Beat.
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Beat. feels like an anthem for this generation. As one of the most important and exciting new voices in this year’s Fringe Festival, the run was sold-out before it had even begun. Including The Lir graduates Fionntán Larney and Martha Breen, Beat. is a new rap musical depicting two friends (Larney and Harry Higgins) trying to navigate contemporary Dublin as men in their early twenties. The 75-minute show is an emotional rollercoaster of drugs, booze, college, breakups, and more drugs, with Tesco Lager cans being handed out for the audience to, em, enjoy.
Larney’s script is extraordinarily impressive, and no doubt cements himself as a name to watch on the national theatre scene. Despite the party atmosphere initially evoked, the play deals with several emotive topics, including feminism, toxic masculinity, substance abuse, and self-harm. Alongside the often crude language, the lyrics and characters challenge the listeners to confront the vitriol of toxic masculinity, and the damage of internalising emotion. Composed by Larney, Isaac Jones and Morgan Beausang, the rap soundtrack and lyricism is compelling, dramatic, and notably differentiated. Breen, who shifts between several characters including a call-centre job interviewer, an ex-girlfriend, and an innocent woman cruelly slut-shamed, has a hauntingly powerful voice to diversify the listening experience.
One of the production’s great strengths is in its portrayal of heartbreak. The rap turns to powerful melodic vocals between Larney and Breen, capturing the breathless intensity of a love that just won’t work. The staging and lighting were simple and effective, with three stick lights helping to ride the wave of different highs, and lows, capturing the few stabilising moments in an earth-shattering night.
Overall, Beat. announces a new type of musical theatre. There is an admirable integrity to this performance; it feels like Larney needed to write this story. With an ending that sought a standing-ovation and warrants the sold out run, one left the theatre with a heart heavy for Dublin, for our friends, and for the gender barriers we must break.
Beat. runs at Smock Alley Theatre as part of Dublin Fringe Festival until 15 September.
Free EU Roaming
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Portraying today’s modernity through art can be challenging, and even more so when Europe is your scope. Theatre group Rule of Three Collective, three women who met whilst studying in Spain, are ‘driven by a need to reclaim and reshape our collective history’, and from this comes their 2018 Fringe offering, Free EU Roaming. The premise of the play is this: three bumbag-wearing holiday-makers, an Irish woman, an English woman and a German woman, are stuck in a hostel in Barcelona while the streets rage due to a ban on a referendum for Catalan independence by Madrid. The play focuses on understanding and examining stereotypes of the three nationalities; countries in which their turbulent past relationships arrive at breaking point.
While the show begins as a light-hearted, Daft Punk-scored, fun night out, the depth of conversation between the three young women soon turns reflective and poignant. Few political and historical moments go unmentioned, with Sinéad Brady as a passive ‘remain’ voter from Coventry, to German Caroline Galvis as an Antifa-member ‘post-nationalist digitalist localist activist’. Katie O’Byrne shines as a D4 airhead stock character, whose initial trite hilarity develops into a moving representation of Irish nationalism and pride.
Between their hostel-based conversation, the characters flip into analepsis, usually relating to their family’s national identity. World War II air raids of Germany, Coventry and Kerry act as signifiers of provenance, rooting the characters as distinctly European, as one. Choreography features in several of these flashbacks, building on the jovial, music festival vibe, though these sometimes seem unnecessary to the story. While the mocking banter on national stereotypes provided laugh-out-loud moments, I found the script to be stilted and a little unsure of itself. Some added poeticism, particularly during emotive action scenes, such as when a van storms Las Ramblas, would have strengthened the intimacy of the production.
Overall, Free EU Roaming skillfully depicts the frustration of inheriting a country you do not identify with. An anthem for the army of women who sought ‘womb for improvement’ in Ireland this year, the play surpasses borders and connects us with Catalans seeking independence, and Brits furiously keeping the EU flag flying. It is a refreshing look at stereotypes of Ireland, England, and Germany, and the privilege that comes with European citizenship. I left with warm memories of travelling Europe, of a sense of belonging. While this ambitious piece is not quite compelling, not quite poetic, it is definitely a laugh.
Free EU Roaming ran at Smock Alley Theatre as part of Dublin Fringe Festival.
