Chop
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin 8
★★★☆☆
Some advice for those eager to avoid audience participation: always keep a notebook on your lap and a pen in your hand. Sure enough, the incorrigible Cian Kinsella – or possibly “Cian Austin Jesus” – slips past this critic to encourage a blameless civilian onstage for a most harmless class of that theatre crime.
My neighbour is tasked with the job of health-and-safety officer while Kinsella sets to axing enough wood to keep a family of five warm through a long winter.
Appearing under his Lords of Strut banner – the troupe is associated with circus skills – Kinsella works his way down from logs the size of tractor wheels to borderline twigs that require no more than whittling. It’s not an act that would much impress an audience in rural Manitoba, but, as far as milquetoast urban theatregoers are concerned, he may as well be wrestling bears.
What else is going on? Everything and nothing. Kinsella enters dressed like a pagan medicine man, in robes and straw mask, before showing us his axe as a stage magician might display a piece of apparatus to confirm it is no more than it appears to be. An instrumental hit of the 1980s blasts out and appears to compel our hero to move in time. A little later a bird flies in to make sad conversation about the apparent end of the world.
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There are themes here. This insecure version of Kinsella constantly asserts a raw masculinity we suspect to be rice-paper thin. The references to doomed birds point to ecological concerns. But this breathlessly concise show seems largely concerned with staging a nervous breakdown in the most anarchic fashion possible.
The creator’s skills are impressive. More impressive still is the sheer effort he exerts in keeping his lunatic balloon aloft. What audience would dare not to be just a little amused?
Continues at Smock Alley Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 13th
