Instead of Morrissey, Sean Hughes's new play boasts gags about the Fatima Mansions. Two Dubliners' management of a London Irish pub is seen through a succession of St Patrick's Days: a stabbing, booking the wrong band and the unforgivable sin of running out of Guinness. Hughes has written himself a thorough-going nerd against whom Owen O'Neill's acerbic, four-lettered sociopath abrades. This is more than stand-up masquerading as theatre, though Hughes can't rid himself of a stand-up's compulsion to ad-lib about noises drifting up from the theatre below, and some of the off-the-wall gags nod worryingly towards thick-Paddy territory.
Written for The Independent.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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