Oliver Cromwell is Really Very Sorry: Xnthony’s superb musical comedy
Cromwell’s brutal ascension to power is told via Eurodance-inflected songs.
Project Arts Centre - Space Upstairs, Dublin Fringe Festival.
★★★★☆
Xnthony’s superb new offering doesn’t quite fit the fashionable category of the bio-musical, where the thoroughly documented past gets propelled into the present – for better (see Hamilton) or for worse (Diana, the Musical). Then again, there is a surprising lack of inter-island consensus about the 17th century English statesman Oliver Cromwell and his place in history. In the musical’s ingenious opening scene, we find a group of gravediggers searching for his corpse in Cambridgeshire, singing of Cromwell’s invasion: “A conquest the Irish will never forget / And the English will never remember.”
Researchers will try to address the gaps in history, the deviations from fact, but there is also something to relish in deciding to play by the same rules of a warped game, to meet a blurry colonial memory with the artistic licence of queer satire. Oliver – the “hunty from Huntingdon,” as the lyrics put it – is first seen as effete young man leaving for college, with dreams of being a star, desperate to impress his emotionally unavailable father.