The Dubliner Magazine

Max McGuinness

Our columnist (22) just brought his first play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This is what happened.

July 7th. First rehearsal for my play Up The Republic!, which I am also directing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a farce set during a race riot in a Parisian suburb, so I intend to kick off with a read-through, followed by a game of pétanque. Alas, the weather forecast is poor and I am forced to relocate indoors. The read-through seems to go well and I leave feeling optimistic about starting the real work tomorrow.

The Celtic Lobster

Trevor White introduces the September issue of the magazine

Did a city ever greet a recession more cheerfully than Dublin today? The rich can well afford their smugness (“A little realism will do no harm”) while the poor are happy to see the middle classes suffer. And so the merry cycle of life – boom, bust, offstage cackling – continues.

Victoria Smurfit

In which our star columnist has a real-life emergency that may just assist her performance on stage.

‘Mummy! up! Up!” I have to react fast, because I know that when I turn around I’ll be dive-bombed by a two-foot dynamo. Athlete-slick, I spin on one heel and catch my youngest as her legs go from under her. I am just tucking her under my armpit when a burning rope is dragged through my stomach. Not literally, you understand, but inside my daily-growing bump it twists and pulls. A pain shoots from hip to hip and I plonk to the floor

Talking At The Fourth Wall

Max McGuinness on some dodgy monologues and a solitary sublime show

Critics and punters alike have been searching high and low for hit shows in a very poor year at this Edinburgh's Fringe. They have accordingly gone for the default option, praising a raft of mediocre plays at the Traverse Theatre, which is the largest and most professional of Fringe venues.

After last year's The Walworth Farce, Enda Walsh has returned with another dose of nostalgia-streaked Technicolor blarney -- The New Electric Ballroom. Some of the best Irish acting talent around cannot rescue Walsh's incoherent and dramatically uninspired script. The play features what I surmise to be three sisters -- with a standout performance from Rosaleen Linehan as the eldest -- reminiscing in bog gothic tones about disappointing amorous adventures outside the eponymous ballroom.

Every so often, a male fish monger enters, inexplicably dumps a bucket of plastic fish into a hole in the floor, and rambles on about being lonely in his underpants. Eventually he strips down to these underpants and puts on an Elvis costume.

The New Electric Ballroom is indicative of the overwhelming influence of the monologue in contemporary Irish theatre, as the piece is essentially made up of a number of soliloquies inexpertly stitched together. What is missing is drama and the play sags throughout. Walsh is also determined, like most of his peers, to wallow in the misery and clichés of pre-Boom Ireland when the tumultuous changes of the past fifteen years are still crying out for theatrical treatment.

Downward Viral

If you go down to the woods today...

So here's the deal with viral marketing: you make a commercial that's so damn entertaining, so amusing or so funny, that people begin e-mailing it around, forwarding on the links, or even embedding it on their blog.

People literally begin advertising for you.

Or alternatively, you're a weird Frenchman making an ad for some orange muck that involves slender-limbed doe-eyed does and anthromorphised octopuses.*

Either way, it gets the message across.

* Excitingly, "anthromorphised octopuses" is a Googlewhack. Well maybe not so excitingly.

David Holmes

The Holy Pictures
★★★★
No place like Holmes
Word spread that Mr Holmes was back, and that his new record was some sort of biographical ode to Belfast. Folks were throwing around clichés like ‘soundtrack’ and even ‘installation’ – it all sounded quite horrible. Anyway, I’m not one for press releases, even when they aren’t getting all high-minded and conceptual about it.

If you explain a record to me before I listen to it then you’re depriving me of music’s greatest pleasure, subjectivity. So if you want to know about David Holmes’ family history and the emotional battles and personal demons over which he has triumphed, then you’ve come to the wrong place. There are plenty of proper journalists out there who deal almost exclusively with that sort of stuff. I can tell you that Holmes’ latest is his best since This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats.

Not Quite a Teddybear's Picnic

If you're heading to Electric Picnic, keep an eye out for Baba Brinkman and MC Dizraeli in the Leviathan Tent. Here we review their show in Edinburgh, and offer some other recomendations...

The Rebel Cell - MC Dizraeli and Baba Brinkman / Pleasance Dome / 17.40

The difficulty for any performance or narrative set in a satirical dystopian future is where to strike the balance. Make it too horrific and people will snort 'that will never happen'. Make it too like the status quo, and the audience will retort 'what's so bad about that?' The Rebel Cell is set in 2013 when Scotland is a thriving independent nation, but England has become a 1984 style police state. More centrally, the two rappers - MC Dizraeli and Baba Brinkman have gone their seperate ways. From their gig in Glastonbury earlier this year, Dizraeli is a radical rebel advocating nakedness and extremism to combat the status quo, while Brinkman has become a war correspondent, who notes the commodification of dissent and rebellion. Both rappers display sensational lyrical dexterity, backed up by serious philosophical differences of opinion. At their core is a classic Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X / John Hume vs. Gerry Adams / Professor Charles Xavier vs. Magneto debate about the merits of constructive opposition or all out revolution. Any time the lyrics get too idealistic, the other rapper steps in to knock them down.

As social commentary, there are two small problems in what is otherwise a verbal tour-de-force. Firstly, the dystopia is slightly charicatured and unbelievable. Secondly, there is a heavy focus on the two rappers' shared past, which somewhat obscures the wider political satire. But this is still a sensationally accomplished and powerfully thought-provoking piece. 4/5

Ismo Leikola - Rogue State Finland / Underbelly / 22.30

For a man speaking his second language, Ismo Leikola is uncannily incisive, charismatic and entertaining. Somehow he turns the language barrier to his advantage, hesitating - searching for the right word - before hitting his audience between the eyes with an unusually sharp observation. At one point he highlights the absurdity of having so many comedians in one festival that no-one can get a decent audience. His mock shambolic style is pulled off with charm and off-beat timing. Opening material about Finland and its neighbours gives way to more universal subjects. Throughout it all, Ismo's honesty and gentle common-sense perspective shine through. A truly winning performance. 4/5

Ronnie, we'll miss you

The end of an era in folk music

Forget The Dubliner. The Dubliner has passed away over to that great big session in the sky. The death of Ronnie Drew, the gravelly-voiced paragon of what it means to be from the city of the hurdling fords, leaves us all a little less.

An institute wrapped in a legend wrapped in a great big beard, Ronnie died in St. Vincent's after a long battle with throat cancer.

As Bono, Robert Hunter and Simon Carmody wrote in The Ballad of Ronnie Drew:

Here's to the Ronnie, to the voice we adore;
Like coals from a coal bucket scraping the floor.

The Best of Dublin 2008 - Entertainment

Entertainment & Fun

Pub crawls, pole dancing, popping the question... We’ve thrown a bit of everything into this section. There is so much fun to be had in this old town, sober or otherwise; you just need to know where to look. Here are some (practical, bizarre, random) suggestions from our intrepid team. Reclaim this city... today


Novelty Party
The Party Limo
20 Lower Stephen Street, Dublin 2. 475 3313,
www.creativeevents.ie

Groove on the move! This sleek black coach with built-in bar cruises around town, letting you and your pals jump in and out for a rigorous pub-crawl. To avoid the usual group indecisiveness, work out the itinerary with the company beforehand. They’ll pre-book the bars and include club cover-fees in your price while dropping you door-to-door. Expect onboard drinks, a pumping sound system and finger-food for well-needed soakage. Creative Events also does the Cube – same concept, but with live music. Holds 35/40 drunks at any given time for standard packages ranging from €40 per head. They’ll also go ‘down the country.’ Hen party heaven. CH

Meanwhile, in the International Bar...

Not in Edinburgh, and Starting to Feel Out of the Loop?

Some readers may be somewhat put out by The Dubliner's extensive dispatches from this year's Edinburgh Fringe. In our defence, it is the World's Biggest Arts Festival - and much of the Dublin comedy scene has transplanted itself to Scotland for the month. A case in point, the spiritual home of Dublin comedy, The International Bar, is currently bereft of all 3 of it's resident MCs.

However, all is not lost. Verbally dexterous comic James Goldsbury has bravely stayed behind to keep the capital laughing. Goldsbury is staging an Edinburgh style one-man stand-up show - appropriately entitled Holy Shit! I totally forgot the Edinburgh Comedy Festival was on this month! (so I better do this instead). You can see some of his earlier work here.

WHERE: The International Bar, Wicklow Street, Dublin
WHEN: 18th - 22nd August, Time: 7-8pm (Doors 6.45pm)
TICKETS: €5 from +353 1 6779250