Running with the rough crowd
MIDWAY through the Dublin Theatre Festival, and there has been much to relish. The highlight is The Boys of Foley Street, the third chapter in director Louise Lowe’s social history of the Monto, an infamous sector of inner-city Dublin. Improving on last year’s Laundry, The Boys of Foley Street never lets up. Whisked through a world of violence, drug abuse and prostitution, you witness the marginalisation of a community. Not that you have time to think about it. There’s only time to feel. And the things you feel are fear and horror. There’s some warmth, too, thankfully. But there’s also shame.
Shame is an important element of The Boys of Foley Street, and it’s handled much better than it was in Laundry, where the audience was given the trite task of learning off the names of girls from the Magdalene Laundry. In The Boys of Foley Street, you feel ashamed for looking. You are shoved into a small bathroom and told to look through a peephole. But you are soon indicted for your voyeurism. By the end of the show, you realise that you have not been a privileged spectator at all but that you, too, have been at the centre of a network of ‘looks’.
