Hysterically Shopping! To Some Sort of End review: This critique of consumer culture is a tough one to sell
Hysterically Shopping! To Some Sort of End Samuel Beckett Theatre ★☆☆☆☆ It’s a little depressing to see so much money apparently lavished on something that seems so conceptually underwhelming. During the 80 minutes of this pop opera I find myself imagining better shows encoded in its symbols and gestures, or tapped out in Morse, searching for meaning in it all. Surely this can’t just be a bafflingly straightforward and dated critique of consumer culture. Maybe I’m getting it wrong. Maybe it’s actually a masterpiece for the age of brain rot, a depiction of the degradation of the human mind and soul at end-times, set to a flood of lurid colours and inflatable bananas. Hysterically Shopping! To Some Sort of End centres on a woman (played by Laoise Murray) who loves going to the supermarket. She goes every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. She really, really loves the supermarket. Beyond that she appears to possess almost no human traits. The checkout clerk (Andrew Gavin) is in love with her; she, meanwhile, is in love with the card machine, Tillie (Alexandra Vostokova). A campy Kathleen Nic Dhiarmada presides over the supermarket as its malign boss. The musicians of the Glasshouse ensemble, talented but underused in Aran O’Grady’s score, are hidden behind a screen. Occasionally, the excellent Ned Dennehy emerges to deliver monologues about the evils of consumerism. “We buy. We consume. We die,” he announces. A neon sign flashes the word “Buy” above the stage. The performers put in a commendable effort, but the script lets them down. Beginning with a high-pitched stream-of-consciousness monologue about shopping – “asparagus, asparagus, salmon, salmon, may as well get the falafel, so glad I gave up meat” – the libretto only gets duller, circling the motif of the supermarket and seeming to find nothing there. “It’s so interesting how supermarkets are laid out,” a character observes. The libretto is credited to William Dunleavy with Grace Morgan (who also directs) and Murray; together, they are the founders of Tasteinyourmouth theatre company. They could, at least, have thrown us a single banger, a chorus we could tap our poor feet to. Instead there’s an atonal ode to tills – “so smooth, so shiny, so efficient” – and It’s a Steal, a joyless number about a discounted lunch. Words are repeated until their initial banality – “yummy”, “spicy ricey” – acquires a punishing force. At one point Dennehy’s character emerges with a gun. I vaguely wonder if he might knock me out with it, but no such luck. The gun is put away unused and, as far as I can tell, never mentioned again. Afterwards, my friend and I agree that the production has managed to feel slightly offensive, although it’s difficult to say precisely why. Is it the depiction of a lesbian relationship, if you can call it that? But if that’s the case, it might also feel slightly offensive to straight people. It might just feel slightly offensive, in fact, to anyone with a sexuality, anyone with a politics, anyone with any lived experience of life. Hysterically Shopping! To Some Sort of End is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival , until Sunday, September 27th