Up on the top floor of the Powerscourt Centre lies Bewleys Cafe Theatre. It’s an intimate venue that comes alive every lunchtime.
The seats quickly fill and the chime of soup spoons and excited talk marks the beginning of this theatrical afternoon ritual. Being performed here until January 27th is the fun and colourful play All Honey. Written by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth and directed by Jeda de Brí, All Honey came to fruition after being performed in last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival.
As it’s bright poster will tell you, this play won Fishamble’s New Writing Award last year and as soon as the play starts, it clear to see why. Trinity graduate Rachel Bergin is one of the stars, but this is also a production bursting with up-and-coming talent and names that surely demand to become big in the Dublin theatre scene.
Set in a brightly coloured room in Ru and Luke’s flat, the set is cluttered with multi-coloured boxes of all different sizes stacked precariously. Immediately, the vibrancy of the design invites the audience down the rabbit hole – and what a hilarious and farcical one it is.
As each guest at the party enters and exits the room, the story of boyfriends cheating, the most wonderful life coach and a very saucy nightgown unfolds with bizarre and wonderful energy. Character dances with each other, with dialogue never dropping in sharpness and wit.
Led by incredibly strong female performances and writing, All Honey laughs at all of our contemporary attitudes towards relationships, mental health and friends. The result is a rewriting of the typical bedroom farce, creating something fresh, hilarious and very familiar in Dublin 2018.
The performances are strong across the cast, with a joyful eccentricity flowing particularly from the characters of Mae and Val. Each character has the chance to own the stage and in various moments, you feel as though the actor is about to break the fourth wall and tell you a joke.
This is how heightened the the performances of these characters are. They joke and perform with such energy and volume that you are sure the act has to break. Only it never does and this farce is delightfully and unashamedly larger than life and over the top.
From two characters ending up in a performance of a made-up play called Hot Chair, to Mae insisting her high heels be dangled above her head so she can calm down, Elizabeth Smyth manages to turn a conventional South Dublin house-warming party into a whimsical and explosive world of secrets, hilarious personalities and drama.
As the group figure out who really is sleeping with who, all friendships are thrown into jeopardy and madness ensues. This is a show only to be enjoyed with close friends, because they are about to find out how loud you really can laugh.
