Jack Kairo and the Long Hard Kiss Goodbye

Upstairs, Lanigan’s Pub, Dublin

Jack Kairo, the spoof private detective created by Simon Toal, is clearly choosy about his cases. When we first encountered him, in 2005’s ingenious Jack Kairo and Friends, he was unravelling a murder mystery so comically convoluted with connections to Iraq that its villains were called Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. In this follow-up for Sheer Tantrum, Kairo takes on a crime syndicate called the Crazy 1% and a merciless enforcer named the Bondholder. Unable to bear the weight of such heavy satire alone, perhaps, Toal has gained a partner in the shifting shape of Patrick O’Donnell.

Written by Toal, O’Donnell and their director Vincent A O’Reilly, the show is full of quick-fire gags, yet feels as though it has been pulled in different directions: between an affectionate film noir parody (where it works best), a fanboy clutter of film references and absurd digressions (where it works less well) and a perfunctory piece of political agit prop (where it doesn’t).

It coheres more charmingly, though, within an imagined, timeless world where whiskey-soaked, wise-cracking gumshoes can be put to the service of contemporary problems. “We might live in a different time,” Kairo tells one character, “but sometimes the old ways are the best”. Toal, deliciously deadpan, probably means it.

His Kairo is rarely more amusing than in the breakneck pursuit of a rococo description or a Chandler-esque gag (“she wore a red satin dress that she was poured into, but had forgotten to say when”) and O’Donnell matches him in limber physical comedy. Between them, no joke is too mad that it can’t be embellished with a car chase on swivel chairs or enhanced with a Spanish guitar. Dividing 13 characters between them – who often have no more function than to delay the plot – it’s a pity that they let one of them get away: the femme fatale. Noir, like Monty Python-esque comedy, has a jittery anxiety about the women it imagines, and this show safely confines them to sight gags or a doomed showgirl, leaning harder on locker-room sexual quips and resolving finally in male camaraderie.

Even in a show as high-spirited and good fun as this, that search through the morass for uncomplicated solutions seems revealing, as though war, austerity and even sexuality were all just cases and the dogged Kairo could get to the bottom of them. Until Aug 11th.