Dublin Fringe Festival 2025: Amsterdam

Alison Kinlan and David Rawle in Amsterdam. Image by Rose Sidiropoulou

***

They say love is blind. In David Rawle's frequently funny Amsterdam it's also deaf, dumb and stupid. Misunderstandings, misread signals and missed opportunities piling high as the friend zone becomes the love zone. A tale of two friends meeting in Amsterdam you don't buy for a second. Claims they suddenly 'catch feelings’ sounding hollow when they were clearly packed with the sun cream before they left. Over crucial visits to The Van Gogh museum, non coffee coffee shops, karaoke with a lusty American and the charms of the red light district all the usual Amsterdam tropes make an appearance. Ensuring a highly entertaining, 80s style romcom. Even if it contains a central relationship you struggle to buy into. A nameless Herself who's a vibrant, young woman, and a little boy lost Himself, running around in short trousers searching for a Mammy to love him.

Feeling like a revamp of Friends for Gen Z, Amsterdam delivers less a play so much as a straight to Netflix pilot. It even has the boppy, bubbly soundtrack. Along with an insecure him who makes Ross Geller look like an alpha male. Performed by Rawle and Alison Kinlan, rarely have a couple looked more mismatched. A former singer navigating the real world she’s smart, funny, talented, a little beaten down and with questionable taste in men. He’s a charmless, gormless, frequently vindictive emotional coward showing the mental maturity of a petulant seven year-old. A self absorbed cheapskate two rejections away from being an Incel who endlessly disparages her. Why they’re friends and remained so, and why she’s attracted to him is hard to know. The lack of a developed backstory leaving too many blanks and making too many asks. Instead, what should look like a relationship of equals charged with sexual tension looks like a horny straight woman hitting on her gay best friend, or a cougar pursuing a virginal high schooler. Indeed, in their “will they, won't they get it on” tango you really hope they won't. Partially because she deserves far better, but mostly because you'd be obliged to ring child services to report her just to be on the safe side. Punching above his emotional and sexual weight, he shouldn't even be in the ring. The only reason you accept him is because you want to believe her. Till you decide she definitely needs therapy. Or at least a self-help book on positive self esteem.

Racing through love’s not so great adventure director Eftychia Spyridaki trades pace for speed, making Amsterdam look like it wants to be over. Compounded by Spyridaki never getting to grips with Amsterdam being written for camera and not for the stage. Its flash past scenes built around a simple acting exercise in which one moment we hear text and the next we hear its subtextual contradiction. Used here as a comic device leaned into far too heavily. As missed moments and misunderstandings mount relief arrives via charming scenes like the karaoke session or the tender finale. Rawle delivering enough polaroid moments to show serious promise as a writer. Then there’s Kinlan, whose gutsy yet sensitive portrayal reveals genuine talent, musical as well as theatrical. So good she almost convinces you there must be something to Him worth the effort. But it doesn’t stop you praying she’ll dodge the bullet and get as far away as possible then loose his number. Bittersweet, maybe, but that would be her best chance at happily ever after.

Amsterdam, by David Rawle, presented by Made Up Productions, co-presented by Glass Mask Theatre and Dublin Fringe Festival, runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2025 at Glass Mask Theatre until September 18.

For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival 2025