Dublin Jack: In Concert
The Complex, Dublin 7
★★★☆☆
Dublin Jack is in many ways the ideal dramatic character. Born John Saul in Dublin, he was the most notorious rent boy of his age, a flamboyant wanderer between the gaslit worlds of Victorian Dublin and London, both whispered about and key to high-profile court cases connected to the Dublin Castle and Cleveland Street controversies of the late 19th century.
In Conor Mitchell’s new work, also called Dublin Jack, the Belfast Ensemble offers not another titillating recounting of sexual scandal but a deeper portrait of a caring person highly attuned to Victorian society’s cruel hypocrisy.
Presented in concert form, these are two acts of a fuller production to come. Any gaps between music and stagecraft are filled by brief explanations from Mitchell, who is the production’s conductor as well as its composer and librettist.
Act one opens in the male bordello on Cleveland Street, where a young rent boy, Sid, has arrived for the first time. Jack, in his 30s and all hauteur and weariness, sees in Sid a naivety and unpreparedness for the harsh experiences that lie ahead.
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The dialogue is punctuated by short, fragmented musical phrases that become more shaded in response to emotional changes, such as Jack’s feeling of dislocation at the mention of Ireland or his sense of not quite belonging.
When Jack seems to tease a regular, Mr Eaves, with his description of sex with the prince of Wales – “Oh, how he touches me!” – the music is at its most luscious yet and hints at a genuine sense of tenderness rather than of boastful conquest.
Later we hear the defence of Gustavus Cornwall, aka “the duchess”, and head of the GPO, for gross indecency in the infamous Dublin Castle scandal. His bleating, straight-faced excuses are initially accompanied drily by piano, rather like a recitative. Gradually, lighter-hearted music underpins his words, adding comedy to the pleadings (as if more comedy is needed for lines such as, “The sphincter of a Protestant does not lie”).
The act ends with Sid dying by suicide, distraught after his first client, although musically the scene’s emotional pitch seems to peak too soon, and the tragedy lands with less force than intended, perhaps a victim, here, of the absence of staging.
Act two is set in an aristocrat’s house at a New Year’s Eve party a few months after Sid’s suicide. Jack and another sex worker, the “maid of Wardour Street”, are alert to the power dynamics at play. Classism and racism are to the fore: both are warned that their presence is “a transaction despite false familiarities”.
Here the dramatic rhythm is spot on, lines landing clearly despite the freneticism of the party. Later, in a quietly charged duet, Jack and the aristocrat’s wife, a secret lesbian, mirror one another’s claims to disadvantage. “You are rich,” Jack sings. “You are a man,” she counters. Finally, as Jack sleeps, the bloody body of Sid reappears in a nightmare, his innocence and idealism haunting.
The tenor Andrew Gavin imbues Jack with subtle, quiet depth throughout the two acts; Christopher Bowen, Matthew Cavan, Eoin Conway, Graham Cooper, Christopher Cull, Aaron O’Hare and Emma Power, as well as the 13 musicians of the Belfast Ensemble, give similarly dramatic performances.
Dublin Jack, which was at the Complex as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, is at the Southbank Centre, London, on Thursday, October 9th, and the Black Box, Belfast, as part of the Outburst arts festival, on Friday, November 14th
