The perils of online slagging laid painfully bare
I wish The Breadline Collective, producers of Well, That’s What I Heard (★★★, Theatre Upstairs, Lanigans) would stop boasting in their programmes that they’re ‘dedicated to taking down the middle class gauze from Irish theatre’. That piece of self admiration presumably means that unlike themselves, most theatre work tries to hide reality. Have they never heard of Tom Murphy, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe, to name only three from a long list? Endless repetitions and multiple variations on f*** and female genitalia stopped being revolutionary long ago. Thommas Kane Byrne’s tragicomedy is promising and has good comic moments. In some ways it’s more authentic than The Snapper. Three teenage girls, from a school in central Dublin, close friends, bitchy, self-assertive foul-mouthed and ultimately vulnerable, live a life devoted to social media. Increasing the number of their online followers by shaming and embarrassing their victims is their favourite pastime. Crushes on big hunks, an interest in parties, drugs and social problems get a look-in, but nothing compares with the joy of shaming revelations on Tell.com. But when one of them becomes the victim of the sniping, life is suddenly not so funny and the finale is a chilling example of the dehumanising possibilities in cyber slagging. The play is essentially an attack on that rotten world, but uses bawdy humour so heavily overloaded with repeated expletives that it eventually gets tiresome. But Ciara Ivie, Ericka Roe and Courtney Black give four-star performances as a well-directed ensemble in very demanding roles. Until June 30.