Everything Can Be Dismantled review: Freewheeling contemporary theatre in search of a rulebook

Discotheque Collective's interactive play involves an audience conversation about the housing crisis. 

The Lir Academy (Studio 2), Dublin Fringe Festival

Sep 12-16

My review of Everything Can Be Dismantled by Discotheque Collective coming up just as soon as I hand you a lamp ...

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,” wrote Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities. The Discotheque Collective seems to take that as instruction for their new work - an interactive play about the housing crisis that flows with the ever-changing logic of a fantasy.

When one performer (Ingrid Beatriz) invites audience members to stand close together in cardboard boxes, she does so with the reassurance of a slumlord. (“The people here are so nice”). Elsewhere, Donnacha Mac Cóil makes a ball game out of a property owner accepting the highest bidder. Such moments are particularly mordant against Sebastian Adams’s jittery violin, and the details of Stefania Elettra Pantavos’s set, where everyone emerges from a tent.

Director Joan Somers Donnelly’s production is clearly inspired by the inventive devices of postdramatic theatre, but even an episodic work requires a careful hand to usher each passage in and out. Often, segments seem to drift purposelessly, like a piece of freewheeling contemporary theatre in search of a rulebook.

Though its approach to audience interaction is broad, it inevitably succeeds in bringing us together to collaborate: we reconstruct the set and have a conversation under the tarp. If you’re lucky, someone will say something smart.