Narcissus review: Crushingly good looks in a world run by beauty
Far from superficial, William J. Dunleavy’s solo play finds gay men grappling with body image.
Smock Alley Theatre - Boys' School, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★
Archway and Tasteinyourmouth’s new play Narcissus is the latest narrative about young people diving deep into experience, exposing the safety nets along the way. Sometimes denounced as navel-gazing (usually by the same people who confuse “millennial solipsism” with what is really “grim futurelessness”), these are the kind of stories where characters are jagged, emotionally complex, unafraid to be unliked.
Set in an anonymous high-rise city, the solo play - scripted and performed by William J. Dunleavy - follows a young gay man named Mikey and two friends during one wild night, buffeted from club to club, on a quest to have sex with the latest star of a hit play. (Luke Evans, no less). After months of living like bohemians, shifting between each other’s beds without attaching any labels, a thick brew of jealousy is fermenting between the men. There’s a lingering fear that if casual sex ossifies into something more committing, one member of the trio will be left out in the cold.
This could easily tip into a self-fascinated tale of hedonism but Dunleavy’s play seems alive to much contemporary art where there is deliberate push-back against what’s easily agreeable, triggering as much anxiety as relief. (Think Lena Dunham’s Girls or Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends). “You must think we’re really shallow but I believed most deep people were,” says Mikey, about the group perfecting their appearances while on the buzz of getting attention - obsessions that sound suspiciously like a trapdoor.
Mikey and friends live off party canapés, cocktails and little else. In one moment, the alarming thinness of one member of the group comes into focus, a young man who’s convinced that he must unclog every pore. Mikey at one point speaks of his own shocking thinness like a brag, and likens himself to a character who dies early in an AIDS drama. It doesn’t sound as much like a bad joke as it does like a line underscoring the warping effects of body image. (In this version of reality, Luke Evans is starring in a production of Larry Kramer’s ACT UP drama The Normal Heart, a reference throughout Narcissus that seems to point to how powerful illusions can separate and detach individuals from reality).
There is a bleak underbelly to this glamorous life of non-stop clubbing. “We may have been cash-poor but we were always rich in assets,” says Mikey, describing a survival tactic via an innuendo. As the plot progresses, the characters become more and more scarred, whether chewed up and spat out by their cruel older admirers, or hurt by the sad conclusion of their own romantic pas de trois.
Admirably unsentimental, Narcissus is not in love with itself. But it could do with more love. Directors Grace Morgan and Laoise Murray present sections of the script as pre-recorded voiceover, while sending Dunleavy through the hells of drunken vomiting and binge-eating in private, images that could well stir but there is a distracting sense that the voiceovers – which are fuzzily recorded – hold key details to the story. The sound-absorbing upper levels of Smock Alley Theatre’s auditorium might be to blame, where video designer Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng has a more winning battle, conjuring large fuchsia-bright Chthonic portals into a desolate nightlife.
In performance, Dunleavy knows well the bold mixture of moods he’s going for, to be both unapologetically vain and misty-eyed fragile. He sometimes loses the required crystal-voice though, as if to be either frightening or vulnerable is to be low-volume blunt. He does it all with a half-grin: a knowing, blurred detail that can jolt out into satire or sincerity with impressive ease. That’s difficult not to admire.
Runs until 19th September
Friends,
A few updates. In case you missed them, I reviewed other productions from Dublin Fringe Festival for the Irish Times.
You can check out my review of Masterclass (“Masterclass: a magnificent send-up of the anxieties of the age”) and my review of Rescue Annie (“Rescue Annie: a grim history of loneliness”).
- Chris