Irish Times writers cast a critical eye over the latest performances at the Dublin Theatre Festival

White Cabin

Project Arts Centre

Nonsense, as Lewis Carroll taught us, is not just the opposite of meaning. It can be a parallel universe with laws of its own. A warped logic can be no less compelling than a straight one. The wonderful White Cabin from the St Petersburg-based group Akhe is this kind of nonsense. It creates what so many avant-garde performances aspire to: a dream-world that is neither fantastical nor nightmarish but as solid and vivid as dreams are while we are in them. Its laws and logic may not be easily discernible, but we know they exist.

They may be a little more obvious to Russian observers, for White Cabin seems to be steeped in the Russian past. Its use of superimposed multi-layered images, free-floating bodies and flat, almost childlike representations of the human form, reminded me strongly of a Marc Chagall painting such as I and the Village. Its atmosphere of phantasmagoric comedy and feverish surrealism is reminiscent of the St Petersburg stories of Nikolai Gogol. It touches on both Orthodox rites and pre-Christian folk rituals. It also draws on the brief flowering of modernist art after the revolution of 1917 and before the Stalinist repression. It feels, in other words, like a summoning of all the cultural energies that were banished in the years of despotism.

It is hard, too, not to discern a mourning for the lost and disappeared. The use of old silent films and old postcards, the moment when the stunning actor Yana Tumina calls out names in panic, the general evocation of a cruel and capricious universe where things come and go in ways that are beyond the control of the individual - all of this suggests a kind of historical mourning.

Yet to describe White Cabin simply in this way would be to suggest a directness that it consciously avoids. Apart from Tumina, it is performed by its creators Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchnenko, and has been evolving since 1996 as a shifting, deliberately evanescent phenomenon. Though technically astounding, with a dazzling use of video, a vibrant score by Nikolai Soudnik, splendid lighting by Vadim Gololobov, and performances that draw on the skills of the magician, the performance artist, the clown and the acrobat, it remains gorgeously slippery.

It seems at once incredibly disciplined and freely improvised, minimalist and lavish. Everything seems a kind of pun. The performances are, for example, literally drink-sodden, with red wine, champagne and beer soaking the actors at various stages, but the image seems to suggest both an alcoholic delirium and a ritual libation. The strings and ropes that are used in the first part of the show are both magical lines along which objects can lift and glide and bonds in which humans get entangled.

Torches both illuminate and blind.

White Cabin works as a palimpsest, a manuscript that when it is held up to the light reveals the traces of the previous messages and stories that have been written on it. Its theatrical boldness, comic invention and painterly beauty make it truly remarkable.

Until Sat

Fintan O'Toole

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Queen of Colours

The Ark

Most Irish children will not be familiar with Jutta Bauer's book, Die Konigin der Farben (Queen of Colours) so they will come fresh to the stage adaptation by German company, Erfreuliches Theater Erfurt.

The story literally evolves in front of our eyes as a drawing of the little queen is projected onto a large semi-circular area on the back wall of the performance space. This drawing is then replaced by a shadow puppet who plays out the role of the queen who gives orders to her court painter and court musician to bring colour into her life.

The court painter stands to the left of the stage, her childlike drawings of the little queen's world projected onto the back wall. The court musician (a piano player) sits to the right, musically and verbally interacting with the little queen (and the court painter) as the little queen's world becomes filled with red, then blue, then yellow.

At times, the tale seems like an allegory of two parents pleasing their only child. This symbolism is carried through when we see the little queen act like a spoilt child who then needs to learn how to say sorry.

The children in the audience seem to totally comprehend this dimension and are relieved to see the colours returned harmoniously to the little queen's world. All in all, it's a gentle, pleasing show even if one is left feeling a bit sad that the little queen has to live all alone in her castle.

Ends today

Sylvia Thompson