Jellyfish

Project Cube

***

Given shows about alienated, self-anaesthetising youth are about as rare in the Fringe Festival as musicals are on Broadway, writer and performer Alice Malseed hardly breaks new ground with her one-person piece about a disaffected young woman adrift in a world of recreational drugs and zero-hour contracts. On a bare stage, Malseed's character chronicles her journey from aimless adolescence in a prosperous but dull Northern Irish commuter town and seeking solace in club life to sinking into quiet desperation in London. Her story is narrated through a series of vignettes, more a short-story collection than a structured narrative. Under Sarah Baxter's direction, Malseed delivers her monologue in deliberately mannered fashion, almost chant-like at times, although sometimes very funny too. That her story is familiar is perhaps the point of the drama, as she intersects with similarly lost characters in Dublin, London and, above all, Belfast, which is painted in vividly hedonistic fashion, free of the usual sectarian tropes. Maybe we've heard it all before, but rarely in this accent.

Until September 11th