Wake: The folk-song afterlife beyond the disco ball
In Thisispopbaby's circus of grief, the division between the living and the dead feels porous.
National Stadium, Dublin Fringe Festival
★★★★☆
There is something spiritual about the ambience of an Irish pub. You can sense it in the air. If you get caught-up in the long melodic phrases of a singer’s traditional song, in the strains of a fiddle or accordion, you can be dragged through a barrier between worlds – the rift between past and present; certainty and uncertainty.
It is not outside the abilities of uplifting entertainments to explore such big ideas. Thisispopbaby and Dublin Fringe Festival’s heartrending circus-play Wake is an obvious sibling to Riot – the 2016 genre-shift by the same directors, Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon – in how it combines awe-triggering displays of spectacle with the spirit-search of spoken word poetry. At this vigil, what we are watching over is not the corpse of an individual but a wave of collective anguish. “This is a wake for everything that’s not coming back,” says poet Felicia Olusanya, our MC.