The Cappuccino Culture - this was a fun show. On entering the Boys School in Smock Alley each audience member is handed a tourist map of Dublin with a colour (your team), a number, and a phrase, place or name written on it.
The performance began with each performer welcoming the audience in their own language and I was reminded of the Eurovision results process when everything is repeated several times in quick succession in different languages. Except in Eurovision it is usually just English and French - here we had 14 performers! Next the performers introduce themselves or each other through short little snippets of information in a very lovely and interesting way about what ‘groups’ they belong to - the 80% of people who are afraid of rats, for example or the 0.1% of the population who dislike chocolate.
And with that we were off into the game show type experience with the performers divided into two teams vying to win locations on the map of Dublin. Questions were posed and challenges made and the audience participation was great. There were passion matches, taboo rounds, human sacrifice, musical chairs and a wall of fame interspersed with short personal performances from some of the performers. The only audience participation required was to shout out answers while the performers did all of the work.
This was quite an original and fun show. With so many participants each with their own story as well as the collective group experience, every single performance is going to be different. Unfortunately there were some technical hitches with video footage which took away from the middle bit of the show somewhat but overall this performance firmly put a smile on my face 
This is what the festival website had to say about it:
Let’s see what happens when you get Irish, Spanish, Korean, Italian, German, Portuguese, Polish, Iranian, and French people together. They talk about the weather. And they play pub games. This is Dublin’s fair city – currently the 25th most expensive city in the world, and where seventeen percent of the population have peculiar accents. This is a multilingual piece of theatre where no one performance is the same; a show that explores contemporary Dublin as a cosmopolitan city where different cultures coexist. Be our guest. Have a drink, a bite to eat, and get ready to play a fun game where Dublin is our board and we are all the players.
Tickets for The Cappuccino Culture cost €13.00 and can be purchased on the ABSOLUT fringe website or at the door in Smock Alley Theatre. It will run every night at 8.45pm until Saturday 25th September.
