Singing (not very well) in the Jacks
Copper Face Jacks Olympia U ntil August 12
In his programme note, Paul Howard writes that his idea was to create a musical that would be a homage to what he calls the most famous nightclub in the country, ‘a cultural crossroads with the folksy charm of a GAA club disco’.
And on opening night it looked as if Howard had rounded up all the adoring devotees of his Ross O’Carroll Kelly saga to launch his latest satire on modern Ireland.
They came geared up to laugh, and they laughed at everything: bad jokes, repeated jokes, occasional good jokes and a battery of sex jokes and expletives, reaching ecstatic heights of merriment when a garda singing I’m Gay, I’m GAA set them cheering, whooping and clapping, not just once, but the three times that it was sung.
Surprisingly for a man whose comic touch is usually so sharp and understated, Howard’s songs in general have a sledgehammer subtlety.
The background to it all is the sudden overwhelming love affair between Noeleen from regulation stage-Irish Cahirciveen, and Dubliner Gino, a Conor McGregor lookalike, strut-alike.
Gino is a dedicated car-clamper, Dublin football captain, unreconstructed thicko, serial seducer and father of uncounted infants, whose racism consists of detesting anything from outside Dublin, especially from Kerry.
Noeleen, pure and ambitious, has followed her dream to work in Dublin in the VHI. And they meet in Coppers. The rest is Playboy of the Western World by way of West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet complete with unchaste balcony scene. Opposition to Gino comes from Mossy, wily Kerry farmer, besotted with Noeleen and expert on female sexuality, who decides to prove his love and manliness in a drinking contest with Gino, accompanied by a snatch of West Side Story rumble music. The show is generally fastmoving, snappily choreographed and very good in its send-up of The Playboy style of dialogue, that gives Roseanna Purcell great scope and a hymn to the wonders of VHI. Eoin Cannon is a garda with a dubious sexual history whose ambition is to open a hipster coffee shop in Stoneybatter. There are isolated scenes that show Paul Howard at his best, but the show gives the general feeling of a comedy idea that has over-reached itself and has nowhere to go, especially after the interval.
The introduction of a female American gender studies academic has comic potential but the idea is never developed and stumbles into a crude cliché finale.
The performances and the production values are all top-class, with Johnny Ward’s Gino dominating the scene as a distinctively Paul Howard comic creation.
‘Performances are top-class with Johnny Ward’s Gino dominating the scene’