Sure Look It, Fuck It review: The thick haze of a spoken word nirvana

Clare Dunne's debut play follows a returned emigrant through one day in Dublin, struggling with anxiety. Photo: Fiona Morgan 

Project Arts Centre (Upstairs), Dublin

Mar 21-23

★ ★ ★

Plays have long been written in verse but since 2013 - when Tom Vaughn-Lawlor pushed the rhythms of Howie the Rookie towards swag rap - the genre has undergone a renovation. The light-hearted rhymes of Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool put shape on a family divided by addiction. Kate Stanley Brennan’s house beats exposed a horrific rape culture in Walk for Me. At their best, spoken word plays have the intense emotions of poetry; at their worst, they freestyle without enough attention to plot and character.

Braided from speedy rhythms and vivid descriptions, this debut play by Clare Dunne - one of our finest actors - follows Missy, an emigrant returned after several years in New York. Moved back into her parents’ Dublin home, penniless and without a job, she’s feeling a little off-track.

“Did you know swearing can calm you?”, says Dunne’s Missy with reassurance, during a casual prologue. Supplying the audience with a response to be spoken aloud throughout (see the brash title), the play seems to want us on its side. Sure look it.

That liberating mantra is fitting as Missy goes about a day, struggling with anxiety, starting with a disastrous job interview. When the interviewer Gina asks her questions, it’s hard to know which is stranger: that Missy will allow herself to slip into a daydream, or that she is joined onstage by a musician (Ailbhe Dunne) for a Spanish-style song. (“It gives me mucho mucho pain / That Gina will be the one going to Spain”). 

Strutting across the stage like a cabaret performer, Missy is full of self-deprecating humour. Her self-esteem is low enough to Google “Inspirational life biography” for guidance. She is at once delightfully charming and extraordinarily meek.

Director Tom Creed’s attractive production for THISISPOPBABY stays in that more uplifting key, accommodating broad turns of musical comedy while countering the play's observations of self-shame with an almost mythic odyssey through Dublin. Intimate conversations in a smoking area are sadly interrupted by bouncers. A near-mythological busker shepherds everyone together for a party. 

Dunne seems concerned with getting the good word out about the importance of self-love over the pursuit of success. But look through the thick haze of nirvana and the plot rattles a little. It isn’t clear what dream Missy chased in New York, or how it fell apart. Shuttled along without many stakes, the play begins to feel like an improvisation.

It’s a shame because there’s something interesting here about the expectations facing ex-pats when they return home. Still, Dunne shows an admirable commitment to the venture. Fuck it, what has she to lose?