Reviews today looks at the Dublin Fringe Festival and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL
La Clique****
Batucada ***
Spiegeltent, Iveagh Gardens
ON A SATURDAY night on Dublin's Harcourt Street, they are queuing up in their dozens to be wedged into basement nightclubs; yet just one street away, an Alice in Wonderland-like festival is unfolding beneath the trees, with all sorts of pleasures for the senses. Roll up for the opening of the Fringe festival, at its spiritual home of the Spiegeltent, the best-kept secret in Dublin that's ripping up a riot in the city centre.
This year the Fringe has moved its tent from the urban playground of George's Dock into the leafy wonderland of the Iveagh Gardens. Behind the iron railings, bare bulbs dangle in the breeze, leading you to an encampment of performance venues and stalls; it's as if the craziest circus has rolled into town, and this is where the performers camp out after hours.
Opening the festival is the raucous cabaret of La Clique. This show is familiar to Fringe fans, having enjoyed a sell-out run last year, with an almost identical cast. You could accuse the organisers of a lack of innovation in their programming - but when a show is this good, who wouldn't want to see it twice? It is shocking, sexy and dripping with charisma; David O'Mer's bathtub routine still has a legion of women trying to find his hotel room; Captain Frodo makes sure you never look at a tennis racquet (or your shoulder blades) in the same way again; and Ursula Martinez is equal parts shock and seduction - she forces the audience out if its comfort zone and they love it. A terrific band of performers, then, providing some very adult entertainment.
The main event of the night, Batucada, is an entirely different animal. A Brazilian-themed performance turns the Spiegeltent into Carnival, with dancers, samba payers and DJs. Capoeira dancers (think a sort of non-contact martial art) fling and flip themselves through the air, but it's a difficult venue for this performance - unless you are at the front of the crowd it's impossible to appreciate the intricacy of the movements. A later show in the nearby Bosco tent, with its tiered benches, makes for a much more worthwhile evening.
Last year's opening night performance was a thoughtful, divisive piece by Russian group Derevo, as ambitious as it was challenging. This year, the Fringe opening night was all about atmosphere: no complex theatrics, no fireworks - simply hundreds of people having a wonderful time. As the opening-night act for a Fringe festival that prides itself on its ambition, it feels a little unimaginative, apart from the fabled setting. However, the hundreds on the dancefloor make this an occasion, and the new, secretive location for the Spiegeltent is thrilling; every show here will feel like a little piece of magic. Let the games begin. LAURENCE MACKIN
Etiquette ***
Curved Street Cafe
A TABLE for two in a cafe becomes a world of its own in this interactive installation from London group Rotozaza. Two audience-members/performers are fed lines via their headphones, directing them through unfolding scenarios. The instructions they follow turn the table-top into a stage, with tiny props. Even though the scenes they enact - from Godard and Ibsen - might be familiar, this still feels improvisatory and slightly risky, especially if the two participants don't know each other.
The disjunction between the emotional drama unfolding at the table and the oblivious coffee-drinkers all around creates an intense sense of dislocation. While it peters out towards the end of its half-hour loop, this clever piece is a miniature illustration of everyday experience: of being actor and audience in our own lives, of being tuned into the personal soundtrack that allows words to diverge from their subtexts. And it's fun.
• Until September 21st, every 30 minutes from 10am. HELEN MEANY
OTHER REVIEWS
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Rattle
NCH, Dublin
Brahms - Symphony No 3 Shostakovich - Symphony No 10
HOW DO you like your Brahms symphonies to sound? Heavy? Gruff? Frowning and earnest? Well, not if you're Simon Rattle in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
Rattle's Brahms, as evidenced in the Third Symphony at the NCH on Saturday, was extraordinarily well blended and finely balanced. The sonic impact was rarely that of a growling bass section, nor was the driving force usually that of a heavily-massed violin line.
Rattle's Brahms was uncommonly refined, quietly massive, as it were, with a super-charger that allowed any element suddenly to make its presence felt (as someone might achieve in the recording studio by the movement of a fader) or wind up a gear or two for a flash of unexpected power.
Nothing in Rattle's performance seemed to be sought out for the sake of mere effect. He presented the Third Symphony as a kind of rich tapestry in which every minutest detail was lit with painstaking care. In musical terms the expressive character was rich but never overweight. The internal dialogue could race around the orchestra with the kind of freedom associated with the finest of chamber ensembles.
And the rubato flexed with lightness and freedom. It's not often one gets to hear quite as much of what's on the page presented with effortless clarity to the ear. And it all sounded as natural as breathing. To borrow a remark made by the critic Eduard Hanslick of the symphony itself when it was new, Rattle's approach had "the virtue of not seeking effects at the cost of intelligibility".
The Berlin players' fabulous virtuosity was put to altogether different use in Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, which was delivered with a single-minded tightness of vision which kept the piece itself on as tight a rein as the listeners.
The music, which is riddled with pitfalls for the unwary conductor, ranges from a bleak, brooding pessimism to a kind of fierce exhilaration. Rattle made it an unfaltering white-knuckle ride, which brought the capacity audience to its feet at the end. The clamouring for more was blithely ignored. And in truth, it's hard to see what might meaningfully have been offered as an encore to such a shattering experience. MICHAEL DERVAN
