Dublin Fringe Festival 2025: Offspring

Chris O'Rourke
Sep 9
3 min read

*Emily Terndrup in Offspring. Image, Patricio Cassinoni*

*****

It’s a fate facing many aging dancers. Being abandoned to the creative wilderness in favour of younger bucks. An experience with a commonplace twist for women. Whose bodies when creating new bodies require at least a year away from their creative practice. Bodies whose biological clock ticks faster as the years rush by. Yet what remains when a dancer is deprived of her dance? When torn between the conflicting demands of artistic and parental responsibility? Ensuring even those who are pure of heart and say their prayers by night might join the legion of the damned? Damned if they do and damned if they don’t? In Emily Terndrup’s searingly brilliant Offspring, one dancer’s internal conflict with the competing needs of, and for, her mind, body and soul finds her plumbing darkness to find creative light. Trapped betwixt love of self and love for offspring, Offspring serves up a dance theatre experience that's supernaturally brilliant. Questioning one of the fundamental, painfully relevant conflicts at the heart of our humanity.

Subtitled A Modern Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein serves as a jumping off point. Yet Offspring is less a play about how monsters are made as about mothering. Mothering shows. Children. Dreams. Nightmares. Mothering monsters and monsters as mothers. Yet do monsters really exist? And if they do, how do we live with them? Terndrup’s meta-theatrical frames serving up a delightful conceit. Part Torch Song Trilogy confessional address, part ready-made one person monologue, Offspring is less a play so much as a pitch for a play. A beautifully insane, hilariously brilliant pitch addressed to the audience as notes to self for a staged retelling of Frankenstein. Terndrup having everything she needs. Almost. Just a few odds and ends required. Like a boat, bolts of lightning, and a finished script. Her nine year-old inner child, inspired by Jennifer Beals' Flashdance, ensuring playfulness runs rampant despite heavy themes. Terndrup never labouring her points for they being brilliantly made. Echoing Milton’s Paradise Lost:

“conscience wakes despair….wondering where and what I was.”

In Offspring, everything is touched by genius. The stage, with its evocative props, resembling a rehearsal room, i.e. a laboratory where creative possibilities are infused with life. A mound of soil from which life emerges, a mixing desk and lamp, lights that craft shadows; all simply and brilliantly conveyed. Matt Burke's powerfully understated light design, along with Michael John McCarthy's superb compositions and sound design complementing a deeply engaging performance by Terndrup. Coupled with muscular dance sequences choreographed by Terndrup in collaboration with Luke Murphy and Ryan O’Neill. From short, snapping sequences to a rag doll, loose limbed duet with Murphy, from vigorous articulations to a Flashdance celebration, movements are superbly executed. Yet despite a host of collaborative talents, it’s all Terndrup. Even her duets are solos. Dealing with flesh of her flesh, or her words made flesh that dwell amongst us, Terndrup bravely explores shadows at the heart of our conflicted humanity.

Vocation and parenting. Can you truly serve two masters? In Offspring, Terndrup serves legions. Or rather, they serve her. Offspring’s harmony of disciplinary opposites shaping a possible reprieve for the female dancer. In dance theatre, it's not enough to dance, you have to write, direct, act, MC, add your own. Terndrup, dazzling in her range, reveals subtle and overt comic touches, embodies detailed presence, displays passages of exquisite writing delivered with pitch perfect timing. Luring you to where monsters howl, attack, wound, cry out, or make you laugh out loud. Causing you to recoil at the recognition, for all monsters are mirrors of ourselves. Until words find their end, and end in the way they should. Ceding to music that illuminates. To shadows that sing. To Terndrup, body writhing in silent vulnerability, bearing her soul to reveal ours to ourselves. Heartfelt, haunting, hilarious Offspring allows the audience complete the journey. A journey as much theirs as it is Terndrup’s. A rare and genuine treat. There will be many great artists and shows in Dublin Fringe Festival 2025. There will be few as theatrically innovative, humanly vulnerable, simply complex and hilariously affecting as Offspring. If Offspring is not in the running for every conceivable award, there is no justice under heaven. Not to be missed.