Muster
The New Theatre★★★★☆
On a porch having a cigarette, a man questions the closeness of his relationships. “We’re friends,” his pal says, reassuringly. “Like ‘help you bury a body at 3am’ friends.” The man sullenly responds: “What if I’m the body?”
The calamities of locked-up male emotion are on people’s minds in Muster, Dagogo Hart and Dafe Pessu Orugbo’s eloquent work. They appear as men at the funeral reception for their dead friend: Hart plays a big-picture thinker in a shirt and tie; Orugbo plays a quippy, easy-going maverick in a leather jacket.
Against Peadar Connolly’s buoyant compositions, both performers deliver whirling verses (mostly bars of spoken word from Hart, and of rap from Orugbo), as two men left with the horror of their friend’s suicide. They question what to do with their grief. “Isn’t the point to go back to normal?” says Orugobo’s man, nonchalantly. Hart’s character is thinking about volunteering at a suicide helpline.
What follows is the agony of missed opportunities, and men clashing over not preventing tragedy. You’d think Hart’s character, the poet delivering chilling images (“What we do is both man and shadow.”), would be the most self-aware, but the play reveals Orugbo’s character to be deeper than the surface-thinker he appears to be.
As can be the case with Hart’s plays, it’s a question of how much whirling verse you can take in on a first viewing. One standout bar inverted outward hypermasculinity into an inward question: “If you can bench press your bodyweight,/ What is all this body’s weight?” Damn.
An incandescent finale presents communicated male affection as a yet-to-be discovered territory (“We’ll learn a language that never was”) that’s somewhere reachable, in the encouraging sight of a man finally admitting he’s not okay. “Rock your beast into beauty,” someone urges. That’s Muster in a nutshell.
Continues today at The New Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival
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