Reviewed: The Irish Curseat Project Cube, Dublin and Brightblack Morning Lightat Crawdaddy, Dublin.
The Irish Curse
Project Cube, Dublin
In Martin Casella's bewilderingly tedious play, currently running in the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival for reasons that aren't easy to fathom, The Irish Curse needs a proper definition.
It does not allude to the jocularly racist excuse sometimes employed by the temporarily drunk and impotent - a phenomenon also charmingly known as "whiskey dick". Rather, it refers to a locker-room racial slur: some imagined genetic mutation, inherited by Irish Americans direct from the auld sod. This curse has bestowed the characters of this insufferable would-be comedy with mini members.
That's it. That's the joke. And this shrivelled little conceit is passed back and forth between five characters in a clandestine Catholic church support group for the meagrely endowed, where all comic, pathetic or neurotic potential is mercilessly exhausted. Size matters, Casella insists at every possible opportunity, but although his play is excessively long, he doesn't have a clue what to do with it.
This is why we must endure each group member decanting his personal neurosis in slow succession, in that cutesy-coarse vernacular that Casella mistakes for comedy - the height of hilarity being genitalia/foodstuff comparisons.
Here is athletic youngster Rick (baby corn), gay cop Stephen (cocktail weiner) Southern lawyer Joseph (bottle cap), group leader Fr Shaughnessy (Bee dick) and newcomer Kieran (the Shetland Pony of the team) who prolongs this whole sorry crisis-in-masculinity farrago with endless questions. "Anything else, Kieran?" someone will ask, just when the play feels tantalisingly close to an end. There's always something else.
Given a bare-stage, amateurish production by the British theatre and PR company Cahoots (mysteriously crediting itself as "based on the original direction by Stephen Henry") why, oh why, has this play been included in the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival? The company doesn't claim to be gay; the theme is not exclusively gay; the play featured just one gay character; the lighting didn't seem particularly gay. Could it be that "gay theatre" is such a limiting little ghetto it is enough that a play be phallocentric? "The Irish curse isn't having a small dick," notes Rick with limp sagacity, "it's letting that define your life." Wise words, Rick, but what kind of a curse would it be to let it define your play, or, for that matter, your festival?
Runs until Sat. Peter Crawley.
Brightblack Morning Light
Crawdaddy, Dublin
Brightblack Morning Light (BML) are a collection of musicians from Alabama and California. However, if you're expecting rough and dirty delta blues blended with the more polished tang of west-coast pop, you are in the wrong camping site.
This is what could very loosely be described as free-form blues. Rachel "Rabob" Hughes on the keyboard thrums out some honeycombed tunes on a gorgeous sounding Rhodes. Backed by percussion and vocals, guitarist Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater plays the sparsest of chords, sketching out only the outlines, and letting effects and technology do the rest.
All three vocalists have their voices running through a delay pedal, which makes everything echo and shimmer indistinctly, drawing the music and the vocals languidly into and out of time. Even for the inter-song banter, Shineywater keeps the delay on, so we're not really much the wiser about what he was trying to tell us, though we did catch the words "first Irish tour", "New Mexico" and "marijuana". Oh yes. A lot of marijuana.
BML recorded their last album while sleeping in tents. We're assuming the studio had a bit more in the way of electrical appliances though, as every track is layered and syncopated with delayed samples and loops, feeding and slipping over each other, clambering delicately to the audience, on this the Many Nations Peaceful Crystal Totem Turr. At first it's refreshing and oh-so different - exploring levels of "far out, man", plumbed by the Doors and perhaps even the Rolling Stones when they were feeling especially, ahem, reflective.
The kaleidoscopic sunburst visuals, however, take the mood into the realm of parody, and after two tracks the sound starts to meld and shift, like a lazy lava lamp, before the gossamer-flimsiness of the songs is unravelled. Occasionally a song builds, the percussionist injects the mildest bit of urgency and just maybe a riff or a hook threatens to break out - but no, before things get too heavy, the band collapse the song back on itself and it wanders off into the sky, for all the world like a balloon set free from the oppressive tyranny of a child's grip. There are no edges to these tracks, and, in no small part thanks to the heavy reliance on loops and blips, little spontaneity. As calming as listening to whale song, then, and just as infuriating.
Brightblack Morning Light play the Róisín Dubh, Galway tonight. Laurence Mackin
