Everyone has a Bono story, but Bono has the best Bono stories, as one person in the sold-out crowd at 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin notes on Monday night.
It is billed as the U2 frontman’s “Stories of Surrender”, an “evening of words, music and some mischief” to showcase the tales from his new memoir. But it is much more than this.
Stories of Surrender is ‘a safe space for people who love Bono’, one wit is overheard saying. It is also a safe space for Bono
The show is a musical photo album, the singer flicking through memories of his life with songs. It gives him the chance to flex his talents as a singer, a storyteller, a mimic, a comic and, ultimately, the tenor his father said he never was. This is “my quarter-of-a-band” show, he says. But what a quarter.
U2 are famous for their ambitious stage sets. On Monday Bono dispenses with “space stations and mirrorball lemons” in favour of a simple table and chairs, some stories and 13 pared-back U2 songs. But there is nothing stripped down about his performance. Supported by Kate Ellis on cello, Gemma Doherty on vocals, harp and keyboards, and the producer Jacknife Lee on drums, Bono brings the characters from his past and present to life, inhabiting the various roles himself.
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“The most extraordinary thing about me are the relationships I am in,” he says. The strongest is his relationship with his wife, Ali, who, he says, “saved my life by seeing through me to see to me”. She is the woman who told him not to lose sight of the boy in him.
His deconstructed version of With or without You, a love song to her, is an early highlight of the night and a song that reminds the audience of the power of U2′s songwriting and the frontman’s voice.
“God, that’s great!” he says to himself, lapping up the early adulation from the crowd.
Above the stage, sitting side by side in their own box at the theatre, are President Michael D Higgins, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. At one point the President waves across to U2′s bassist, Adam Clayton, sitting in a box opposite. Alongside Clayton are members of Bono’s family, including Ali and the singer’s youngest son, John. Sitting in a box high above them is the journalist Charlie Bird, who receives a warm ovation from the crowd before the show.
The show is, to paraphrase one of U2′s songs, a sort of homecoming. Sitting in the stalls are a who’s who of Irish public life, including the musician Glen Hansard, the broadcasters Pat Kenny, Joe Duffy and Dave Fanning, the RTÉ chairwoman, Moya Doherty, and the producer John McColgan, the comedian Deirdre O’Kane, the playwright Conor McPherson, the businessman Harry Crosbie and the film director Jim Sheridan.
It is “a safe space for people who love Bono”, one wit is overheard saying.
It is also a safe space for Bono, who reveals his most intimate self. Remembering how U2 discovered their early songwriting alchemy to write I Will Follow, the singer powerfully shows how they built the musical blocks and how he channelled the unacknowledged grief at the loss of his mother at a young age. “I might have spent my whole life trying to fill the silence my mother left me,” he says.
But it is the late, opera-loving Bob Hewson who takes centre stage, his son playing the perpetually unimpressed Irish father with gusto. Bono performs brief cameos too as each of his bandmates, the American heart surgeon who saved his life in 2016, Luciano Pavarotti and Princess Diana.
[ Bono interview: ‘I have spent my life looking for the blessing of father figures’Opens in new window ]
The night builds to a dramatic finale as Bono proves his operatic prowess by dispensing with backing music for an a cappella tour de force of Torna a Surriento, an Italian song adored by his father.
Sung beneath backdrops of his own sketched portraits of his parents, he dedicates the song to “my two brothers”. By the end, a visibly moved Bono has left it all on the stage.
“I was born with my fists up. This surrender thing doesn’t come easy to me,” he says.
