Transformative theatre at the Fringe

The avant garde had a distinctly retro look at the Fringe last week. Project's downstairs theatre space may be more used to experimental, abstract productions, but for the entire week it was transformed into a cross between a GP's waiting room and a talk-show studio. The Framemakers crew had spent the preceding days wandering through Temple Bar, begging and borrowing furniture and decorations for their Seven Days of Everything project. The result was an elegant brown leather suite (replete with its product-placement price tag), some art on the walls and various bits of eclectic clutter. Wandering in around 7pm on Saturday evening – the space was open all week to wanderers, with a promise of tea, coffee and chat – host Steve Valk was animatedly talking to Dublin historian Pat Liddy, an American singer was tuning a guitar, and Jeffrey Gormley was wolfing down fish and chips. Turned out there was a show on that evening – I'd missed that in the programme. I hung around. Tickets were free. People drifted in, and then a decent sized crowd for 8pm. Framemakers had billed this as "an effort to expose and make sense of (the) potential for profound transformative innovation in our present day situation". But by the time it got started, it became clear that – lofty ideologies notwithstanding – this was to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a good old fashioned cabaret/talk-show miscellany. Steve Valk was a gregarious and gentle guide to the evening. His main guest, Pat Liddy, gave an enthused and informed discource on Dublin. They meshed on ideas of public space and civic engagement. (In case we missed it, a hand-drawn cardboard sign at the entrance proclaimed "Public Space".) Rebecca Hart provided plaintive chords and deft lyrics in the musical interludes. An actress came up to be interviewed, but instead took up a copy of Ulysses on the table and read at random, but elegantly, from it. Spontaneity often works out just plain sloppy, but this had a freshness, an energy and an honesty about it that was difficult to resist. With more time, or a more-ingrained habit of talk-show theatre-going, the audience would have engaged more actively. It was the kind of evening to provoke talk, or chat. And then Pat Liddy delivered the coup de grâce. Leading us out the rear of the theatre, into the lane at the side of the Olympia, in a trickling rain (they'd borrowed umbrellas as well, and handed them out), he took us through Temple Bar, through a gate for which he'd the key, to a private courtyard. This was the site of the first performance ever of Handel's 'Messiah', in 1742, he said, as we stood beneath apartment windows in the rain. The umbrella holders pushed forward to make a makeshift auditorium, and Rebecca Hart took out her guitar and sang. It was simple, novel and and a little bit special. Valk calls his work "social choreography". Call it what you want; bringing people together, entertaining them, making them think, making them talk. It's been done before, but it's good to be reminded how easily it can be done again – and in a theatre, not just a TV studio. ?More Framemakers finished on 25 September. For more information about the project, www.daghdha.ie/framemakers. Singer-songwriter Rebecca Hart is on tour in Ireland. See www.rebeccahart.net for details There were much more complicated logistics involved in a production that, on the face of it, seemed altogether conventional, The Masterpiece by Mad Productions. This was a bold and intriguing tale of a Polish painter, Gustav Honess, married to a Jewish woman who was sent to a concentration camp in World War II. A true story, Stephen McNamara's script struggled at times with the weight of research that evidently went into it and the play demonstrated the tensions between history and drama that emerge when attempting to stage factual events. Yet it was at times searing in its depiction of the desperation of Honess and the inhumanity of the camp regime, and as a historical portrait it was compelling. The complicated logistics were in the casting and staging. When your cast come from three different prisons and you want to stage your show in the Dublin Fringe Festival but aren't allowed out of jail, you run into those. McNamara and co-writer and prison tutor Neville Thompson wrote the play in the Midlands Prison, and got permission to stage it in Mountjoy. McNamara gave a powerful, visceral performance in the lead role. He said afterwards he'd done time in Cork, where there were no facilities for drama; when he came across it in the Midlands he discovered something in himself, and is now aiming to make it his career when he gets out next year. They'd love to tour the play to prisons across the country, though realise that working it out will probably prove impossible. The choice of subject matter came initially, from McNamara's interest in art, and from their desire to do something that wasn't about drugs and crime, that could allow them – and their cast and audience – to tackle something new through theatre. Another "transformative" project, then. More Until 1 October at Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, 8.30 pm, €12. Booking: 1850 FRINGE (1850 374 643) colin murphy