Dublin fringe founders Bedrock Theatre return to this year's festival with two short pieces that find them in an appropriately experimental mode.
Known for his visceral stagings of contemporary British and Irish plays, director Jimmy Fay here alternates between admirable directorial restraint, in a staging of Peter Handke's 1966 two-hander Self-Accusation, and sometimes dodgy creative abandon in a devised piece, Pale Angel.
The temptation to dress up Handke's half-hour series of personal confessions and assertions ("I lay on the floor during months with the letter R ... I failed to look away ...") with staging and technology must be enormous, but Fay keeps it beautifully simple. From behind music stands, Amanda Coogan and Alex Johnston half-read, half-perform, letting their well-modulated voices and Handke's remarkably resilient text work on the audience's imagination.
Pale Angel is a series of short scenes of text and movement loosely inspired by the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981. The piece is surreal and fragmented, and seems to be about self-perception and self-representation, but the direction of its gaze is disturbingly unclear. By failing to establish that its fractured imagery issues from a female subjectivity, its persistent focus on the exposed female form and its linking of female creativity and body-hatred start to feel uncomfortably objectifying. It is not apparent what is accomplished by having actor Lisa Lambe read out a marathon list of synonyms for women's genitalia, nor by the presence of a male actor (Ronan Leahy) wearing a Donnie Darko-esque bunny head. The physical production is beautiful and some of the images visually arresting, but the content feels sophomoric.
· Ends Saturday. Box office: 00 353 1 677 8511.
