Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge
3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
Rosie O’Donnell’s new show opens not with jokes but with a long, sad story. It’s St Patrick’s Day 1973, and young Rosie is called home from a play date to find her Irish-American Catholic family gathered with devastating news: her mother has died.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the actor and comedian quips to the audience at 3Olympia Theatre on Sunday night, where the set is getting its world premiere. “Did I buy tickets to the wrong show?”
It’s a good opener, but it’s a question I find myself asking in earnest as the show goes on.
O’Donnell is an assured presence on stage, and the production is polished: sound effects, well-timed slide shows, family photographs, archival footage. Her comic timing and rhetorical skill are considerable, even when the content veers more towards memoir than comedy.
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The show is structured around her fifth child, adopted later in life, whom O’Donnell presents as a nonbinary, autistic, truth-speaking prodigy. Photographs of this undeniably cute kid accompany her anecdotes, which she delivers with warmth and reverence.
The show’s title, Common Knowledge, comes from a line O’Donnell’s child uses whenever correcting their mother with bemused exasperation: “It’s common knowledge, Mom.” It’s touching stuff, though not side-splitting. If the show were reframed not as stand-up but as an autobiographical monologue by a witty, charismatic performer, the expectations would land more fairly.
Eventually, O’Donnell moves to the show’s emotional core: her loathing of Donald Trump. Here the tone shifts. A slide show features paintings of the US president, his face rendered demon-red, words such as “TRAITOR” and “HYPOCRITE” etched across them.
These are paintings O’Donnell began to make during his first term; they now apparently number in the hundreds. There’s a comic opportunity here to say something about the quality of the art, but she doesn’t rise to it.
Given recent, more interesting reckonings on the left about how liberal discourse may have helped fuel Trump’s re-election, this section feels not only dated but counterproductive. O’Donnell’s rage and disbelief, however sincere, feel lazy.
What’s missing is a deeper confrontation with the possibility that such disdain might not only fail to persuade but also, in fact, deepen the fractures it claims to lament. Admittedly, it would be difficult to craft a comedy capable of confronting these tensions but not, you’d like to think, impossible.
Perhaps a less complacent-seeming comedian might attempt it, or at least gesture toward complexity, rather than defaulting to familiar material that flatters the audience but challenges nothing.
O’Donnell’s vision of Ireland, meanwhile, is ridiculous. She praises the lollipop lady, the kindly pharmacist, the atmosphere of “calm and peace”, the country’s incredible “hospitality”. Has she read the news?
“I think Sandymount is amazing. We ended up buying a home there,” she says. Her joy at no longer paying $78,000 a year for her child’s US education also rankles. It’s easy to sentimentalise from within a bubble.
O’Donnell closes the evening with a little homily on how we must get through the hard times with endurance and laughter. Then Angels, by Robbie Williams, booms from the speakers as a slide show shows her kid hugging a dog in their nice Sandymount home. It’s the most I laugh all night.
