Comedy night starts at 9pm
Tickets available from Multisound €15 0494361312
This will be the most fun you have all year!
It’s 2003, Year of the Celtic Tiger. Producers are flocking to Ireland in search of cool Oirish musicians and the next Riverdance. Fiddler Aindrias de Staic is waiting for his break but finds himself distracted by the booze and the craic (and the coke) that go with blowing your dole cheque in the cocooned bars of north Galway. As he cheerfully admits, “ignorance is bliss when you’re on the piss”.
Fate plays a hand when he finds himself on the street, evicted with nothing but his fiddle and half his rent deposit (the 80 quid), just enough to get him to Italy in the company of a busload of eco-political hippy protesters. And so begins the mother of all shaggy dog tales or – if de Staic had been born in a different age – an exquisite picaresque with none of the bawdy bits bowdlerised. Playing mercilessly on that cheery Irish demeanour and cheeky traveller’s aura, he relates how he inches his inebriated way across the rest of the world via Irish pubs, from the Balkans to Indonesia to Bondi Beach and the Melbourne Festival.
Like Ballykissangel on speed, the 65 minutes fly by as de Staic somehow finds comic poetry in running lines of coke on pool tables, being trounced by a bouncer for sleeping with the publican’s daughter, or going dry after a spiritual experience in Bangkok – a huge mistake with hilarious if surreally improbable consequences involving a Scottish babe and a tattoo, although here the inveantiveness almost comes unstuck and the script unravels a smidgen.
The fiddle also punctuates the action with sound effects and reels, and, with even a Q&A at the end, de Staic consistently gets us laughing at even the most miserable situations he stumbles into. Rarely has storytelling been so foot-tappingly funny.
Review by Nick Awde
Published online at 11:15 on Wednesday 17 August 2011
http://ed.thestage.co.uk/reviews/1300
Published in The Stage Newspaper in the issue dated Thursday August 25, 2011
Join us on Facebook and twitter