Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin
If they're lucky, tennis stars will know the sensation of a winning streak: a period in which they can do no wrong, every line call goes their way and all those years of hard graft result in a seemingly effortless performance. Once in a while a theatre company will have that experience too, which seems to be the case with the new company Cheery Wild and its Love All, currently the funniest, smartest and most entertaining show on the stage.
It tells the (largely true) story of Vere St Leger Goold, who in 1879 was Ireland's first Wimbledon finalist and whose decline into dissolution, debt, dalliances with a dubious dressmaker, and finally the dismembering of a dowager, is as preposterously amusing as the script's fondness for alliteration. Comedy, they say, is tragedy plus time, and 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, stop-start commentary (for legal reasons, they clarify) while matching it with the fleet-footed staging of a Victorian cabaret, performed in corsets and tennis whites.
An arch self-awareness accentuates this fun, just as Deirdre Dwyer's economical set reflects the show's unfussy ingenuity: they play on a grass surface but are afforded a gratifyingly corny theatricality of red curtains, mannequins, a trunk of props and variously appropriated tennis paraphernalia. Donal Gallagher's direction maintains the delight of the throwaway, but these tricks are hard-earned and, it becomes clear, subtly considered.
The rally of creativity is constant without becoming exhausting: as opponents come and go in this brisk tournament of desire, gambling and outrageous accents, Wylde and Hickey create a more instantaneous rapport with the audience, posing throughout as amateur stumblebums even while the performance puts them at the top of their game.
At just an hour, it may seem as pleasing and substantial as strawberries and cream, but it possesses the modest confidence of those who put real effort into confection. It may pose as a knock-up, but it leaves the sensation of a grand slam.
Runs until Mar 3
