Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: Miss You
Miss You by Chaos Factory. Image uncredited
*****
You could be forgiven a sudden shudder of dread. Chaos Factory's multi-faceted Miss You serving up another female trauma play based on a Greek myth. Like reviewing or writing using AI, the result is often a highly polished and convincing sham passing itself off as original work. Thankfully the multidisciplinary Chaos Factory are the real deal. Harnessing myth whilst actively puncturing artistic pretensions with real world kicks in the teeth. The myth in question that of Demeter whose daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades and dragged to the underworld with the permission of her father Zeus. Myth informing a simple conceit of three friends and the mother of a missing fourth gathering to make a commemorative film on the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. Asking how do you go on when you can't go on? How do you commemorate what's too painful to remember? Why must women internalise blame for what was never their fault? The answers might not be easy, or even forthcoming, but the result is some top drawer, high voltage theatre dedicated to women who go missing and are never found.
Early signs are less than auspicious with the process of film making resembling a low budget, student assignment gone wrong. "Let's move on", the mantra for all three women (Fionnuala Gygax, Venetia Bowe, and Maria Oxley Boardman) stuck in a moment they can't get out of. Ten years on from the party where their friend disappeared, her body never found, relationships have soured and prickled. Laura Sheeran's superlative direction conveying the tetchy distance of nostalgic familiarity refashioned to razored resentment. They might be successful film makers, yoga teachers or mothers today, but the wound of that night still shapes and divides them. The arrival of the missing girl's mother (Úna Kavanagh) sees tensions turn volatile, erupting as self-tortured confessions. Sheeran's directorial excellence and Emily Kilkenny Roddy's sublime final movement sequence resolving distance in a tumbling image of palpable beauty. Crowned with a collective seeding of the faintest of hope in the face of the utterly hopeless.
A memory play where nothing much happens, what makes Miss You so brilliant is the depth and power of its telling. Across the board it elevates sounds, sights, words and images both onstage and onscreen. Sabine Dargent's endlessly shifting set and costumes, Dara Hoban's lights running from rave ready to otherworldly, and Jenny O'Malley's evocative sound design less commentary so much as integral parts of the experience. Like Ovid, the focus is on transformation, with the shift from real to imagined, memory to present, the living dead and the dead still living beautifully conveyed. Highlighting the ineffectiveness of art to give voice to the unspeakable as it struggles to capture what cannot be said. Masks, veils and strewn sponge cake often more successful at showing trauma housed in the body and not just the mind. Mummified corpses, posing bodies, enfeebled smiles hitting with the force of house tracks when the beat drops, or the silence of an unanswered call in the dark when a presence is felt.
If Gygax, Bowe and Oxley Boardman magnificently articulate a pained survival, it is Kavanagh who infuses Miss You’s emotional tones. That secret ingredient that elevates a dish to perfection, Kavanagh marries understatement with intensity establishing the backdrop against which all four women labour. A world in which desolation can become commemoration, defeat turned to a kind triumph, resistance never futile even if only as a forceful howl of defiance. Miss You a drop kick to the soul talking to a terror every woman fears and most men never worry about. Stunning. Powerful. Not to be missed.
Miss You by Chaos Factory, runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2026 at Project Arts Centre till Sept 10–12.
For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival 2026
