Film Reads: The Breakfast Club – Dublin Fringe Festival – Review
Performances – 20–26 September – 21:00 – Venue – Dublin Castle – Castle Gardens

For those not old enough to remember the release of this film the first time around, The Breakfast Club is the 1985 John Hughes film that helped launch the careers of Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. It tells the story of a group of very different teenagers all stuck in detention one Saturday morning. The film was a huge success and went on to gross $51.5 million on a $1 million budget. The movie contains a number of American high school archetypes, with the standard-issue Jock, Unpopular Girl, Rebel and Nerd all represented. In short, it’s perfect fodder for the people at Dreamgun to take the piss out of! And so it was one night on the grounds of Dublin Castle…

The Dreamgun collective is a free-wheeling lineup of comedians and actors who have been performing ‘script readings’ of their favourite films for a number of years. We first encountered them in 2017, when they reworked Jurassic Park, but they have also worked on Harry Potter, The Lion King and many more. The writers involved are movie nerds and their reworked scripts contain a vast amount of references to other films of the era. The cast does not rehearse the scripts and there is a feel of improvisation to the experience, as the cast fluff lines and burst into laughter at their own mistakes.

This version of The Breakfast Club had six on stage for the duration, with one acting as a narrator to set the scene. The actors often played multiple parts to fill out the cast of the movie.  The film references kept coming with A Few Good Men, The Simpsons and many others featuring. The night ended with a vaguely threatening letter from the owners of the copyright of the Breakfast Club read aloud but we were assured it had all been sorted! We wish the Dreamgun legal department well with that one. Next up they’re promising a version of Star Wars and also ‘something new’ for next year’s Fringe. It’s all nonsense, but it’s also very good fun!