Am I the A**hole?
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin 8
★★★☆☆
“Did you see the way the jury looked at me?” says Tomi, an alarmed plaintiff suing his ex-girlfriend. There’s no surprise on the face of Grace, a black lawyer, who begins to remind him of unsurprising bias: “You do realise we are…”
“That’s good. The law is supposed to be colour-blind!” he interrupts, with himbo naivety, in a well-judged performance by Sodiq Jibbz Abiola. Grace’s annoyance (a fine Colleen Keogh) is also that of this comedy by Dafe Pessu Orugbo and Lisa Nally: black people get treated differently.
There are far less cogent goings-on in the defendant’s meeting room. Amy Mae, Tomi’s white ex-girlfriend, whom he’s suing for exploiting his wealth and lifestyle, begins to panic: “I’m doubting myself!” Her lawyer Fran (a wildly unpredictable Síomha McQuinn) sounds almost excited with envy: “Oh, what’s your secret?”
In such moments, Orugbo seems interested in the absurd diversions of surreal comedy. It’s a leap he and Joy Nesbitt, the director, don’t quite pull off, as the bizarre juxtapositions and nonsequiturs of the courtroom cross-examinations feel more random that anchored.
Am I the A**hole?, at Dublin Fringe, is a courtroom spoof more interested in judgment than justice
At Reverb, at Dublin Fringe, the gleeful audience are carried along by the energy onstage
Seón Simpson’s on a Tangent, at Dublin Fringe, is a touching, hilarious monologue
In Chop, at Dublin Fringe, Cian Kinsella stages a nervous breakdown in the most anarchic way possible
There are smart depictions of ideas here. As Amy Mae, a barista living a luxury lifestyle on her parents’ dime, and guided by star signs and burning sage, Aoife Morgan Jones gives a neat performance of what sections of the internet have termed “white nonsense”. (Western astrology has been appropriated from south Asian cultures into something unrecognisably superficial.)
Most admirably, Orugbo teases whether these biases of privileges are worth a jury’s consideration. Tomi explains that his wealth comes from pressures a white society put on his immigrant family to excel, but does that excuse his betrayals and misjudgments?
For a jury selected from the audience, opposing arguments barely weighed against each other on the night I attended. Amy Mae received a sentence of cancellation.
Continues at Smock Alley Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 13th
