Underneath

If there's a trophy for deceptive openers, beloved Irish actor Pat Kinevane has it: and it's probably made of gold lame. He begins his self-penned solo performance by wrapping himself in swathes of the fabric, his black-painted face in a grimace of red-lit horror. But his agonies are short-lived. He leaps up, tells us that, "You never know what's round the corner, do ya?", and embarks on a truly bizarre 90 minutes of storytelling, reminiscences and dance.

The sepulchral opening pose is designed to mark the death of his subject, an awkward, stammering and lonely woman from Cork. He's theoretically telling her life story, but prances from digression to digression like a grave-robbing magpie. There's musings on the gold of ancient Egypt, hymn singing, mother-in-law jokes and most inexplicably of all a long series of impressions of people on A Place in the Sun.

Kinevane is an engaging presence, energetic and chatty. But his material feels so spontaneous it's hard to shake the feeling he's come up with it on the spot. Kinevane's two previous solo shows for Fringe First-winners Fishamble have focused on marginalised voices, and he's fascinated by the insults that his disabled subject gets, imagining elaborate torments for her. But her own story is thin and implausible, her essence lost on his rambles through Cork's streets.

There's much to charm in Kinevane's performance, but sometimes his quirky brand of grave humour feels like it's all holes and no plot.

http://www.dancebase.co.uk/festival-15/underneath-378