I Am A Home Bird (It’s Very Hard)

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Of all the ironies to befall a show about emigration, it seems particularly cruel that Shaun Dunne and Talking Shop Ensemble’s documentary piece should discover it has nowhere to go. It isn’t that Dunne, its writer and narrator, lacks material, urgency or relevance. A young writer whose twin sister recently departed for Australia, and whose peers are deserting this ravaged country in their droves, his is a voice of defiance: he’s staying put.

But in substance, form and delivery, this doesn’t take the form of an argument as much as an over-extended riff. Amiable, unaffected and slightly muted, Dunne is supported by Ellen Quinn Banville and Lisa Walsh, whose functions could be much better defined. Quinn Banville is due to leave, but advances little counter-argument (she’s glad to be going), while Walsh hovers somewhere between onstage dramaturg and comic relief: reciting newspaper clippings, dancing fetchingly, and delivering one freakout moment of oration that blasts Irish pop culture into smithereens.

Director Oonagh Murphy works hard to relate these anecdotes and gags to a wider social context, but the show feels like an accumulation of research divided between flip postdramatic methods. It is more sequenced than structured, more project than performance. The result is a confused show: an undecided Dunne struggles not to sound shrill in his separation anxieties (“If you go you’ll stop being my friend”), but becomes so glibly optimistic about a country that has apparently “learned our lessons” to be convincing. The tone of the show seems similarly affected, lurching from deadpan inclusions of Enya’s

Orinoco Flow

(“

Sail away

”) to more earnest lifts from Brian Friel’s

Philadelphia, Here I Come

.

Elements stack up like a restless Facebook feed: old personal photographs, multimedia clips and Skype conversations abound, while speech takes the form of a litany on the meaning of home. But these associations multiply, slapped like tags on baggage that is never unpacked.

We know the confusion of identity caused by diaspora, the emotional pain of people departing a country that holds little promise for them, and no one could object to Home Bird’s genuine agitation that we stay and rebuild.

Sadly, for all that heavily inscribed determination, they are no clearer than anyone else about how we can get there.

Runs until April 16th.