Television
Cube, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Research shows that television-viewing habits can shape people’s thinking: you are what you watch. In their ingenious cabaret show Television, the musician SexyTadhg similarly meditates on concerns about authentic selves while the outside world beams into people’s minds, allowing a campy person in a southeastern town to adopt American queer slang. “No one in Carlow says ‘Work bitch,” SexyTadhg clarifies.
First seen sitting at a keyboard, playing slinky notes sounding like supper-club cabaret, SexyTadhg suddenly erupts into spikes of rock’n’roll, in a blistering song about the Government trying to send misleading messages to the public. The set list moves through numbers themed around television programmes, from re-creations of the Angelus to a TG4-style traditional-music show, resembling a surreal kind of channel-surf.
In performance, SexyTadhg and their band are similarly changeable, exchanging the stately rock of Electrify Me, a ballad likening a connection with someone to a closed circuit, for the twangy grooves of Space Love, a science-fiction romance.
There is lament for the way things are – a musical interpretation of an RTÉ News broadcast becomes a grim depiction of people living fearfully with their parents during the housing crisis – but an uplifting finale imagines everyone given freedom to live their lives.
There is something about the persona, how it’s virtuosic but grounded, heartfelt but not wrapped up in empty bumper-sticker wisdom. “You better march in my parade,” SexyTadhg sings, powerfully. It’s difficult to not want to get in on this: the revolution that hasn’t been televised.
Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Friday, September 13th
