Theatre review: Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Eric Blau and Mort Schuman’s revue of the songs of Jacques Brel may have its roots in 1960s New York, but Alyson Cummins’ set leaves one in no doubt that we are channeling pure Gallic nostalgia in Alan Stanford’s renewal. A couple of cafe tables and bentwood chairs, complete with bottles of wine and Absinth, are placed in a crumbling theatre, a gaping hole in the roof above the sagging red velvet curtain.

We open with the bouncy ‘Brussels’ — “put on your spats and your high-button shoes”. It kindles images of cabaret, war, and defiant human spirit; of Europe, then, in the first half of the last century. These are motifs we return to repeatedly, with the scorned lovers of ‘Madeleine’, the Flanders dead of ‘Marieke’, the bitter mocking of ‘The Middle Class’.