Love All

Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin Mar 26-31 1.10pm €8-€12 (lunch €4) bewleyscafetheatre.com086-8784001

How could history have so easily forgotten Vere St Leger Goold, a name worthy of recollection even if it wasn’t an anagram of Doggerel Verse Lot or Legged Torso Lever? Goold’s was Ireland’s first Wimbledon finalist in 1879, before a spectacular flame-out saw him lose to an Anglican vicar in straight sets. His subsequent decline into dissolution and debt, a marriage to an unscrupulous French seamstress and a final grisly dismembering of a Swedish widow they had defrauded saw him end his days as a prisoner on Devil’s Island.

I know what you’re thinking. How are you supposed to wring a story out of such dry banality? The answer, according to CheeryWild Productions, is to treat it with the elan and wit of doggerel verse and the grisly good humour of a legged levered torso.

Performers Aideen Wylde and Tadhg Hickey treat the story of riches to rags, gambling and disinheritance, as breathlessly as a penny dreadful, serving it with sly anachronistic embellishments and stop-start commentary, while giving everything the fetching naughtiness of a Victorian cabaret, serving up self-reflexive gags and physical comedy in corsets and tennis whites. Donal Gallagher’s direction maintains the delight of the throwaway, just as Wylde and Hickey pose as amateur stumblebums even while the rally of their creativity is relentless.

Love All is deservedly back by popular demand. If you miss it this time it counts as a double fault.

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