Trouble Denim
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
An obvious question for Shane Daniel Byrne’s swirling new stand-up show is how a freewheeling comedian with a gift for bending rules adjusts to a gruelling career that already seems pretty lawless. “This is my difficult second album,” he jokes in Trouble Denim, twisting his face into the grimace of a nervous artist under pressure.
Following his immensely popular debut, But He’s Gay, Byrne explains that he’s taking a peer’s advice to create a show riffing on the milestones of his year, his first as a full-time comic. At its centre is a nerve-racking tour to Australia, from which he discovers he’s in a depression and launches into an attack on the Catholic Church to blame.
With Byrne’s punchlines the delivery is as important as the content – it often involves quicksilver impressions of smug Dublin suburbanites. (The voice of a Blackrock receptionist neighs with explanation: “I grew up around horses!”) There is a giddy tension, as his performance has a sense of lacking order. When explaining a demanding tour’s impact on his sleep, he pops off a half-baked improvised joke (“My schedule was out of whack. Like having sex!”) before staging an apology as a misdirection (“Sorry I put that in. I’m a virgin”).
The show doesn’t exactly exude the confidence of controlled chaos, as the links between monologues become tenuous. A skewering of a self-serious London comic’s advice (“Give them some vulnerability”) segues first to a comic family portrait and then to concerns about adulthood. He’s still taking charge of his destiny.
Trouble Denim continues at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 21st
