Warrior review: A heartfelt, poignant Star Trek-tinted cancer-survivor musical

Warrior

Smock Alley Theatre

★★★★☆

With Warrior, the singer, actor, dramaturge, sometime Nuala and national treasure Karen Egan brings her heartfelt, Star Trek-tinted cancer-survivor musical to Dublin Theatre Festival. Except, as she repeatedly insists, it’s not really a tale of cancer survival. After all, she only had “a little bit of cancer”.

There’s something of the late, great Spalding Gray’s impressionistic spoken-word gigs about Egan’s appealing narrative. She’s ably joined by the performers Fiona Browne and Oliver Flitcroft – with additional interjections from the musicians Caitríona Finnegan, Barry Donohue and Russell Smith – each vocalising or interpreting Warrior’s heroine, Katherine Kirk. It’s a device that works brilliantly, not least when she recounts (to choral, overlapping effect) not being able to get a word in edgeways during her “perfect childhood”.

That era, like most of the material, is articulated with a winning marriage of self-deprecation and hyperbole. The Dublin borough of Kimmage is eulogised in song as the greatest city in the world, with a minor caveat: it’s not technically a city. The very title of the project is repeatedly used to lampoon the writer and creator. “It’s my truth,” suggests Kirk, with tongue firmly in cheek. Much of the material, however, overlaps with Egan’s truth. The performer’s series of artist residencies in Finland makes for several hilarious interludes delivered in cod-Nordic dialect. A break-up with a former Finnish boyfriend, related in this patois, gets one of the evening’s biggest laughs.

Egan’s experiences with cancer, which form the spine of the show, are relayed to poignant effect. Small details, notably how the heroine’s sisters rally around with a rota for housework and hospital appointments, are affectingly authentic. John Comiskey’s imaginative lighting design excels in replicating the experience of waiting as time elapses between appointments: test results and various invasive procedures.

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The initial reaction of Egan’s alter ego to her predicament is to downplay its significance with conceited grandiloquence: “Is this going to take long? I’ve got an album to launch.” She finds her bearings, however, through her brother Barry, a man who has been in and out of institutions since he was 15. His mental-health problems are ultimately eclipsed by physical ailments, including a stroke and bowel cancer.

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The gravitas of these subjects and themes is counterpointed by frequently jaunty songs – mainly composed and arranged by Egan and Cian Boylan – and good humour. A parodic rendition of an Irish daytime-TV fashion spot yields the immortal line “You won’t have to worry about accessories. Just stand beside the bananas and you’ll be laughing.”

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The welcome Trekkie energy is magnified by Sinéad Lawlor’s costume designs; her outfits make one think that the exhausted Irish nurses referenced by Kirk have been beamed aboard the Enterprise. It’s not an idle reference. Egan finds meaningful analogies between her medical experiences and alien terrain. Ciara Murnane’s complementary set design looks like a futuristic re-creation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, replete with projections of lunar landscapes and light sabres.

Warrior continues at Smock Alley, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 7th