Soak: The Perfect Man
Project Arts Centre – Cube
★★★★☆
At one point in Soak, Samuel Yakura’s fizzy second play, a tough Nigerian father passes his personal philosophy down to his son. “Life is a mission,” he says. “It isn’t a peacekeeping mission.”
That son, now an adult man, resembles an eager showman in Yakura’s nimbly comic performance. In a sharp satire of traditional family values, he is the eldest child expected to lead. “Who here is a firstborn?” he asks the audience, with swagger. “The rest of you: you’re welcome.”
Yakura’s play seems concerned with how tradition and what it holds in store for eldest sons – “We aren’t raised. We’re trained. Like elite navy seals” – warps into something more noxious. Wearing a waistcoat and tie, he recalls being a teenager, bragging about dunking basketballs and coming first in school tests. Already gratingly macho, this boy is fast becoming a bruh.
What makes it incredibly palatable is that Yakura is one of Irish theatre’s great goofballs. Without any father’s advice on how to communicate, Yakura’s young man models himself on comedies from Cartoon Network’s golden age: puffing his chest like Johnny Bravo, taking notes in masterminding from Dexter’s Laboratory. What a goon.
That doesn’t mean Yakura isn’t saying something serious about male tradition and bro culture. As in his charming debut, The Perfect Immigrant, poems arrive like songs do in a musical, giving bottled-up characters extraordinary fluency. (Here, they even receive accompaniment, courtesy of Osazee Aiguokhian and Michael Atunwa’s groovy music).
In the play’s latter stages, when Yakura’s young man wrestles his emotional struggles with a hard-ass therapist (Chisom Princess George), the poetry wields chilling metaphors of malfunction and hopelessness: “A shipwreck never worries about a coming storm.” (Yeesh!) The dark, watery dread of director Katie O’Halloran’s production ultimately calms to a still revelation about fathers trying their best with what they have.
Runs at Project Arts Centre – Cube, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 12th