Review: I'M YOUR MAN - Lost in Music

There's no denying the producer savvy of THISISPOPBABY, whose new co-production with Project Arts Centre is one of the first to sell out this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. The queer outfit, raving in the nervous crossover between nightclub and theatre, sometimes sprints the gamut of popular culture to its own detriment. Where the high wire ambition to produce a musical at the Abbey Theatre at least had moxie, the decision to stage Mark Palmer's 12-part song cycle is difficult to fathom.

On the zany striped floor of Áine O'Hara's set, a six-piece band crunch out ballads surrounding a mysterious composer named Matthew (Palmer), the catastrophes of his gender and heart rising and falling in sugary pop ballads.

Whether the employ of surreal visuals - pitting Matthew against a backdrop of smiley-face masks - or a drummer (Bryan O'Connell) choosing a curious moment to question our consumer society, there are attempts to access a wider emotional landscape with echoes of mental illness, struggles with sexuality and Catholic hang-ups. "I wannabe the man that when you love you love the most" rings one tune. "And when we touch I want you to feel the Holy Ghost".

If music is to bring him back from the brink, it's unfortunately a formula well tested: the polite jabs of guitars, melancholic hooks of pianos, all sung over in overwrought lyrics: "I love you from the bottom of my heart (from the 'scrape the barrel' bottom of my heart)". Palmer's sound fits snugly with various piano rock bands over the last decade (The Fray, One Republic) but its originality is contested.

Dramaturgy appears dashed, so much so that the composer's presence onstage seems like an after thought, a sculptural object to be bolted into shape by Philip Connaughton's industrious choreography. Moving as if conducting the music with his body, it's an abstraction that feels out of place. Vocally, he isn't the centre at all; the responsibility rests uneasily between the preppy boyband vocal of Adam Matthews and Ruth McGill's steely soprano.

As director, Phillip McMahon is well stocked - armed with a glitter gun; Mark Galione's smoky lighting - but the more devices he throws at the performance the thinner it becomes. What remains to be worked through is why stage Palmer's songs? "Trust me, I'm an experienced fool", rolls one lyric. Every songwriter has said something similar.

I'm Your Man runs at Project Arts Centre (Upstairs) as patt of Dublin Theatre Festival untl 3 Oct. For more information and tickets, see the Dublin Theatre Festival website.

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