AnimalsAbbey Theatre★★★☆☆
“Please welcome to the stage myself.” So begins this adaptation of seven short stories by Blindboyboatclub, performed at the Abbey as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. We immediately recognise the plastic-bag mask and Limerick accent. But is it the author and podcaster himself?
A winning coup de theatre soon suggests we are being had. And following an erudite excursion through the biological theories of Jakob von Uexküll, the bag-clad performer frames Animals’ playful opening in terms of Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect.
Puncturing the illusion of theatre can serve to make us think critically about the social world depicted on stage. But whereas the German playwright sought to stir the audience’s revolutionary consciousness, Blindboy’s more modest aim is to prompt reflection about the burdens and creative charms of neurodivergence.
That central theme is most vividly captured in the recurring sight of Pat Shortt carrying a fridge-freezer on his back while imparting a stream of historical and scientific trivia. Having won RTÉ’s Blackboard Jungle quizshow as an adolescent, this astronomy enthusiast’s flair for facts brought him academic and worldly success. Yet now he finds himself ruined by some mysterious skulduggery inflicted by “Dublin elitist c**ts” (which becomes a splenetic mantra).
Another blast of oddball energy comes from Liz FitzGibbon as a beehive-haired Limerick solicitor whose chaotic office belies her ferocious, if somewhat misdirected, sense of moxie. Her attempts to help Manus Halligan’s equally loopy dog trainer, accused of pepping up greyhounds with tea, build to a splendidly farcical ruckus at the dog track. The paint-spattered costumes (designed by Saileóg O’Halloran) and live video projection here contribute to a woozy, carnival-like ambience.
The focus then shifts to Pamela’s chipper yet diffident taxi driver (played by Emer Dineen), who is struggling to find his place in the manosphere. Swipes at portentous, never-ending podcasts and homosocial preening in the gym may be a little predictable but still deliver some solid laughs.
After the interval the tone is transformed as a poitín maker (Halligan) recounts a supernaturally charged encounter with a cormorant that seems to threaten his child. Delivered as a pathos-laden monologue inside a hospital waiting room, it’s an intricately crafted tale that gets a bit lost on stage.
Animals then swings back towards boisterous comedy without any appreciable transition. An egotistical director (Dineen) and her cast assemble for the first reading of a play about a lurid, fantastical encounter between Éamon de Valera (Karl Quinn) and Michael Collins (John Doran). The scatological humour quickly becomes gratuitous and lacks any real provocative edge, as the characters themselves eventually point out. (A similar idea received vastly more sophisticated comic treatment in The Orphan and the Mob, a short story by Julian Gough centred on “Dev’s Hole”.)
After an accomplished and thoughtful first hour and a half, it is dispiriting that Dan Colley’s adaptation (which he also directs) ends up suffering from such a loss of focus and coherence. At three hours in total (including the interval), Blindboy’s full-scale theatrical debut is a loose (plastic) baggy monster.
Animals is at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, November 7th