Blue Thunder – Dublin Fringe Festival – Review
A Cathal Cleary Theatre & Kelly Phelan co-production

PERFORMANCES: 11 – 16 & 18 – 23 September – 19:00 & 21:00, €15/€13
Venue – 10-13 Thomas Street (Meeting Point)
Duration: 50mins

“Blue Thunder is an immersive play written to be staged inside a parked 17-seater taxi minibus for an audience of 12 at a time.”

We meet Brian (Gary Lilburn) as he sits alone in his minibus (other than for the 12 audience members, that is). Brian is a Taxi driver at the end of his shift. It’s 3 a.m. and the rest of the world is asleep. He makes a number of calls to a number, leaving voice messages that talk of his day. He then receives a call and is joined shortly by two of his sons; Dara (Eoin Geoghegan) and Ray (Seán Doyle). They are full of boisterous energy, shouting the lyrics to a Robbie Williams song and laughing. Their father isn’t in the mood for their drunken merriment and tells them as much! The three start to talk about their lives, slowly revealing the complexity of their relationships with each other and the women they know and love.

There’s always a feeling of apprehension when you’re about to go into a piece of immersive theatre. Each particular production has its own rules and structure. It’s quite unlike waiting for the curtain to rise on a normal theatre production, where your main concern is ‘Did I turn off my phone’. In this production, the audience is a fly on the wall. The audience sits in complete silence, and on my particular performance, there weren’t even any laughs at some of the comedic moments in the script, as the audience didn’t want to ‘break the spell’.  It was a more intense experience than a traditional theatre could generate.

Before the production starts, the audience waits in an archway just off Thomas Street. After a brief introduction by one of the staff members, we’re brought to a white minibus a short walk away. The audience is asked to sit according to height, with the tallest people towards the back of the bus and the smaller ones towards the front. The sight lines were pretty good, although there was occasional straining of necks to see who was talking at any particular moment.

Brian (Gary Lilburn) is the patriarch of the group. Lilburn plays him as a well-meaning but troubled man. He’s always trying to do the right thing for himself and his family but never quite achieves it. He has a good heart despite his failings. Eoin Geoghegan’s Dara is struggling to find his place in the world. He feels like a failure, as he’s out of work and has a doomed romance and wants to lash out at the world. Seán Doyle’s Ray is the most successful of the family, with an impressive job but is crumbling under the pressure of the work. The relationship of the three men with each other and the women in their lives is the focus of the work, as each of them has failed in some sense.

The venue created a sense of intimacy in the production, like the audience was seeing something private and confidential. The play is an insight into the lives of these three men, who are all dealing with strained relationships of one type or another. Some of them have turned to dramatic and dangerous solutions, whereas others are trying hard to ignore the reality of the situation. It’s an impressive and at times powerful piece of theatre, as we see into the lives of these three men struggling with the world around them.

Performers:
Seán Doyle – Ray
Eoin Geoghegan – Dara
Gary Lilburn – Brian

Director Cathal Cleary
Producer Kelly Phelan
Line Producer/Stage Manager – Sophie Coote
Costume Designer – Mae Leahy
Production Manager – Seán Dennehy
Transport – Jason Kelly