Falling to Earth: My Summer with Bowie
Civic Theatre, Tallaght
★★★☆☆
Part grainy portrait of small-town life, part exuberantly fanciful moonage daydream, Eugene O’Brien’s single-handed drama imagines the infinitesimally unlikely relationship between a fictional Everyman and a real-life starman to varying levels of enjoyment and credibility.
The set-up is familiar enough. Stephen Jones plays Scut Kelly, a single man suffocated by the confines of family and place. A failed boxer caring for his widowed father and working as a bouncer in an indeterminate midlands town, he finds solace in dreams of romance with the local chemist’s daughter and the music of David Bowie.
And it’s into this dreary reality that fantasy intrudes in the form of the late, legendary English singer. It’s the summer of 2014, and Scut is recruited for a cash-in-hand job as a minder at a local studio where Bowie is secretly recording. The frustrated underachiever strikes up a tentative, almost illicit friendship with his idol, even as he continues to endure the minor indignities of his daily existence. Meanwhile, Bowie nurses his own woes, as he unsuccessfully tries to conceal his failing health. Something has to give, and sure enough does.
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Highly implausible as this scenario seems, it’s not impossible. After all, the grotesquely famous Michael Jackson struck up a bond with an Irish taxi driver when he was recording incognito in a Co Westmeath studio. But while Scut seems a decent fella, with a neat line in fart jokes and a sensitive streak beneath the banter, envisioning him as a close companion of Bowie requires a suspension of disbelief that even a stage struggles to engender.
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Then again, perhaps that’s the point. Even as Scut indulges in his all-too-believable rituals of boozing around confederates named Bagger and Hopper and Digger, there are allusions to fantasy and reverie and sci-fi. From the play’s title onwards, there are nods to Nicolas Roeg’s cult 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which starred Bowie as an ailing, reclusive extraterrestrial stranded on Earth, while a dream sequence in which Scut meets his dead mother carries an understated emotional punch.
If the premise is far-fetched, it lifts the narrative out of the intimate small-town milieu that O’Brien has chronicled in plays such as Eden and his television series Pure Mule. Scut’s friendship with Bowie, however imaginary, brings him out of his shell, culminating in a show-stopping rendition of Ziggy Stardust. O’Brien’s characterisation of Bowie (who died in 2016) as basically a down-to-earth geezer only further emphasises the underlying but never overstated theme about the transformational power of art.
At the heart of all this lies the tremendous performance of Jones. Under the direction of Jim Nolan, the actor brings vividness and veracity to his portrayal of Scut while breathing life into a supporting cast of characters, from mercurial superstars to sullen patriarchs and sundry miscreants. He transforms the potentially uneven script into a captivating one-man show that is by turns reflective, bawdy and entertaining. Above all, it disproves the adage that you should never meet your Heroes.
Continues at the Civic Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 15th
