To get to Roxanne’s Bar off Little Bourke Street you enter from an alleyway side door and climb three floors up a rickety wooden staircase.

It’s the stuff that urban adventures are made of and serves as the perfect entree for Sample Theatre’s anarchic production, The Inferno.

A loose interpretation of Dante’s epic poem, the story is set in a modern casino peppered with various grotesque characters.

There’s an agro Minotaur, a misogynist game show host, a dirty drug pig and a menacing Mommy Long Legs spider. Children’s TV characters, B1 and B2 also make an appearance as lecherous adults and the bizarre circus act is held together by four musicians each with their own hellish identity. To apply the lingo; this is weird ass shit.

Equal parts bawdy burlesque, angry rap and student intelligentsia, Sample Theatre defies categories. But amidst the foul language and some truly over the top playing they’re immensely entertaining. Tobias Manderson-Galbin and his crazy troupe ought to be locked up. But that would stop them creating wonderfully bizarre theatre.

The Inferno
Written and performed by Tobias Manderson-Galbin
Cast: Ashley Michael Nish, Conor Davey Gallacher, Kerith Manderson-Galbin, Brigid Gallacher, Julian Cue, Don Carlos, Annie Pfeiffer, Erin Kelly and Tom Boig.

Season finished

By DAREN POPE