Theatre review: William Blake, Sam Amidon and Brennan's bread in the mix for Nobodaddy
Rachel Poirier in Nobodaddy, at Dublin Theatre Festival. Picture: Emilija Jefremova
★★★★☆
There are so many allusions and literary references in Michael Keegan-Dolan’s new collaborative creation with his Kerry-based Teac Damsa company that it’s quite striking to reflect that the overall effect is not very literal at all. Instead, it's suggestive and expansive – paradoxically both loose and embracing.
We can pick up strands easily enough of course, but putting them all together seems beyond this production at times. But maybe that is the point. For instance, why the dancers wear classic showband suits becomes clear only with a shouted recitation of Paul Durcan’s 1995 poem In Memory: The Miami Showband, Massacred 31 July 1975. There’s a mantra-like whine in that, which stings all too easily nowadays. “You must take one side or the other, Or you’re but a fucking romantic.”
And here’s another thread: the big-R Romantics, the poets, or rather one of them. For the work is named for William Blake’s creation, the Nobodaddy, his “father of jealousy”, lover of “war and slaughtering”. If Nobodaddy for Blake was like the “angel of the bottomless pit”, the subtitle here tells us a lot: Keegan-Dolan is taking us through the bottomless pit - “Tríd an bPoll gan Bun.”
Towards what then? Towards life, and a celebration of it. Towards a response to isolation, to death, to suffering, all transmitted through music and movement. If at times it feels equal precisely to the sum of its parts, there is more than enough to astonish and move in the successive vignettes, played out by nine dancers and six musicians.
We begin with an antithesis to Keegan-Dolan’s vision. A possible fallen angel (the ever electric Rachel Poirier) lies prone on some hospital chairs. She must be waiting for a bed. If only she’d had a better insurance policy.
But we are not stuck in modern death-by-bureaucracy for long. Soon it’s another way of death entirely, as a famine sermon rings out, “God is angry with this land. The potatoes would not have rotted unless He sent the rot into them.”
This signals the earthy and kitsch Irish imagery that so often marks Keegan-Dolan’s work. Spit, spilt milk, Brennan’s bread, jam. A body smeared with butter.
Yet, through the central figure of American musician Sam Amidon we feel the tug of the wider world. Again and again, his lilting voice takes us across the Atlantic, heading out west, with the immigrants’ songs of loneliness and fragile hope. The music mixes folk and baroque, rock and techno, with movable crates and platforms creating scenarios for a choreography that’s finely detailed, or wildly gesturing.
A particularly soaring moment comes when the musical worlds seem to coalesce, all the dancers joined together in a line before us. It’s here that Nobodaddy finds its own eloquence, its own way to communicate Keegan-Dolan’s vision. He is, as he puts it, “for people coming together … for music and for singing … for dancing.” Hear, hear.
- Until October 5
