Project Cube, Dublin:Even the welcoming announcements at this mini-festival of new work had been culture jammed, subverted, served with a twist. "How yis?" asked an archly informal voice. "Ah, that's good to hear." Over five days, this announced 10 brisk productions from emerging artists curated by THEATREclub, an infuriatingly young company with only slightly less energy than the national power grid.
If the title suggested a collective mainly concerned with icy postures and audience titillation, the more striking trend among the featured work was an effort to put some shape on our cultural chatter and political fallout, raising their voices over the din, as though trying to start a debate in a nightclub.
The material for Karl Watson's Bang Shoot Blastmay have been the emotional shrapnel of young relationships, but Liana O'Cleirigh's staging evinced a generation in the grip of performance. Whether re-enacting scenes from Casablanca, Titanicand Juno– partly as parody, partly as revered canon – or fishing staggeringly unintimidated audience members from their seats, the performers turned both love and theatre into an interactive game.
Devised and performed by Christopher Samuel Carroll and Roseanne Lynch, In Touchbegan as a satire on corporate culture, but similarly gravitated towards a faltering relationship. Muting the social context of their disconnection, the performers also allowed their richer physicality to ebb away under the predictable pull of pathos.
A better union of text and performance came courtesy of Asylum Speakers, Christine Bacon's docudrama on refugees in Ireland, saved from the brink of worthiness by Tara Robinson's enlivening direction. Here, a striptease may signal the invasiveness of asylum screening, a distressing testimony can be counterpointed with arresting dance, and familiar words sound newly minted by disarming methods.
James Hickson's appropriately playful riff on pop-art, Andy Warhol's Nothing Special, again took a romantic relationship for its narrative focus, but broadened its scope to present the packaging of experience in art and gnomic utterances – even if director Maeve Stone's engagingly droll methods finally succumbed to similar Warholian sententiousness.
The most invigorating show of the festival, though, was also its most ungovernable: THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What The Fuck Are You Gonna Do About It?A blissful tussle between structure and chaos (structure lost), formlessness may have been the point of Doireann Coady and Grace Dyas's ferocious show. Thick with irony and surprises, it depicted youth culture as a jumble of hand-me-downs, shape and meaning as elusive fallacies and a nation in a similar state of collapse.
Few moments this year have been more enthralling than Brian Bennet's verbatim recital of Pat Kenny's Frontlineheckler, the rant delivered more serenely than a church sermon, and its juxtaposition against artful dance routines, fractured narratives and Breakfast Clublip-syncing pointed at their bizarre inheritance from an angry, waning, confused country.
It may have seemed cynical beyond the years of its participants, but more encouragingly Theatre Machineappeared neither despondent nor daunted.
There’s plenty left to say about life and love, it recognised, and countless ways to say it. The well-worn culture these artists encounter is a mess of shards and detritus – no more reliable than a blinking clock radio – but that doesn’t mean they can’t turn it on, tune in, and put it back together again.
