Review gonzos return flight to perdition

Damian McCarney

In a recent interview with the Celt, actor Rex Ryan admitted he didn’t know if the emotional pay-off from doing a one-man show was better than a conventional play, because he’d never done one before. Judging by the way he bounced off-stage after Sunday’s performance of Pilgrim, disappeared behind the curtain, only to ricochet back on-stage to absorb the standing ovation - the pay-off was immense.
This was the final of three performances at Cavan Townhall Theatre and offered a warm-up for the forthcoming Dublin Fringe Festival. Gonzo have been rewarded for their previous sell out performances at the Fringe with a run on the Smock Alley main stage, and the buzz Pilgrim is guaranteed to generate will ensure Dublin audiences pack out the 200-plus venue too. It’s simply brilliant.
Gonzo shows are typically sensory assaults - multimedia extravaganzas with hallucinatory episodes, over-spilling with characters and just as many plot threads, tangling and knotting into a blitz of entertainment. Pilgrim stripped it all back leaving Rex Ryan, armed with playwright Philip Doherty’s best script to date, centre stage. A bawdy and beguiling tale, it was as much an extended beat poem as it was a play. A stark white-washed wall of luggage, divided along the centre, towers over Ryan, echoing the World Trade Centre as 9-11 looms over the action. Given the minimal backdrop it makes Ryan’s performance all the more exceptional - however, director Aoife Spillane-Hinks undoubtedly deserves a whole suitcase full of credit too.

Twin Towers
The action centres on a despicable, self-centred drunk Christy Reilly, who is repeatedly described as a ‘dickhead’. Christy’s flight home from San Diego to Dublin where his pregnant love interest awaits, is detoured to Newfoundland due to the Twin Towers attack. As a result he is stuck in the village of Gambo amongst a global community of stranded commuters, known as the ‘Plane People’. From here we are propelled back in time to the defining moments which caused a younger Christy to erect his protective wall of dickheadness, and witness his gradual maturation into, well, just a bit of a dick. Moving seamlessly from staccato scene-setting descriptions, into full blown conversations with himself, Rex Ryan energetically performed a minor miracle of recall, not to mention acting in conjuring up a colourful community. Amongst the 85 pulsating minutes, a stand-out moment for this reviewer was an almost epileptic rendition of a beer-beer-beer-whiskey binge.

Whilst some of Doherty’s other plays may be more obvious crowd pleasers, this in-depth portrayal offers a much more complete and rewarding play. It’s Doherty’s finest. Peripheral characters were lovingly sketched, while the rhythms and rhymes of the occasionally filthy, often hilarious, language sang.
If you missed it in Cavan, it’s worth making the pilgrimage to the Dublin Fringe on September 11-14, 16-18.