One of the stand out shows at last year's Dublin Fringe Festival was Dylan Coburn Gray's verse play, Boys and Girls. At it's simplest, it's the story of four young twentysomethings trying to get laid on a night in Dublin. But its intelligence, narrative scope, soulful acknowledgment of interior lives and up-to-the-minute poetry suggest a romantic spirit in an age of LOLs and hashtags.
Now the show is back for a second run, this time at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, until Saturday. Here's the full five-star review from this paper's theatre critic Peter Crawley, and a video of the cast in rehearsals.
Boys and Girls
Dublin Fringe Festival
*****
To the hand-wringers who see the slow death of culture in each new generation grinding art into mulch or, worse still, letting their powers of creation begin to sag under cheap communications of LOLS and hashtags (never mind the “frapes”), this stunning Dublin hymn makes it seem like sour grapes. If you want brave new writing, here is your salvation.
With sensational flow, four young speakers deliver Dylan Coburn Gray's verse to us, a conceit we should know from Mark O'Rowe's Terminus. But here there's no mythic adventure, no need to go beyond the genuine texture of a generation's concerns, which – let's face it – are pretty standard-grade: booze, drugs and trying to get laid. The difference is in how they express it; frankly, internally, with every word in the dictionary, the voice of the moment turned into pure poetry. The title screams Blur, but Kerouac knew the mess (Boys and Girls have "such a sad time together") from the chase to the catch to post-coital tristesse.
Without getting prim, though, Gray honours virtue: his wit is quite lacerating, but the truth shouldn’t hurt you, and he dares to be romantic in a time full of cynics. Maybe it’s not theatrical, but the rhyme’s not a gimmick, and however simple the shape of his stage is, that talent, like this subject, belongs to the ages.
