The Civic Theatre has, in conjunction with Common Currency Theatre Company, produced what can most accurately be described as a theatrical curiosity which affords Donal O'Kelly the opportunity of another bravura performance.
Translated by Marella Boschi from the Italian of Alessandro Baricco, it purports to tell the strange and ultimately inexplicable story of a pianist who was found by a sailor as a baby in a box on board the transatlantic liner The Virginian and never left it until he died in the explosion detonated to destroy the ship.
It is claimed by the narrator, a trumpeter in the liner's jazz band, that the pianist could play all the music of the earth all at once, and that he bettered the great Jelly Roll Morton once in a music duel on board.
Frankly, I don't believe a word of it, and Leticia Agudo's staging of the piece does little to enable me to suspend disbelief in a script which even the narrator refers to occasionally as rubbish or bullshit.
And the trumpeter narrator is required every now and again to assume the persona of the sea-borne pianist who, sitting at a piano on stage with Ray Martin (trumpet), Brendan Doyle (clarinet), John Moriarty (guitar) and Daniel Bodwell (double bass), is clearly the show's composer, Justin Carroll, whose music, while grand in itself, cannot measure up to the extravagant claims of the narrator or his often overblown text.
Donal O'Kelly does his energetic best to divert us from these logical inconsistencies and at times he succeeds most winningly, especially when there's the semblance of a joke in the text, and there are quite a few of these.
This performance is a considerable achievement in what is otherwise a flimsy whimsy, brightened from time to time with that quintet. Emma Cullen provides a shiny setting to suggest a marine environment and Dermot O'Donnell's lighting is fine.
Runs from November 6th to 11th and November 27th to December 2nd in Tallaght. To book, phone: 01-4627477. In Clonmel from November 21st to 25th; Tralee from December 5th to 9th; Limerick from December 12th to 16th; Letterkenny, Cork and Mullingar in January; Portlaoise and Dun Laoghaire in February.