Octopus Children
Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2
★★★☆☆
FeliSpeaks has been a cultural figure for the better part of a decade. Even so, their coming-of-age play for Thisispopbaby unfolds in unexpected ways.
Somewhere in Longford, young Felicia Olusanya – a closeted teenage version of the poet, played by Tishé Fatunbi – is feeling isolated from their white, straight peers: “I wonder if they know how much better they have it.” Suddenly they’re visited by an otherworldly spirit guide known as the Octopus (FeliSpeaks themselves, transformed into an Afrofuturist blaze of neon and hair sculpted into tentacles): “You were always here on purpose.”
[ FeliSpeaks: Life as a ‘black, Irish, queer culchie’Opens in new window ]
Unsurprisingly, FeliSpeaks’s preference is for metaphor, in this case a kind of teuthology. Did you know that octopuses display softer colours when they’re relaxed, or that females are physically dominant to males? It provides a guide for young Felicia to defy their patriarchal upbringing by stubbornly traditional parents (played by Tierra Porter and Favour Odusola).
We see Felicia coached by incandescent poems from the Octopus that pulsate against Tommy Grooves’ rapturous percussion: there’s the full-mouthed croak of Tough Meat, a rebellion by a daughter against their oppressive father (“Your father cannot eat you. / Too much meat”) and the ominous drone of Eating Concrete, a poem resonant with the shooting of George Nkencho, clunkily transposed here as Felicia’s brother becomes the victim of a racist attack (“Another boy has eaten the pavement / In D15”).
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The effect is undeniably emphatic. Oonagh Murphy and Esosa Ighodaro’s stylish production, much like Tobi Omoteso’s stirring movement direction, is both high-energy fast and elegantly slow.
That helps conceal the play’s creeping hesitancy to stick with its subject. In a blazing coda, both the Octopus and Felicia perform a poem that roves through a changing Dublin where black queer people can find a friendly face at each turn. That suggests a play about a place. Isn’t it supposed to be about FeliSpeaks?
Octopus Children continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Sunday, September 14th
