Inis Theatre has transformed its hour-long Dublin fringe festival hit into a very entertaining full-evening touring production. At the suburban performance I attended, they had certainly found an ideal target audience: groups of thirtysomething women there to giggle and heckle as actors Iseult Golden and Carmel Stephens showed us the dirty underbelly of the world of speed-dating.
They arrive on stage as dating company organisers Siobhan and Seamus, directly addressing the audience and getting us ready for our speeddating sessions. Then the action becomes a series of quick-change transformations as they embody some two dozen love-seekers. They act out, not just their threeminute primary encounters, but interplay in the bar, the toilets, and behind the scenes, as Siobhan and Seamus patrol the action and engage in some strained flirtation of their own.
It is a testament to Golden and Stephens' physical and emotional precision that the characters become instantly familiar, and part of the fun of the evening is the mounting complexity of the action - three different dating encounters woven together; four men bragging about their conquests in the space of a one-minute vignette. The smart writing also cuts directly to the humanity of each scene: the defensive single dad who lays his situation on the line way too quickly, and the savvy chick who gives him a lesson in manners (and ends up taking him home); the knivesout interplay between a loathsome coquette and her much nicer friend; and, most touchingly, the pair who bond by baring scars from past relationships but then don't hook up because he realises he's still not over his ex.
The production even successfully touches on social issues like race (the toilet attendants are black) and class (a bitterly funny standoff between a southside snob and a working-class girl), and there's a teasingly queer subtext: we are never allowed to forget that these heterosexual encounters are being played out by two women.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 353 1 855 2622. Then touring.
