We were left with a fabulous, technical display of dancing, but not a moving one.