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.
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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 Fringe Festival, until Friday, September 13th
