It's the final festival week and 7,000 people have been through the red velvet curtains of the Spiegeltent.
The mirrored dome has been such a success that fringe director Vallejo Gantner has confirmed it will be returning next year. Tomorrow is the tent's last night in town, and ClubSpiegel will have a New Orleans-themed send-off party for pass-holders and people with tickets from any of the day's festival shows.
Box-office takings for the fringe are up a healthy 40 per cent on last year, but there were also a lot more shows - 135 including those at the tent. The Fringe Festival Awards - for best show, best actor, best actress, best production, sexiest show and best emerging company, production or actor - will be presented at a private party at the Ambassador at 2 a.m.
It takes a lot for the youth - and indeed not-so-youthful - of Ireland to stir their stumps on a Saturday morning. But the Spiegeltent was stuffed for BBC Radio 4's 11 a.m. recording of Loose Ends last weekend. Ned Sherrin, its presenter, had lined up an eclectic panel: writers Anne Enright and John Arden, Desmond Guinness of the Irish Georgian Society, comedian Dara O'Briain, Chieftain Paddy Moloney and Loose Ends regular Emma Freud.
If a panel can have a hit member it was O'Briain, who delivered a hilarious five minutes on the state of Dublin. The Chieftains played bluegrass. But the biggest roars were for the impossibly cool-looking Nick Cave and his band, who played one song (Dolphins), then sat listening. You get few better fringe moments than the happy incongruity of seeing Cave applaud The Chieftains.
On Monday the Crash Ensemble didn't just play Philip Glass, they listed the composer as playing keyboards with them. His biography also appeared at the back of the programme. He wasn't there, though. The bizarrest piece in an evening of mainly electronic-based music was Narayana's Cows, an interpretation on flute, clarinet, violin, bass, piano and percussion of a mathematical formula involving bovine reproduction. Cows were defined as a crotchet and calves as a quarter - and there were a lot of them by the end of this music-for- anoraks marathon.
On Tuesday the Kevin Gildeas - Dr Millar, the Goose, Mark Doherty and Gildea - played a show with material so patchy you'd be hard pushed to make a bikini from it. The musicians were terrific, particularly Millar, but Gildea wasn't having a good night. "We don't have much door tonight, so we'll just have to take whatever we can get off the audience," he declared, pinching wine and cigarettes from tables and rambling on at unfunny length about relationships, property and jobs. This 7 p.m. show definitely suffered, as Gildea pointed out on stage, from being scheduled too early.
Camille O'Sullivan and her band played two stormers on Tuesday and Wednesday. She'll probably never find a better venue for her cabaret- type shows than the Spiegeltent. On Tuesday she sang the music of Jacques Brel. The next night she presented The Black Angel, a show she created for the tent with Weimar Republic songs. Both could have sold out twice: O'Sullivan is deservedly creating a cult audience.
Contemporary Irish writing: where is it? was Monday's topic in the Arts Council's Critical Voices series. Loughlin Deegan of Rough Magic chaired the debate, which focused
on playwriting. "The 21st-century
way of writing for theatre is multidisciplinary," said Mexican critic Luz Emilia Aguilar Zinser, observing that Irish theatre is rooted in narrative and too focused on the spoken word. Gavin Quinn of Pan Pan and Ali Curran of the Peacock agreed that new Irish theatre could be far more inventively and visually staged.
At Wednesday's debate on translation Rachel West, who has translated Conor McPherson, pointed out that we tend to take translated novels for granted but that translated plays are rarer. "Are any of us even bothering to learn more languages these days?" asked Michael Cronin of DCU. "Time is money, speed is everything and things that take time, like learning languages, get devalued. But without translators there can't be translations."
The final free discussion, at 1 p.m. today, is on festivals, with panellists Fergus Linehan of Dublin Theatre Festival, Vallejo Gantner of the fringe, Dominic Campbell of St Patrick's Festival and Jack Gilligan, Dublin City Council arts officer.
Irish Theatre Magazine hosts Critical Engagement at Liberty Hall today and tomorrow with a free symposium on criticism, including a public interview with Richard Eyre by Garry Hynes at 1 p.m. tomorrow.
