The Britney Spears Circus tour pulled in to Dublin for two nights only at the weekend
“MY SISTER’S at Slane, in a field watching Oasis stand in the one spot and sing,” says an impeccably turned-out Niamh Gaffney from Kilkenny.
She is still reeling from the aftershock of seeing her idol Britney Spears in the flesh (quite a lot of flesh, it must be said) at Dublin’s O2 on Saturday night.
“This was more than a concert – this was a show,” adds her friend, Yvonne Martin. “It was like a Shakespeare play,” says the third member of the glamorous Kilkenny gang, Miriam Cody.
What the Bard would have done with Britney’s cast of gimps, circus freaks, Bollywood dancers, kung-fu monks and a dwarf, one can only wonder.
In Britney Spears he would have found a worthy tragic heroine. The twice-divorced mother of two boys she does not have custody of has suffered some hair-raising meltdowns. The 2009 Circus tour, which pulled in to Dublin this weekend for two nights only, puts Britney back in the place she seems most at home – the spotlight. It’s an obvious metaphor, the circus, but hey, there’s a whole bunch of women here willing Britney to take control and be the ringleader of her own macabre freakshow. There’s a lot of love in the room.
And why shouldn’t she be a role model for girls and modern women, asks Lorna Hoey from Palmerstown, Dublin. A mother of two young children, she’s taking the night off to rejoice in Britney’s resurrection. “Fair play to her, despite everything she managed to pull herself together. She’s a survivor.” Mother of one Gemma Byrne, from Kilcock, Co Kildare, is also in Team Britney. “As mothers we relate to her. She’s real. She’s gone through things many women go through, like post-natal depression, and she’s come back to the top. I’m delighted for her. It’s woman power.” There were no animals in this circus – unless you count the elephant in the room. There’s been some carping about Ms Spears’s lip-syncing tendencies, and oops she did it again on Saturday.
But did it make any difference to the fans? “We know she mimes,” said Yvonne Martin. “No, we don’t care. We knew when we bought the tickets. We saw her here in 2004 and she was miming then and we didn’t care.”