Theatre review: Dylan Moran | Apollo Theatre | refund policy | Stand - up Comedy | Shaftesbury Avenue | Bill Hicks

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The Review - THEATRE by TOM EVANS
Published: 20 November 2009

Dylan Moran

Dylan’s novel approach to poetic irony

DYLAN MORAN
Apollo Theatre

“ANYBODY who wants to leave is welcome to have their money back” says Moran, placing a couple of banknotes on the stage within reach of his audience.
This is no throwaway gag. Moran’s sardonic refund policy is a barely disguised confrontation with a crowd whose ears are still ringing with his 20-minute assault on consumerism.
When nobody claims the refund from the apron it is not because they fear the lash of the Irish stand-up’s tongue – a number of his put-downs have a brittle, pre-prepared quality.
It is because it would spoil the luxurious feeling of shared despair that Moran has induced by confiding in them his fear of 21st-century life (“he knows he’s not dead” he says of contemporary man, “because she’s talking about curtains, and he really really wants to be dead”).
Moran’s round gesticulation and exquisite meter turn his stage into a secular pulpit. “You need something to believe in. What can you believe in now?” he asks, and offers no punch-line to diffuse the slight tension between the searching question and the glitzy Shaftesbury Avenue audience.
But his is not the didactic irony of Bill Hicks, nor the apocalyptic rage of Andrew Lawrence.
He yearns for a time when being a “real man” meant being in a pub and receiving a phone call “for you” on the pub landline.
You cannot tell if he is being serious; he hovers in a thrilling space between sincerity and irony. A twitch or a cadence will appear to swing it one way, then the other. This uncertainty sometimes works against him – the more whimsical delivery jars with his angrier material.
When Moran’s subject matter is limpid, his language remains interesting. Take, for instance, his shock at the ability of the fried breakfast to tempt English people back into drudgery every morning: “slices of dead pig, tubes of dead pig, some fungus and a chicken’s period!”.
Moran exhibits a delight in the colour and rhythm of words that tells of his adolescent past as a poet (albeit, by his own admission, an awful one) and gives us reason to look forward to the novel he promises is “in the pipeline”.
Until January 5
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