An Evening With Wee Daniel

An Evening With Wee Daniel, written and performed by Aoife Sweeney O’Connor. Photograph: Dylan Gomery

**

‘Up in Donegal,’ the award winning An Evening With Wee Daniel tells us, ‘things are different’. Different not necessarily being as interesting as you might have hoped. Aoife Sweeney O'Connor's one person love poem to all things Dunloe preaching to the faithful. In which Donegal looks like it got stuck in a Workman’s Club cabaret in the 1970s. Even though Dunloe seems remarkably contemporary in its acceptance of gay and non-binary people like Sweeney O’Connor. Leaving this troubled tale of self-acceptance low on drama and high on kitsch. The cheap kind, like the sparkly gold tinsel serving as a backdrop for the simple conceit of a Daniel O’Donnell show on which Sweeney O’Connor tells her story. An uneasy telling of a weak tale interspersed with impressions, gags, and so so songs, aside from one rather stunning ballad. Sweeney O’Connor’s song and comedy act leaving you apt to check if you read the name right? Was it An Evening With Wee Daniel, or An Evening With Twee Daniel?

Like ET, An Evening With Wee Daniel is shamelessly sentimental. Emotional manipulation concealing a multitude of sins. Which is not to devalue Sweeney O’Connor’s autobiographical revelations. But rather to say that to truly engage the story has to be truly engaging, not just the character. Both leave something to be desired. Much and all as you feel for the loss of a mother, her loss being shoehorned in near the end following a brief flash of foreshadowing very early on feels like you’re being played. Otherwise there's no drama, no stakes, and its Daniel O’Donnell themed cabaret is not up to the standard it needed to be, riddled as it is with predictable cliches. Then there’s character. While Sweeney O'Connor oozes charm and charisma, the Daniel O'Donnell suit and mannerisms are so integrated it’s hard to know who is Sweeney O'Connor at times. The result less self-acceptance so much as a more polished mask to hide behind. A drag act concealing rather than revealing the artist in a confessional work that confesses to nothing.

Purporting to speak about growing up gay and non-binary in Donegal, it doesn’t really. Indeed, when Sweeney O'Connor begins to look around to find like-minded souls, it doesn't seem they suffered social dislocation so much as they hadn't noticed them before. They were there all the time, happy in a community happy to have them. Which doesn’t give credence to the primary theme of marrying a sense of being non-binary with a sense of belonging to Donegal. Falling short, like much of the humour and songs, unless you’re in on the Donegal in jokes, which evoke a Jury's Hotel Irish Evening with Hal Roach. Still, like Born Again Christians, or The Moonies, or Daniel O’Donnell fans, a devoted cult following is sure to enjoy the local colour of An Evening With Wee Daniel which satisfies their leanings. For everyone else it suggests Sweeney O’Connor has something going on. But we’re only afforded a glimpse of it.

An Evening With Wee Daniel by Aoife Sweeney O’Connor, runs at The New Theatre until June 21.

For more information visit The New Theatre