Dublin nightlife takes to the national stage
WITH the premiere of new electro musical Alice in Funderland, the Abbey Theatre isn’t just taking a stray glance through the looking glass. It’s diving headlong into it.
Written by Phillip McMahon, with music by Ray Scannell, it’s the first musical on the national stage in 20 years, but what distinguishes this production would seem to be its provocative aesthetics. Directed by Wayne Jordan, it conjures an alternative Dublin, a fantasy citadel of the night inhabited by a host of vibrant, transgressive characters, amongst them a hooker attired in red PVC and imperious drag queens (in this case, Delores, the queen of Hartstown).
It’s not the sort of thing that appears on the Abbey stage all that often — or, indeed, ever. The show’s narrative — purloined from CS Lewis, of course — centres on ingénue Alice (Sarah Greene), a Cork girl on a hen night in Dublin who is lost and bewildered in a brave new nocturnal world.
Of course, concocting a striking aesthetic is bread and butter for the company behind the show, This Is Pop Baby. Blending theatre with club culture, the company have earned plaudits for their work at Electric Picnic, where they marshalled a popular tent for three years, as well as for their curating of the LGBT performance festival, Queer Notions. When it comes to producing honest-to-goodness plays, This Is Pop Baby are no slouches either. In 2011, they were behind two of the year’s most successful shows, Neil Watkins’ adroitly-titled The Year of Magical Wanking and Mark O’Halloran’s disarming and gentle one-act piece Trade.
With less than a week to go before Alice in Funderland debuts, the duo behind This Is Pop Baby — writer-director McMahon and his long-time accomplice, producer Jennifer Jennings — sit in the Abbey bar with Cork native Scannell and reflect on the journey of the show’s long development.
It all started in London four years ago with the three of them enjoying “bacon butties” in Scannell’s house in Tooting Broadway, while stooped over an electric piano. McMahon and Jennings had been in the UK to research musicals on the West End, and had arranged to meet Scannell as a potential collaborator.
“I was going to make them a bit of lunch when they got in,” says Scannell, “But they were a bit worried about getting their flights, so Jenny — like a pure producer — just said ‘right’ and took over the kitchen and threw Philly and me down at the piano. Philly had some loose ideas in a diary, so we just tried something on spec and that was pretty much it.”
“Something happened that day,” says McMahon. “We realised that we were all definitely on the same page. It was cool.”
Celebrated in recent years for his one-man show Mimic, the multifaceted Scannell — a writer, actor, and musician — seems a perfect fit for This Is Pop Baby. It was a mutual love of music and clubbing that forged a bond between the three, and which gave direction to the style that the Alice project would take. “Ray talked about dancing in St. Henry’s in Cork as a teenager and we talked about dancing in the Pod in Dublin,” says McMahon. “We were all within the same world.”
“The starting point for the aesthetic was electro and pop really,” says Jennings. “As it went on, we started to take what the more classical musical form had to offer us. So there are quite a few character-led songs in different styles throughout the play. But the underlying aesthetic is very contemporary and very fresh.”
They are hopeful that it will appeal to the youth culture and counter-cultural demographics that have attended This Is Pop Baby’s shows at Electric Picnic and Werk, the nightclub they ran in the Abbey’s basement in 2010.
“We’re saying to people that if we can show you a good time for 48 hours in a field in Laois, we promise you that we can do the same for three hours in a theatre,” says McMahon. “Hopefully, we’ve built up a trust with that audience. They have partied with us. How extensive that audience is, who knows? But I think people know that This Is Pop Baby are going to show you a good time.”
Jennings insists that the show could have a broader appeal. “It won’t only appeal to younger audiences but to your mam and your grandmother as well,” she says. “I’m certainly bringing my mam and my grandmother.”
In melding together theatre and club culture, This Is Pop Baby are in sync with a blurring of traditional boundaries that is more fervently taking place in contemporary Irish theatre.
“Certainly, for us, theatre has always involved the idea of music and clubbing and art — high art and trash art — and drag queens,” says McMahon. “People try to pigeonhole what a theatre company is, but, for us, This Is Pop Baby can always be anything that we want it to be.”
This doesn’t mean that a show like Alice in Funderland is less socially engaged. It’s clear that Jennings, McMahon, and Scannell regard it as a direct and profound dialogue with contemporary Ireland.
“It may sound daft,” says McMahon, “because Alice is a rip-roaring comedy, but there’s also a call for action in it. It’s asking people to key back in to a sense of community.”
How does the show speak to contemporary Ireland? “I think it becomes a collage of moments in Irish life,” says McMahon. “It’s not trying to hit any nail on the head exactly. Alice is this confused person who has a world thrown at her and I think she works as a filter for any young Irish person trying to discover what this Ireland is that’s around her, and what her place in it is.”
All three believe that the time is now ripe for youth culture, as well as Ireland’s more visible counter-culture, to interject in public discourse. “I think recessionary times do naturally give a youth culture an impetus to start something new and to reflect on what’s going on,” says Scannell.
The trio are effusive in their praise of the Abbey for taking a chance on a young company, as they are of the Project Arts Centre and the other agencies who supported them during four years of recurrent workshops and development.
* Alice In Funderland runs from Mar 31 – May 12.
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