Irish Times writers review Trackat the Project in Dublin and  The Backside of the Bills at the New Theatre, also in Dublin.

Track

Project, Dublin

Peter Crawley

The small groups who amble from Project Arts Centre into the city, cocooned from the afternoon traffic by large headphones, may sport a contented and bemused look - as though the world has been arranged for their own private viewing. Yet it is they who are on display: decorated with Chinese name-tags, red ribbons, and orange umbrellas, a discrete little parade.

Track, a new version of an earlier piece from the witty social choreographers, Broken Talkers, plays with the idea of the observed observer, creating a performance that is part walking tour (where instructions and soundscapes are delivered via individual MP3 players) and part beguiling exhibition of street theatre. Reworked for the Chinese New Year celebrations, it is a gently disarming piece designed to amuse and surprise, rendering a familiar city as though viewed through new eyes.

"Continue walking to a statue of a large man surrounded by angels," goes one command in heavily accented English. Who? Daniel O'Connell? The mingling of new communities in Dublin may be the guiding theme of Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan's smoothly constructed performance, but their concerns quickly become more universal. In the pinging trajectory of city life, guide Shidan Yu tells us, people are always moving away from someone and closer to somebody else. "Will any of these people ever connect?"

Connection is the ultimate aim of the show and its most striking, heartening moments conjure the pattern of performance from the random bustle of a crowd: a sudden romantic tableau blooms in a public space, an arch intercultural rendition of a scene from a classic Irish play is tucked down a side alley, while a Chinese broadcaster's warm anecdote of human kindness in a new land is relayed over the last stretch of our journey.

That our tour has a secret destination is the final surprise, and one that extends its goodwill into a sense of cultural community. A chance to converse, and celebrate the Chinese New Year, its last act hums with optimism; that our evolving city, and our lives, are firmly on track.

Runs until Monday, at 1pm and 3pm

The Backside of the Bills

New Theatre, Dublin

Sara Keating

The title of Marieluise Fleischer's first play, Purgatory in Ingolstadt (1924), could serve well as a metaphor for the playwright's real life, which is the subject of Kerstin Specht's one-woman play, The Backside of the Bills.

Born into a conservative Catholic community in rural Bavaria in 1901, Fleischer's life is a fascinating fragment of feminist history. Coming of age as the suffrage movement swept across Europe in the aftermath of the first World War, her life was one that was both made possible and inhibited by the men she loved. First there was her father, who educated her but then told her she must forsake her theatrical ambitions for trade. Then there were her lovers, who liberated her sexually but left her trapped by desire. Next, her male contemporaries, Germany's leading dramatists Bruno Frank and Bertolt Brecht, thrust her into the limelight and then sabotaged her career. And finally, there was the husband she abandoned and then returned to and then lost again in the aftermath of the second World War.

On Urmel Meyering's stripped-back set, Fleischer might be speaking to us from the refuge of an air-raid shelter; the grey and green palette of the canvas walls, the cleverly functional travelling case, are distinctly military in style. Mannix McPhillips's red-and-green lighting design complements this war-torn aesthetic, while Hedda Kaphengst's growing confidence as the conflicted, naive know-all, Fleischer, is a convincing portrayal of the writer's maturing and then disintegrating mind.

Noel Cummins's direction lacks pace in parts, the transitions between time, place and character neither fluid nor clear enough to cohere completely. However, at only an hour and 15 minutes long, Fleischer's mad fantasies keep an audience engaged: now she is dancing with the Danube, caressed by its currents; now she is a mermaid protected by shells.

Unfortunately, in real life, Fleischer's fate was far more tragically mundane: she was to remain the prisoner of the town that she so successfully anatomised in her most famous play, and she died there alone and impoverished in 1974.

Runs until Feb 16