What is immediately apparent from the line up of new plays in this year's Fringe is that whilst Irish playwrights and theatre artists are looking to have their work performed just as readily abroad as at home, playwrights and artists from abroad are also flourishing here.
Dragonfly Theatre Company is only one instance of an Irish company who first gained approbation abroad, in the New York Fringe, before being acknowledged at home with the new writing award at last year's Fringe. They look to build on this success with Shona McCarthy's latest, Reptillian, a play that is as daring in its linguistic léger de main - it's a verse drama - as it is in its visual conception.
Among the most encouraging progressions for which the Dublin Fringe is a lodestone, is that international artists are making work in Ireland at the very frontline of their own development. The international mix of new plays for this year's Dublin Fringe bears this out.
Pope Joan Theatre Company has, in its director Aoife Spillane-Hinks, a US artist who has grown considerably while creating work in Ireland. She has been instrumental in providing a spark for new writing in Galway for the last two years and is now working with compatriots and locals alike to put together A. M. Mac Eachern's All Dressed Up to Go Dreaming, a play which artfully references American popular culture from the thirties and forties just as it obliquely references recent American politics.
Another US play, John Crutchfield's Tw elve Treatises on Memory from Audacity Theatre Company, exemplifies some of the best qualities in current American playwrighting with its sheer uninhibited sense of fun when dealing with treacherous negotiations between former lovers - comprising in all twelve playlets of widely varying styles. It is getting its first professional production from director Una McNulty, the play having arrived with her through a wonderfully circuitous and indeed charmed route.
thisispopbaby, in association with the Abbey Theatre, gives us two one-act plays from Irish writers who have their imaginative horizons in individual ways trained on America. Belinda McKeon must surely have written the greater part of Tw o Houses while attending the Columbia University MFA writers' programme in New York. She has clearly absorbed New York's fearlessness and chutzpah in a story about messy teenage sexuality and entanglements with older men. Phillip McMahon's In vestment Potential charts with the lightest and truest touch the history of a love affair, its final scene in Las Vegas poised between fantasy and fact while giving nothing away.
On this humble island it's clearly been a strength, and a source of much of our neuroses, to be able to absorb influences indiscriminately from the US, the UK and Europe. The Attic Studio presents Th ose Powerful Machines from Irish writer Arnold Thomas Fanning, which he wrote when he was resident in the UK, and which resembles plays from the UK much more than it does anything Irish. The play taps into London's contemporary knife-edge atmosphere by locating a tense Pinteresque drama between three former anti-capitalist saboteurs to a potentially explosive denouément.
But not only influences. Elske Rahill's How to Be Loved from Mirari Productions gives us Marilyn Monroe reincarnated as a Dublin woman. The strategy is that of the mask, literally so, when make-up and wig are taken into account. The atmosphere weirdly recalls Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Elfriede Jelinek's Princess Plays, or Beckett's Trilogy, even as the writing approaches the alienations of gender idendtity with something perfectly her own.
The mask - the persona - is repeatedly cover for the monologue in this year's Fringe, curiously so, when you consider how often it is an actor-playwright who is reaching for both the mask and the monologue. This is true not only of Elske Rahill but also of Phil Kingston and Elaine Murphy. Phil Kingston's The Common Will sees him take up the mask of none other than Will Shakespeare, in an extraordinarily faithful, detailed, lively account of the years leading up to the writing of Hamlet. Themes of duplicity and cunning abound in a piece in which Elizabethan London has more than a whiff of celtic-tiger Dublin about it. Elaine Murphy's Little Gem from Guna Nua confronts us squarely with the lives of three women, three generations, who gain their autonomy and our eternal love by the honesty of their look at themselves and the courage of their look at the world.
The monologue form is put to such diverse ends that you might think it stretched to breaking point this year. It cleaves to the subjective like no other in Clodagh Downing's play The Evolution of Lauren Begaun and again the delight is in meeting someone through a monologue whom you utterly believe. Paul Kennedy's Stopping By the Woods from Squint Productions likewise winds you in to a consciousness getting to grips with itself in the familiarly upbeat Dublin idiom of Mark O'Rowe. Then as if the idiom leads itself on its own merry dance, the final moment is a breakdown in language with the precise effect that it breaks your heart. The free-wheeling dramatic monologue is wonderfully capacious enough to accommodate the Dublin odyssey of Daniel Reardon's All Round My Head, the rhyming couplets proving to be an adventure equal to that in the narrative.
Out in the wilder regions of experimentation are two productions whose investigations are as much in the staging as in the language. In Neil Watkins's The Darkroom from Gentle Giant Theatre Company, our greatest superheroes take centre-stage. And slug it out in duels. To the death. It's an ingenious premise. To reflect further that Neil turns to heroic couplets and iambic pentameters to investigate the shadows that keep company with us all, and in particular the shadow of HIV, and that director Karl Shiels and designer Sarah Jane Shiels mean to keep it very dark, is to feel something very exciting in the making. Peter Dunne's Before Colour from Wicked Angels investigates language as untruth, setting one young woman's denials against the incontrovertible evidence of her two sisters' self-harm. A staging with the fluidity of the colour spectrum is keeping pace here with the quicksilver changes in the dialogue.
Tucked away in the margins of the Fringe is Step It Up, a programme of play readings, capturing a moment in the development of new work coalescing towards a production. There is no more pitiless, and consequently better, test for a play. The play has nowhere to hide, the audience's experience is in the language alone. Th icker than Water is about a prison break, and intriguingly so, the writer (who must remain unnamed for legal purposes) is currently doing time in Portlaoise prison. Shawn Sturnick's Crown Jewels tracks down a nest of thieves in Dublin Castle but really the fun is all in the gay abandon.
On learning that Zelig, an emerging theatre company from Galway, premier Pat McCabe's Appointment in Limbo for the Fringe - a play where a present-day lap-dance club is crosshatched with the outlandish folk heroes of 19th century Fenian and Orange ballads - I begin to think: the spirit of Flann O'Brien inhabits every particle of this adventure. Then I drift to thoughts of how this production is unthinkable anywhere else, and of how Flann O'Brien is the presiding spirit of the Fringe itself.
In the midst of the indecipherable blur of the Irish theatre scene is the Dublin Fringe, a lightning rod with all the potential to summon the utter clarity of the lightning bolt. Wear rubber when you venture anywhere near one of these productions.
Thomas Conway is a freelance director and Literary Manager with Druid.
