Anna Burnside reviews a ‘thin’ offering from A Play, A Pie and A Pint.
It’s 2004 and Deirdre is an Irish dance champion with an webcam sideline. She performs high kicks for the camera in a marabou-trimmed dress with cycling shorts underneath and nipple tassels on top of the frock.
Niche.
Fast forward to the 2020s and she is running an Irish dance school in Glasgow with her Oirish mammy, grooming her daughter Aoife for clickety clack-footed stardom.
Deirdre still has her other income stream on the go. Her mother thinks she is tutoring Chinese students in the hornpipe using Google translate.
Besides humour pitched at that level, there is a lot of plot, much of which is hard to follow and some of which leads nowhere. The webcam strand fizzles out, as does a potential blackmail scenario at a dance competition. Instead, there’s a madcap intergenerational rammy of a finale with a twist that has all the subtlety of a kick with one of the dancers’ clomping great shoes.
Writer Anna McGrath gives Maura, the mammy, the odd, good line. Leah Balmforth, as Aoife, does her best and is a welcome voice of calm beside her overheated mother and granny.
Brian James O’Sullivan, lurking at the back of the stage, provides accordion music, ringtones from a keyboard and a manly voice when required. It’s a sweet touch in a show that is otherwise so thin it’s almost see-through.
Feis performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint in Glasgow until September 20, 2025. It the transfers to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from September 23-27.
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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