Theatre review: Bas***d – A Family History

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Oddie Braddell’s one-man show is certainly endearing, aglow with the actor’s natural warmth and comic presence, yet it struggles with a disjointed structure and a failure to clearly develop its themes.

The cue for this autobiographical piece is the existence in the Braddell family tree of a couple of notorious ‘bastards’. Bloody Braddell was a ruthless officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army, while John Waller Braddell was a detested land agent who evicted more tenants than anybody else during the Famine. Oddie has great fun re-enacting scenes from both men’s lives, rampaging around the floor killing Papists in the guise of Bloody Braddell, or laying in the throes of death as John Waller Braddell. (Hilariously, the latter found time to dictate a written testimony in which he charged his killer with shooting him and leaving him in a “state of dying”.)